Minor Arcana is the newest ongoing series by industry legend Jeff Lemire, debuting from BOOM! Studios this month. The comic focuses on a damaged woman who goes back to the small town she grew up in where she finds a bit more than she bargained for regarding her own pseudo-psychic family history. It’s a wonderful read that’s shaping up to be one of Lemire’s best. The Beat reached out to Lemire with some questions about Minor Arcana, which you can read below.
This interview was conducted over email and has been edited for clarity.
JARED BIRD: Something I love about the series is its focus on a small-town occult shop. What drew you to make a comic on psychic shops and tarot card readers?
JEFF LEMIRE: This book has been gestating for about three or four years, so the initial spark came a while back. I do remember doing a scene in my series Fishflies where a character goes to visit a small town medium for help. And that started to really strike me as something interesting. You see these small storefront psychic shops everywhere. I see them in the city, and I know they exist in small towns too. And it just felt mysterious. What goes on behind those windows? Who are the people who run them? It kind of grew out of that. And when I came up with the idea of a prodigal daughter returning home, and her and her mom running one of these shops and living above it, that’s when the story really started to take hold.
At the time I was working on the Essex County TV show here in Canada and couldn’t start any new comics for a while, so the idea sat. And I’m glad it did, because the longer it sat, the more it developed and cooked and grew. So, by the time I actually got around to starting it last year, it was really fully formed. I had the whole scope of the story. The beginning and end. All the various supporting characters. It was all there.
The focus on tarot came out of the research. I started reading about mediums and psychics and the tarot just emerged as this treasure trove of imagery, symbolism, and story. The more I read, the more it weaved its way into the world and characters I had been developing.
BIRD: Theresa has some misanthropic tendencies, and a lot of baggage about heading back to her hometown. She’s been trying to escape it for the longest time, only to end up back. Do you think that’s something readers may be able to relate to?
LEMIRE: I’m sure it happens to a lot of people. Not everyone has happy childhoods or family lives. And many people, when they’re young, just want to strike out on their own and build their own life. I know I did. But family is a powerful thing, and it can pull you back whether you like it or not.
When we find Theresa, she is at a crossroads. The life she is leaving behind in the city is a mess (we will learn more about that other life in future issues) and this all coincides with her mom’s illness.
So, Theresa is back where she grew up out of necessity. Partly because of her own failures, and partly because her mother needs her. There is some resentment there, but she is just as angry at herself. And the misanthropic tendencies you mention don’t help. She is a pessimist and can be her own worst enemy.
But of course, we set Theresa up as The Fool and her journey will be one of discovery and reinvention.
BIRD: You’ve written a number of series set in small towns across your career and you’re from one yourself. What do you think it is about small town settings that inspire your creativity?
LEMIRE: Well, it’s where I came from. So, it all draws from that same well. I lived in a small town like the ones I wrote about when I was at my most impressionable and when my tastes and sense of self were still forming. So, it’s no mystery why that is so deeply burned into my creative life.
And, also, I really just like drawing small towns and rural settings. It plays to my strengths as an artist, and aesthetically I still just enjoy it so much. Every part of me is still drawn to these rural stories and maybe I always will be.
BIRD: Minor Arcana touches upon a lot of dark themes. There’s ideas of the afterlife and grief, recovering and facing trauma, and dealing with substance abuse. Was this series difficult to write?
LEMIRE: Well, I am still very much writing it, one month at a time. So, it will be a multi-year journey for sure. And yes, it has been a very difficult time for me personally. I was going through a lot personally when I started working on Minor Arcana, and to a degree I still am. It’s been a rough stretch for me. But, ironically, writing about these darker themes actually helps. It’s cathartic. And I also know where all the storylines are going. This is very much a book about community and about healing. That’s not to say that everything will turn out great, it’s more layered and complicated than that, but the darkness is a means to an end.
BIRD: The colours of the first tarot reading shine off the page. Did you always envision that scene as an explosion of colour in a muted world?
LEMIRE: The colour in Minor Arcana really evolved as I worked on it. The original plan was for me to do the book in black and white, with just a blue watercolour wash, like I did Fishflies. But as the scope of the book widened, my editors, Eric Harburn and Matt Gagnon and I talked, and we knew it needed a greater variety of approaches to represent the different worlds and realities that Theresa moves between.
I thought about bringing another colorist on to do the “real world” sections of the book, while I would do the more liminal spaces myself. But Eric and Matt encouraged me to try painting all of the book myself.
I knew that the psychic shop had to be almost garish and really rich in colour and represent Vickie’s personality. While the rest of the world would be more muted and more like Theresa. So, I just went nuts laying washes on those pages, going really dark and really rich and choosing colours that were way out of my usual comfort zone. It was a lot of fun to try and give each location and each environment its own colour scheme. The first issue took forever, but now that I’ve established the look and the different locations it’s much quicker.
BIRD: You’ve said that this series is a love letter to the ‘first wave’ of Vertigo comics. They’ve inspired previous works of yours such as Animal Man, which on a personal note is one of the first comics I ever read monthly. What about that era is inspiring Minor Arcana?
LEMIRE: Those original Vertigo books, Sandman, Swamp Thing, Animal Man, Doom Patrol, Shade the Changing Man etc. were so incredibly formative for me. I was 14 or 15 when they were coming out and when DC’s “Berger Books” officially became Vertigo in 1993. Painted comics, and mature horror comics are the norm now, but back then they were a complete revelation.
Those books were much more sophisticated than the mainstream stuff that was available to a kid like me up until that point. And, while they still used genre, they had complex characters and worlds, and they really appealed to me as I was getting older. They kept me reading comics, really. Of course, there were a lot of independent comics, and European comics at that time that were also very literary and mature, but I didn’t really have access to those yet, living in a small town. But I did get the Vertigo books since DC distributed them more widely.
It’s hard to define what I am trying to capture from those Vertigo books. There is the supernatural aspect for sure, but really, it’s more of a mood and a tone and a feeling that I still get when I look at those initial Vertigo comics. And it’s all mixed up with my love of post-punk and early alternative music from that time as well.
BIRD: What do you hope readers will take away from this series?
LEMIRE: I want this book to be a rich tapestry of a town. I want characters that feel like one thing when you first meet them, but slowly reveal themselves to be much more layered and complex. And I want readers to fall in love with them, and the world, and go on this journey with me.
Like I said, this is a book about community and about healing and I hope that comes through as it unfolds. But it is also filled with a lot of twists and surprises.
I also want to celebrate the ongoing series, and single-issue comics. I want each issue to feel special, not just like one chapter of a trade paperback. The storylines within the book will be smaller. 1 -3 issues, with the bigger, underlying story driving through it all.
