Review: Sweet Tooth by Jeff Lemire (Vertigo)

Sweet Tooth is set in a dystopian future where the world has been ravaged by a disease. No! The dead do not come back to life as zombies. The remaining survivors struggle to survive. Some try to live peacefully, while others turn to evil and bullying, taking what they need from the weak. Around the start of the pandemic, animal-human hybrid children appeared. These children have a connection to the disease. The story centers mainly around Gus, a child with deer features, and Jeppard, a tired middle age man who has a tragic past. Unsurprisingly, the two are initially hostile towards each other, but grow a strong father-and-son bond as the story unfolds. They not only struggle to survive in the dystopian world, but become involved in the mystery of the disease and hybrid children. What stood out for me is the threatening situations the characters are constantly faced with. Death is a constant theme. But the threat of death comes not only from the pandemic. It is the antagonists, the vile and cruel human beings who present immediate threats to our protagonists. After reading a half dozen issues in the series, it is easy to see why Jeff Lemire was chosen as a writer for DC's main line of comics. Given it's dystopian setting with disadvantaged protagonists, it reads like Walking Dead (Image Comics), except with fewer subplots.