“The thought of being able to self-publish wasn't even possible I had no money at all.” The Xeric was $5,000 U.S.

“My wife was working at a book store and between the two of us, we could barely pay rent most months,” he recalls. In 2005 Lemire won a Xeric for his first graphic novel, Lost Dogs. Then came the Xeric Grant, a program founded by Teenage Mutant Turtles co-creator Peter Laird to help cartoonists self-publish. More bad jobs awaited while he doodled his own comics, but getting anyone to publish them was a pipe dream. After working various blue-collar jobs, he moved to Toronto at age 19 to go to film school. It’s a reflection of where Lemire grew up, “a really tiny farm in rural southwestern Ontario,” he explains over the phone. But while his output spans all genres and characters, there is a wistful tug of longing behind all of his best work, a focus on family, rural life, and those who yearn to belong to both. Since then he’s written for Marvel, DC, and Valiant, and launched a half-dozen of his own series. When I last interviewed him for PW, nearly 10 years ago, Lemire was part of an article on “promising cartoonists”–the first volume of his acclaimed Essex County trilogy, Tales from the Farm, had just been published, and he was getting used to being a cartoonist after years of crappy jobs. He’s risen from a night shift short order cook who dreamed of making comics to a respected Canadian author who’s also gotten to write for every major superhero from Superman to Wolverine. The new workload is a comfortable place to be for Lemire, 39. If this sounds like a lot, it’s actually slimmed down–last year his schedule included writing eight comics periodical series a month. And he’s writing two more ongoing titles for Image, Descender, a SF tale about a robot and Family Tree, about a girl who turns into a tree. And Royal City, a new ongoing title he writes and draws for Image, just launched as a monthly comic. Around the same time, A.D., collecting an Image series he drew from a story by Scott Snyder (who writes Batman for DC) is also hitting shelves so is a collection of Black Hammer, a horror-tinged take on superheroes drawn by Dean Ormston to be published by Dark Horse. Roughneck, a graphic novel he wrote and drew, launches Simon & Schuster’s new Gallery 13 graphic novel line in April.

A self-admitted workaholic, the Toronto-based cartoonist is everywhere this spring.

Wolverine by Jeff Lemire