From the Archives- Jeff Lemire's The Nobody

Here is a review from 2009, looking at Jeff Lemire's The Nobody. The book is being republished by Dark Horse Comics and will be released next week so it seems like a good time to dust this one off and represent it.

The plan wasn't to run another archived review after running one last week but I've been sidelined all week by some bug or another. Hopefully we'll be back to normal programming next week.

The story of a stranger coming to town always involves upsetting the status quo and change for everyone involved.  In The Nobody, John Griffen brings a whole unknown history with him, and that disturbs the people in the sleepy town of Large Mouth.  This bandaged man makes them scared and suspicious, just as he makes Vickie, a Large Mouth teen, curious and excited for the same reasons.  Jeff Lemire's story plays with anxieties, reminiscent of a Hitchcock film that way, as mysteries and suspicions create a psychological horror that plays with your anxieties.  The mysteries of Griffen play off of all of our fears of upsetting our staid lives.  Sometimes those fears are imaginary, and sometimes they are real.  Like in Hitchcock's stories, Lemire forces us to look at how much those fears and anxieties exist only in our heads and how much of them are real and truly dangerous.

It was back in 1994 that John Griffen came to Large Mouth for his own reasons.  The sleepy, small little town was nothing extraordinary.  It was a fairly normal town that Vickie, only sixteen at the time, grew up in and was bored by.  John Griffen was something new in her young life, a man of shadows that disturbed the regular day-to-day routines of Large Mouth.  The man, wrapped completely in bandages and wearing goggles, kept to himself in his hotel room but only came out occasionally to get something to eat.  That's where Vickie first met him, when we went to her father's diner just to get a take out menu.  To the teenager, the mystery of John Griffen brought something unknown into her life.  She saw him and watched him.  She looked solidly at him in a way that Lemire's characters a barely do, with round, well defined and well focused eyes, trying to see under those bandages and to catch a glimpse of what life is like outside of Large Mouth. 

Much like Vickie, John Griffen is searching for something too.  The bandages that cover his face hide a past full of mistakes and pain.  He wants to be alone and uninterrupted and idyllic and rural Large Mouth looks like the place where he can find that solitude.  There are reasons for those bandages; they help protect him after he used himself as his own test subject in a scientific experiment.  His own actions have driven him into hiding in Large Mouth where he thought he could just literally disappear but his bandages and general strangeness around town makes him the new town gossip target as they try to figure out who this odd stranger is?

Vickie and Griffen's eyes almost tell the whole story in this story.  While Vickie's eyes are the wide, observant eyes of youth, Griffen's eyes are hidden behind welder's goggles the entire time.  Lemire tells Griffen's story, hardly ever showing us the true John Griffen, if that is even his true name?  Other than through flashbacks to the experiment, Lemire's leading man remains cloaked to us, never showing a smile or a frown or a wrinkled brow.  He remains the eponymous "nobody" to us, barely existing beneath a mask of goggles, bandages and heavy clothes.  Without ever truly seeing Griffen, Lemire tells us much about the character through his substitute eyes, his goggles.  Griffen's eyes are ever present, one of the most distinguished characteristics of the man.  Wider and rounder than Vickie's, Griffen observes everything but absorbs in nothing.  He's not there to get to know the people or to live in Large Mouth.  His large eyes never reflect anything around him.  He may as well be invisible or even dead.   

Building off of his own Essex County books, Lemire adds a Hitchcockian element to this story, exploring how the small insecurities and fear of change can lead to disaster for all involved.  The Nobody shares many similarities to Lemire's earlier work, including a general air of simple-life sadness.  His stories remain based in rural settings and contain a timeless quality to them, as if these places always have and always will exist.  We're told as the book opens that these events actually took place sixteen years ago but there is little in the book to place the story in 1994 as opposed to 2009 or in any other year.   This is an old story that's finally being told to us by an adult Vickie.  I wonder if she's still in Large Mouth as she's telling it, perhaps to her own children as a warning, or did those events in 1994 send her on a new path, taking her out of the small town that she most likely would have spent her whole life in.

Whether through Vickie's eyes or Griffen's goggles or everyone else's sad eyes, how well do any of the characters in The Nobody see their world or the events that are unfolding around them?  Like us, they see what they want to see; an exotic mystery, a town where you can easily disappear or an unknown danger that will threaten us all.  They all see different things but maybe they are all seeing the same thing and that's the horror of it.  Maybe they are all seeing their stable lives upset and are excited and scared by that.