Mazebook
Jeff Lemire
Dark Horse Books, 2022

I am a longtime subscriber to Jeff Lemire’s Substack, and remember him discussing Mazebook and presenting art from it. Yet I somehow missed the formal publication, so I am catching up. The protagonist Will is a lonely building inspector still grieving the loss of his puzzle-loving daughter Wendy. When we meet him, he is a lost soul, obsessed with a fear of forgetting her: he finds he can’t remember her face clearly anymore. And he feels completely disconnected from the people around him as he sleepwalks through his life, relying on routine to get him through.

He receives a mysterious phone call one night from a girl claiming to be her and saying that she’s trapped in the middle of a labyrinth. Convinced that his child is contacting him from beyond this world, he visits his ex-wife to retrieve a box of Wendy’s belongings. When he finds an unfinished maze in one of her hospital puzzle books, he thinks he recognizes the clue she gave about meeting her in the center.  Overlaying the maze on a map of the city allows him to trace an intricate path through a different plane of reality in search of her.

In the process he befriends a mysterious homeless man and a talking dog, as well as a neighbor woman in his apartment building. Lemire signals the shift from our world to the maze world by changing the background color wash from brown to blue (of course the talking dog is another big clue). In the end Will does solve the maze, gaining much more than he imagined: the power to make peace with his memories and fully rejoin the real world. Despite the grand mysticism of the maze, it finally is the sort of haunting story of human contact that Lemire excels at. The generally monochrome visual look is frequently broken up by red elements, going back to his daughter’s beloved red sweater. Memories of her stand out by being rendered in full color. The collection concludes with alternate covers and Lemire’s detailed sketchbook and notes describing the genesis and design of the series.

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Stillwater Vol. 3: Border Crossing
Chip Zdarsky, creator/writer; Ramón K Pérez, creator/artist; Mike Spicer, colorist
Image Comics, 2023

The Stillwater saga concludes here. It opens with Daniel somehow surviving the pyre outside of town which was intended to kill him for real by burning him alive. Daniel does not believe that the town is under God’s protection, but he leans into it anyway, presenting himself as some kind of prophet. After his escape, Mayor Galen figures out the trick of re-drawing the town borders on the map, decides that life in Stillwater has become stagnant, and that what the residents need is change. He enlarges the borders further into the county to include the nearby town of Coldwater.

Bringing the citizens of Coldwater into the fold proves surprisingly difficult. In the meantime, Daniel returns with long Messiah hair, and we learn that Clara is the source of the town’s immortality, the result of a deal with the Devil (or something like it, appearing in the form of her son). A satisfying series conclusion had to include an explanation of Stillwater’s immortality, and I suppose that anything other than a supernatural explanation would have been a hard sell. But Zdarsky goes beyond that: complete erasure of the town borders results in a still world. An unexpected ending, for sure. It could be the introduction to a sequel, but I feel like it is the end of the story. The rest is left to the imagination.

This collection also includes historical tales about earlier years in Stillwater’s history. “The Prisoner” by Jason Loo writer/artist; “Live To Tell” by Andrew Wheeler, writer, Soo Lee, artis, and Dee Cunniffe, colorist; and “Matrimony” by Ethan Young, writer/artist, and Dee Cunniffe, colorist; all further illuminate Stillwater’s early years as the town struggled to cope with the need to keep the resident’s immortality a secret to the world at large.