The Underwater Welder [Versión Kindle]

Jack Joseph has a wife with a baby on the way and a job welding pipes underwater for an oil rig off the coast of Nova Scotia in the small town he grew up in. Things should be great - good job, happy family - but Jack's haunted by the disappearance of his father 20 years ago who went diving one night during Hallowe'en and never returned. His dreams have seeped over from the night into the daytime and under the sea, welding pipes, he begins to see and hear things from those dreams. And lately his dreams have seemed so real.

Jeff Lemire's impressive comics career has really taken off in the last couple years with his brilliant creator-owned "Sweet Tooth" series for Vertigo, his one-off book "The Nobody", and signing on to DC's New 52 reboot series "Animal Man" and "Frankenstein, Agent of SHADE", and he continues this successful streak with the excellent story of "The Underwater Welder". It reads a lot like a Twilight Zone episode with supernatural elements creeping into the story early on before totally submerging it (pun intended) and taking the reader with it.

Lemire's line-work in his art is perfectly suited to the ghostly story presented here with many disturbing elements such as Joseph's father's alcoholic face staring out of an obituary page to the reader or the surreal experiences Joseph experiences under the waves. The parallels between Joseph and his father's life is also haunting as Lemire merges the two into an intertwining and complex storyline that adds to the feeling of unease this reader felt as the story unfolded.

I'm a sucker for ghost stories especially when they're told in a compelling and mysterious way like this and I've been a huge fan of Lemire's since the "Essex County Trilogy" so I'm predisposed to enjoy this book, but it has all the elements of a successful comic book: great twisty story, likeable main character, great art with imaginative layouts, and clever plotting. "The Underwater Welder" is a superb book from one of the most gifted comics artist/writers living today and is a fantastic read.

Jeff Lemire's The Underwater Welder plays out as the best Twilight Zone episode never produced. His best work yet, Lemire's subtle and powerful storytelling takes us from the rural Ontario of the Eisner and Harvey Award-nominated Essex County Trilogy to the hauntingly beautiful undersea world of Jack Joseph, an underwater welder on an oil rig off the coast of Nova Scotia Canada.

Jack moves back to his small Canadian hometown with his wife Suzie, who is 9 months pregnant. Things look fine with his exotic job as an underwater welder on an offshore oil rig until one day at work when Jack is visited by the ghost of his long dead father, a salvage diver in these same waters. As he struggles to come to grips with his visions, we gradually realize that Jack is a man haunted by his past. Through a series of very well done flashbacks, we learn about Jack's childhood, his divorced parents, and why Jack has a particularly difficult time with the holiday of Halloween.

Jeff Lemire captures the subtle mood and lonely feel of a small Canadian maritime town perfectly, and the underwater scenes are simply breathtaking. The eerie story drew me in immediately, and sweeps along with weird twists and turns coming at such a rate that I couldn't put it down. With The Underwater Welder, Jeff Lemire redefines the boundries of the graphic novel yet again. Rod Serling would be proud.

GoodReads recommended this book to me because I was smitten by the books of Guy Deslisle, another Canadian known for critically-acclaimed unconventional graphic novels.

On the bright side, this story hooked me from the first few pages and had me craving to know how it would end, so I read it all the way through in one attentive sitting. Also on the bright side, it reminded me of one of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes: the one where a guy awakes to find that everyone in his small town has vanished.

It was a fine, quick read but not ultimately very compelling. The story hooks but it does not ultimately reward. The characters, while not quite cardboard, have inadequate complexity to earn the affection or sympathy deserving of a real live person. Lemire's squiggly drawing style makes the characters - even the ones we are supposed to sympathize with - look sunken-eyed and uninviting. The story's resolution, while perfectly conventional, was neither satisfying nor provoking.

I appreciate the time and attention that Lemire poured into this book, but I cannot recommend it nearly as highly as Guy Deslisle's books.