Essex County Review: Jeff Lemire’s Quiet Masterpiece
A review of Essex County by Jeff Lemire, the quiet, heartbreaking trilogy about family, hockey and loneliness in rural Ontario.
By Web Admin
Not every great comic is loud. Some of the best whisper. Essex County, written and drawn by Jeff Lemire, is a trilogy of interconnected stories about lonely people in rural Ontario, and it is one of the most quietly devastating works the medium has produced. Published by Top Shelf between 2007 and 2008 and later gathered into a single collected edition, it announced Lemire as a major talent and remains, for many readers, his finest work. This is our full review.
If you think comics are all capes and explosions, this is the book that changes your mind. It is small, personal and human, and it earns its tears honestly.
A tender, heartbreaking trilogy about family, memory and isolation on the Canadian farmland. Raw art, enormous…
Check price on Amazon$15.51as of Nov 12, 2026 4:12 pm UTCOur verdict (4.7/5): A tender, heartbreaking trilogy about family, memory and isolation on the Canadian farmland. Raw art, enormous heart. Collects all three books in one volume.
What is Essex County?
Essex County is a graphic novel trilogy by Canadian cartoonist Jeff Lemire, named after the real farming county in southwestern Ontario where he grew up. It comprises three books: Tales from the Farm (2007), Ghost Stories (2007) and The Country Nurse (2008), all originally published by the indie house Top Shelf Productions. They were later collected into a single roughly 500-page volume, The Collected Essex County, which is the edition most readers buy today.
Each book tells its own story, but they share a place, a handful of recurring characters and a set of themes: grief, guilt, the distance between family members, and the way small rural communities hold both comfort and loneliness. Read together, the three parts quietly assemble into something much larger than the sum of their pieces.
The three stories
The trilogy is built so that each part deepens the ones around it.
- Tales from the Farm follows Lester, a young orphan obsessed with superheroes, living with his gruff uncle after his mother's death, and his unlikely friendship with a former hockey player who runs the local gas station.
- Ghost Stories jumps back to tell the story of two brothers, Lou and Vince Lebeuf, whose hockey dreams and a single act of betrayal shaped the rest of their lives. It is the emotional centre of the trilogy.
- The Country Nurse follows Anne, a travelling nurse whose rounds tie the earlier characters together, and reaches back to a fire at an orphanage decades earlier.
The art: raw, loose and perfect for the material
Lemire's art will not be for everyone at first glance. It is loose, scratchy and deliberately unpolished, with heavy blacks and expressive, almost caricatured faces. But that rawness is exactly right for these stories. It feels handmade and emotional rather than slick, and Lemire is a master of the silent page: some of the book's most powerful moments are wordless expanses of snow, sky and empty farmland that let loneliness breathe. Give the style a few pages and it becomes impossible to imagine these stories drawn any other way.
Hockey, grief and the spaces between people
At its heart Essex County is about the things families cannot say to each other. Hockey runs through all three books, but it is really a language for love, regret and lost time. Lemire is fascinated by silence, by the years that pile up between an apology and the person who needed to hear it, and by how a landscape can hold a whole life's worth of memory. It is a melancholy book, but not a hopeless one; its final pages offer a quiet, hard-won grace.
The setting does an enormous amount of work here. Essex County is flat, open farmland, and Lemire draws it as a place where the sky swallows everything and neighbours can be miles apart. That physical distance mirrors the emotional distance between his characters, and it gives even ordinary scenes, a drive down a country road, a hospital visit, an old man watching a game alone, a weight that a busier setting could never carry. Few cartoonists have made a specific patch of ground feel this alive, and it is no accident that Lemire has returned to fictional versions of his home county throughout his later career.
