Minor Arcana is the latest serialized series from industry legend Jeff Lemire, debuting this month from BOOM! Studios. The comic tells the story of a damaged woman who returns to the small town where she grew up and discovers more than she expected about her pseudo-psychic family history. It’s a fantastic read and is shaping up to be one of Lemire’s best works. The Beat asked Lemire a few questions about Minor Arcana, which you can read below:
This interview was conducted via email and has been edited for clarity.
Jared Bird: What I love about this series is that it focuses on a small town occult shop. What inspired you to draw a comic about a psychic shop and tarot card reader?
Jeff Lemire: I’ve had this book in the works for about three or four years, so the initial spark came a while ago. I remember doing a scene in my series, Fish Fries, where a character goes to a small-town psychic for help, and that’s when it really started to feel interesting to me. There are these little psychic shops everywhere. I see them in cities, I know they’re in small towns, too. And it just seemed so mystical to me. What’s going on behind those windows? Who’s running them? And that’s how the book came about. And then the story really started to take off when I came up with the idea that the prodigal daughter comes home and that she and her mother run a psychic shop and live above it.
At the time, I was working on a TV show for Essex County, Canada, and I couldn’t start a new comic for a while, so the idea was left lying around. But I’m glad I left it lying around, because the longer I left it, the more it developed and matured and grew. So by the time I actually started last year, it was completely formed. The whole outline of the story was set. The beginning and the end. The various supporting characters. It was all there.
My interest in tarot came as a result of my research. I began reading about mediums and psychics and tarot emerged as a treasure trove of imagery, symbolism and stories. The more I read, the more tarot became woven into the worlds and characters I was creating.
Bird: Theresa has misanthropic tendencies and has a lot of issues with returning to her hometown. She’s been trying to run away from it for a long time, but she does end up coming back. Do you think there’s any part of her that readers can relate to?
Lemire: I think it happens to a lot of people. Not everyone has a happy childhood or a happy family life. A lot of people want to be independent and build their own life when they’re young. That’s what I did too. But family is a powerful thing, and it can pull you back whether you like it or not.
When we find Teresa, she’s at a crossroads: the life she left behind in the city is in shambles (we’ll learn more about that other life in upcoming issues), and all of that is compounded by her mother’s illness.
So Teresa has returned to the place where she grew up out of necessity, partly because of her own failings, partly because her mother needs her. There is some resentment there, but she is just as angry at herself. And those misanthropic tendencies you mentioned don’t help. She’s a pessimist and can be her own worst enemy.
But of course, we’re going to set up Teresa 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 throughout your career, and you come from a small town yourself. What do you think it is about small-town settings that inspires your creativity?
Lemire: Well, that’s where I come from, so it all comes from the same wellspring. I lived in a small town like the one I wrote about when I was at my most impressionable, when my tastes and sense of self were still forming, so it’s no wonder it’s so deeply imprinted on my creative life.
I also really love painting small towns and rural landscapes — it plays to my strengths as an artist and is very aesthetically pleasing — every part of me is still drawn to these country stories, and always will be.
Bard: The Minor Arcana touches on a lot of dark themes: life after death, grief, recovering from and dealing with trauma, dealing with substance abuse, etc. Was this series difficult to write?
Lemire: Well, I’m still writing it one month at a time. So it’s definitely going to be a journey that will take years. And, certainly, it was a very difficult time for me personally. I was going through a lot personally when I started working on Minor Arcana, and to some extent I still am. It was a tough time for me. But ironically, writing about these dark themes has actually been helpful. It’s cathartic. And I also know where all the storylines are heading. This is a book about community and healing. I’m not saying that everything will be fine. It’s more layered and complicated than that, but the darkness is a means to an end.
BIRD: The colors of the first tarot reading shine off the page. Did you always envision that scene as an explosion of color in a muted world?
Lemire: The color palette for Minor Arcana really evolved as I worked on it. My original plan was to keep the book in black and white with just a few pale blue watercolors, like Fish Fries. But as the book’s scope expanded, and in discussions with my editors Eric Harburn and Matt Gagnon, we realized we needed a more diverse approach to represent the different worlds and realities that Teresa traverses.
I had considered handing over the “real world” parts of the book to another colorist and illustrating the more borderline parts myself, but Eric and Matt encouraged me to try and illustrate the entire book myself.
I knew the psychic shop had to be loud, colorful, and representative of Vicki’s personality, while I wanted the rest of the world to be more subdued and Teresa-like. So I went over the pages with washes, made them really dark, really intense, and chose colors that were way out of my usual league. It was a lot of fun giving each location and environment its own color scheme. The first issue took forever, but now that I have the look and the different locations down, it’s gone a lot quicker.
Bird: You’ve said that this series is a love letter to the “first wave” of Vertigo Comics, which inspired some of your earlier work, such as Animal Man. Personally, Animal Man was one of the first comics I read monthly. What is it about that era that inspired Minor Arcana?
Lemire: The original Vertigo books – Sandman, Swamp Thing, Animal Man, Doom Patrol, Shade the Changing Man, etc. – were huge influences on me, I was 14 or 15 years old in 1993 when these books were published and DC’s “Burger Books” officially became Vertigo, and while painted comics and adult horror comics are commonplace now, at the time they were completely mind-blowing.
Those books were much more sophisticated than the mainstream stuff that a kid like me could read up to that point, and while it was still in the genre, they had complex characters and worlds that really appealed to me as I grew up. Those books kept me reading comics. Of course, there were a lot of independent comics at the time, and a lot of literary, mature European comics, but I lived in a small town so I didn’t have much access to those yet. But DC had wider distribution, so I could get the Vertigo books.
It’s hard to define what it is that I’m trying to capture from the Vertigo books – there’s definitely a supernatural aspect to it, but it’s really more the atmosphere, tone and feeling that I still get when I look at the early Vertigo comics, and all of that mixed with my love of post-punk and early alternative music from that time period.
BIRD: What do you hope readers take away from this series?
Lemire: I want this book to be a rich tapestry of a town, with characters that seem like one thing when you first meet them, but then grow into much more complex and profound characters, and I want readers to fall in love with the characters and the world and go on this journey with me.
Like I said, this is a book about community and healing, and I hope that comes through as it unfolds, but the book is also packed with many twists and surprises.
We also want ongoing series and one-shot comics to be welcome. We want each issue to feel special, not like a chapter in a trade paperback. Storylines within the book will be smaller; 1-3 issues with a larger story running throughout.
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