There have been lots of comparison between Sweet Tooth and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, as well as Margaret Atwood’s Oyrx and Crake. Lemire prefers to tell rural stories. The landscape reflects the kind of characters he likes to create and the way he likes to tell stories, slow and sparse. Sweet Tooth also gives a different point of view as a lot of comics (especially those of the end-of-the-world kind) are set in cities and urban centres. The Canadian culture and history also lends itself to creating a great post-apocalyptic story. The Canadian landscape can be very sparse, harsh and unforgiving in the winter, and I’m sure that this has influenced the tone and setting of Sweet Tooth, and a reason why Lemire primarily keep the characters out in the wild, in big open spaces.
Sweet Tooth has received great critical acclaim and has been a big hit with both traditional comic and indie fans because I think that the protagonist (Gus, the antlered boy) is a very easy character to like and root for. By his very nature he is completely innocent and there is nothing cynical about him. It’s hard not to root for him. Then you take that and contrast it with a harsh and terrible world, embodied by Jepperd and a real tension is created.
It’s obvious from reading it that Sweet Tooth is about the relationship between Gus and Jepperd. It's about Gus coming of age, and it's about Jepperd learning to love again and opening his heart after all the horrible things he’s seen in the world. To me, at the outset, Gus is pure innocence and Jepperd is a total savage, full of hate, violence and regret. As the book goes on, as they're exposed to one another, they both start going the other way. At the end, Gus becomes the best of both of them. He becomes a hybrid of what he was at the beginning and what Jepperd was. He's just enough of each to survive, and he's better than each of them on their own. He has the parts of Jepperd he needs to survive and he needs to lead this new breed and help them survive, but he also has those important things that he's always had that make him better than mankind, which is his innocence and his heart -- an ability to love people and let them in, which Jepperd couldn't always do.
Sweet Tooth was actually the first comic I ever read and it became a portal to all of Jeff Lemire’s work that preceded and followed. Because of this, his work always serves as inspiration and has been the main inspiration behind choosing to develop an animal or anthropomorphic character (attribution of human form or other characteristics to anything other than a human being) and has contributed to choosing my character to reside in an ‘end-of-world’ environment.
It’s obvious from reading it that Sweet Tooth is about the relationship between Gus and Jepperd. It's about Gus coming of age, and it's about Jepperd learning to love again and opening his heart after all the horrible things he’s seen in the world. To me, at the outset, Gus is pure innocence and Jepperd is a total savage, full of hate, violence and regret. As the book goes on, as they're exposed to one another, they both start going the other way. At the end, Gus becomes the best of both of them. He becomes a hybrid of what he was at the beginning and what Jepperd was. He's just enough of each to survive, and he's better than each of them on their own. He has the parts of Jepperd he needs to survive and he needs to lead this new breed and help them survive, but he also has those important things that he's always had that make him better than mankind, which is his innocence and his heart -- an ability to love people and let them in, which Jepperd couldn't always do.
Sweet Tooth was actually the first comic I ever read and it became a portal to all of Jeff Lemire’s work that preceded and followed. Because of this, his work always serves as inspiration and has been the main inspiration behind choosing to develop an animal or anthropomorphic character (attribution of human form or other characteristics to anything other than a human being) and has contributed to choosing my character to reside in an ‘end-of-world’ environment.
