Jeff Lemire Work Quotations

My indie work is mostly reality-based, focused on real life and characters.

Self-publishing worked for me. Being able to put your work in print, even if it's a tiny print-on-demand print run of a dozen or so copies, shows publishers and editors a completed piece of work and that you can follow through on a project.

I can handle a lot of work. I've always been able to. I'm a very focused individual. I come to my studio at about 7:30 in the morning and exit almost 5:00 P.M. In that time, those eight or nine hours, it's kind of laser focus on whatever I'm working on. There aren't really any distractions or anything.

I enjoyed my time at DC. Dan Didio, Geoff Johns and Jim Lee were great to me, and I'm very grateful for the opportunities they gave me. Having said that, I think it's important to try new things and work with new people to keep myself fresh.

When I do my best work, the stories tend to be pretty emotionally-charged.

'Bloodshot,' for me, was unlike anything I'd ever done before, which was really the draw of it. In addition to trying to reconnect with my earlier work, I also wanted to try to do something that was completely new and different.

I started off doing indie comics that I wrote and drew myself. I was doing those for ten years before I started to work for DC. The first book that I wrote for DC was for another artist. I did some backups in 'Adventure Comics' years ago starring The Atom. That's the first time that I ever wrote for another artist.

There is definitely a thematic lineage between 'Descender' and my previous work, like 'Sweet Tooth' and 'Trillium.'

I've always been attracted to themes of isolation in my work - in my independent work and my DC work.

I'm never one to care too much if my work becomes adapted; I make comic books.

Everyone finds my work super sad. I never do. I always find it uplifting in a weird way.

I never thought I would work in mainstream superhero comics or Valiant or Marvel. I just set out to make the kinds of stories I wanted to make, which at the beginning was small personal stuff like 'Essex County.'

You can write a script, but that's just a starting point as a cartoonist. The heart of the process comes when you start to draw it, and you work out how to lay the page out, how best to tell the story.