Comic Review: Sweet Tooth: The Return #1 (DC Comics)

DC Comics releases a comic series about a human deer who lives in the deep of the woods with his father, makes his return in Sweet Tooth: The Return on its first issue.

So there are some stories that focus on a candy-related story like one of the fairy tale stories, but this is different. This would make the readers know that this is more than just a comic about candy, but this is more of a research of a beast-man who poses himself as a half-human and a half deer. The whole comic is created by Jeff Lemire, he’s a Canadian cartoonist and an author who made Essex County Trilogy, The Nobody and Animal Man. Speaking of, he was born and raised in a small farming town of Essex County in Ontario, near Lake St. Clair. He decided to pursue his life in comics ever since he dropped out of film school because filmmaking is not really his thing. There’s also a Netflix adaptation of Sweet Tooth released in May 2020 which makes quarantine more interesting in fact to know what this series is about.

The front cover shows concept art of the human deer thing who is being scared if someone found him, eating a man’s shirt for no reason. Perhaps he was too hungry to find some food to eat. I find the concept art for the character very interesting, in fact, I always imagine how Beast Boy from Teen Titans changes forms completely in green and stuff. This one is like the human Bambi all grown up, just trying to conceive its form as any other genetic special should have. The story starts when the main character narrating of how he experience a dream of him being chased that was being told by his father that he had just bad dreams, that it’s not real. And thought that it’s more than just dreams and suddenly it complicates him even further. Once he got out of the house, he finds himself inside a laboratory in which the whole landscape was created that way to have an artificial forest or something. He tries to escape from the whole prison, and somehow everyone treated him like an animal, but an animal with special species, he managed to escape and ran into a stranger who is there to rescue him.

Now this comic is completely out of blue to know that the whole plot is more complicated as it was from the previous comics. But from perspective, this whole part of the story seems like I’m going back reading an indie comic called The Lab where every stick figure is injecting their blood and their blood is based on colors that came from color theory. The art style is something else, and this is coming from the artist who dropped out of film school because his art is more giving some details for the readers to follow the comic and makes it much easier for them to read. I get the idea of how the artist produced this kind of story, character design, and landscape at the same time. It almost makes you think this was created by one man, but he has been dedicated to drawing comics for such a long time. So Sweet Tooth Returns is a comic of a lot of things, but speechless is not one of them.