Why it launched a career
Essex County put Jeff Lemire on the map. It was nominated for multiple Eisner and Harvey Awards and, in 2011, was selected for the Canada Reads competition as one of the essential Canadian books of the decade, an unusual honour for a graphic novel. Lemire went on to a huge career at DC, Marvel and in creator-owned comics, but many readers still consider this early, personal work his best. If you enjoy his voice here, his later series Sweet Tooth carries much of the same emotional DNA.
Pros and cons
Pros
- Deeply moving, character-driven storytelling
- Three stories that enrich each other beautifully
- Masterful use of silence and empty space
- One affordable collected volume holds it all
Cons
- The rough art style takes adjustment
- Slow, melancholy pace throughout
- Emotionally heavy; not a light read
Which edition should you buy?
The choice here is easy, and it saves you money.
| Edition | Collects | Format |
|---|---|---|
| The Collected Essex County | All three books | Softcover, ~500 pp |
| Individual original volumes | One book each | Softcover |
For almost everyone, the single collected softcover is the right call. It holds the entire trilogy, it is the cheapest way in, and the stories are meant to be read together in one continuous sweep.
Get The Collected Essex County on Amazon
How it compares to other literary graphic novels
If you love quiet, personal, literary comics, Essex County sits alongside some of the medium's best. It shares a diaristic honesty with Craig Thompson's coming-of-age memoir, though Lemire works in fiction rather than autobiography. Here is where to go next:
- Our Blankets review for another intimate, beautifully drawn story of memory and first love.
- Our best indie graphic novels guide for the wider creator-owned field.
- Our best standalone graphic novels list for more complete, self-contained reads.
- Our overall best graphic novels list for the all-time greats.
You can also browse the full indie hub for more books like this one.
The verdict
Essex County is proof that comics can do everything literary fiction can, and a few things it cannot. It is patient, humane and quietly heartbreaking, and it rewards readers willing to slow down and sit with its silences. If you want to understand why people take the graphic novel seriously as an art form, this is one of the books to hand them. It is a permanent fixture on our list of the best graphic novels.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to read the three Essex County books in order?
Yes, ideally. Each story stands alone, but they are designed to be read in sequence, and the later books deepen the earlier ones. The collected edition puts them in the intended order.
Is Essex County a superhero comic?
No. It is a literary, character-driven trilogy about family and rural life in Ontario. Superheroes appear only as one young character's imaginative escape.
Is Essex County appropriate for all ages?
It deals with grief, death and adult relationships, so it is best for teens and adults. There is nothing gratuitous, but the emotional weight suits older readers.
What should I read after Essex County?
Jeff Lemire's Sweet Tooth is the natural next step, and Craig Thompson's Blankets shares its intimate, personal tone. Both are covered in our reviews.
Discover more creator-owned gems in our best indie graphic novels guide.
Is Essex County based on a true story?
Essex County is fiction, but it is rooted in Jeff Lemire's own life: he grew up in the real Essex County in southwestern Ontario, and the farmland, hockey rinks and small towns are drawn from that experience. The characters and events are invented, but the emotional texture of rural life feels personal and true. That honesty is part of why it hits so hard.
How long does it take to read Essex County?
Reading The Collected Essex County takes most people around three to five hours, since it runs to roughly 500 pages with long wordless stretches. The quiet pacing makes it read quickly, but many readers slow down to take in the art. It is best read in one or two sittings, so the stories can build on each other.
Do I need to like hockey to enjoy Essex County?
You do not need to like hockey to enjoy Essex County. Hockey runs through the book, especially in the Ghost Stories section, but it serves as a symbol of family, rivalry and lost dreams rather than a sports story. Readers who never watch hockey are just as moved by its themes of grief, memory and loneliness.
Is Essex County better than Sweet Tooth?
Essex County and Sweet Tooth are both Jeff Lemire at his most heartfelt, but they suit different moods. Essex County is a quiet, realistic literary graphic novel about family and grief, while Sweet Tooth is a post-apocalyptic fable with genre thrills. If you want a story you can finish in an evening, start with Essex County; our Sweet Tooth review covers the other.
