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A bright light in a post-apocalyptic landscape

Ontario comics creator’s story is full of dire things, but has its sweet spots

DEBRA YEO “Sweet Tooth” will debut Friday on Netflix.

To call “Sweet Tooth” a postapocalyptic TV show feels a bit like equating a rainbow with the storm that preceded it.

Yes, the Netflix series is full of dire things — a virus that kills people, human fear and anger and hate for creatures that are different from them — but at its centre is one of the sweetest characters ever committed to video, and not just for the candy he loves to gobble down.

“He kind of embodies hope and childhood and innocence and the best of humanity,” says Jeff Lemire, who created Gus, the hybrid deer-human boy nicknamed Sweet Tooth.

Indeed, Gus, as played by 11year-old Canadian actor Christian Convery, latches onto your heart in the TV series.

He came to life more than a decade ago after latching onto Lemire’s imagination.

“Like a lot of my ideas it comes from my sketchbooks, where I’m always just sort of randomly jotting things down or drawing things, and this little character of Gus, the half deer boy with antlers, kind of started popping up,” Lemire said in a Zoom interview. “The more he popped up, the more I kind of built a little story around him.”

Lemire has been called Canada’s most prolific comics creator. His prodigious output includes dozens and dozens of titles for American publishers like DC Comics, Marvel Comics, Image Comics, Dark Horse Comics and Top Shelf Productions, as both a writer and artist.

Around the time Gus popped into his sketchbook, Lemire had recently published the graphic novels that first brought him acclaim, “Essex County,” set in the part of Ontario where he grew up, and he was looking to expand his horizons into the kind of science fiction, dystopian tales he was a fan of.

“Sweet Tooth” is set in the United States 10 years after the “Great Crumble,” when a virus colloquially known as “the Sick” began wiping out swaths of the population. Around the same time, hybrids began to be born, babies with physical features of animals, blamed by some for the virus.

Gus, who has antlers, deer ears and a heightened sense of smell, is thrust into this dangerous world with a troubled exfootball player named Tommy Jepperd (British actor Nonso Anozie) as a reluctant companion.

Little could Lemire have imagined when he created

“‘Sweet Tooth’ is very much a different take on the apocalypse where it’s a return to nature … it’s a story of hope and of togetherness and finding family.”

JEFF LEMIRE CREATOR

“Sweet Tooth” that the boy’s TV alter ego would debut as the real world was living through its own version of the Great Crumble.

The TV series “was all well in motion and then all of a sudden we found the real world kind of reflecting the story and then the weirder part was that the character of Gus — I actually named him after my newborn son Gus back when I did the book — and now the real Gus is the same age as the character in the comics and we’re living through a pandemic, so it’s very strange,” Lemire said.

It’s also apt that it was an actor from the Marvel universe — for which Lemire has written comics about such Avengers-adjacent characters as Hawkeye, Moon Knight and Thanos — who optioned the “Sweet

Tooth” books for TV. Robert Downey Jr., a.k.a. Iron Man, and his wife, Susan Downey, fell in love with the comics and started developing the series through their production company, Team Downey.

This is the first of Lemire’s solo projects to get a screen version — the graphic novel he worked on with the late Gord Downie, “Secret Path,” was turned into a CBC film in 2016 — but it won’t be the last. “Essex County” is being made into a CBC show and several of Lemire’s other books are in “various stages of active development,” he said.

With “Sweet Tooth,” Lemire is off to a good start.

The series is beautifully made, taking full advantage of the natural wonder of its New Zealand locations, but it’s the characters who really make it special. Gus alternately warms and breaks your heart, with a guileless optimism that shines through even in the show’s darker moments.

Besides Anozie as Jepperd, the show also stars British actor Adeel Akhtar (“The Night Manager,” “The Big Sick”) as Dr. Singh, who’s tasked with trying to find a cure for the virus; New Zealand-American Stefania LaVie Owen (“The Carrie Diaries”) as Gus’s friend Bear; Latin American actor Dania Ramirez (“Heroes”) as Aimee, a protector of the hybrids; American Will Forte as Gus’s father; and South African actor Neil Sandilands (“The Flash”) as General Abbot, leader of a paramilitary force hunting the hybrids.

There are distinct differences between the comics and the show, and Lemire said that at first he was “trepidatious about how they would approach things, but I love that they really embrace the things that I think are the most important about the story, which is this character of Gus … Seeing them build the world around that heart of the character, for that to come to life it’s pretty special,” he said.

(Jim Mickle, known for the TV series “Hap and Leonard,” adapted “Sweet Tooth” and is the showrunner alongside Beth Schwartz, a writer and producer known for “Arrow” and “Legends of Tomorrow.”)

Lemire is full of praise for Christian Convery, the young Vancouver actor who embodies Gus. “Everyone who sees him in my family thinks he looks like my Gus so he must have been destined to be Gus,” says Lemire. “He’s got a great spirit and a great, quirky personality that he brings to that character … He’s such a big heart and it shows through onscreen, so he’s perfect.”

For Lemire, having that kind of goodness in a world in which

very bad things happen isn’t out of place.

“I try to tell stories that are about all aspects of human life, and there are dark and bad things that happen every day, but there’s also beautiful, happy, funny things that happen,” he says. When he tells genre stories, “there’s always going to be darkness and violence and difficult things in the story, but they’re always a means to an end of telling a story about hope or retribution or family togetherness … when the dark things happen they’re there to sort of shine a brighter light on the good things as well.

“‘Sweet Tooth’ is very much a different take on the apocalypse where it’s a return to nature, a return to the innocence of childhood, and it’s a story of hope and of togetherness and finding family.”

As well as the project has turned out, Lemire won’t be leaving his day job for TV production any time soon, or leaving Toronto for Hollywood, he says. “I love comics so much … I love the immediacy of it and how much I can express myself in comics and, really, when I’m doing the books that’s all I’m focused on, is trying to make a great comic book, and especially back a decade ago when I was sort of just starting out my career.”

So no, a TV adaptation of “Sweet Tooth” was never on his radar, “but it’s pretty great that it is happening now and that I can enjoy it.”

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2021-05-29T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-05-29T07:00:00.0000000Z

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