Crenshaw's Books & Decks

The Underwater Welder is a black and white fiction graphic novel that focus in the strange circumstances surrounding the life of 33y.o. Jack Joseph --an underwater welder who works in a rig--, and her expecting wife Susie. The accidental finding of an old forgotten childhood watch and an accident happened during a rutinary shift will bring Jack to question reality, his present and his past. 

Jack loves working and diving because down there he gets the solitude he craves, he is alienated from his mother and progressively alienated from his wife, whose most basic needs he finds difficult to tend to as the same pace that his mental confusion grows. He is obsessed with the death of his father, who died at his same age, in the night of Halloween, and sees progressively identified and mixed with his father's memory and "ghost". The isolated inhospitable rugged shores of Nova Scotia are a perfect setting for this intriguing novel.

The novel  has many of Lemire's themes and characters archetypes also present in other of his works: the role of memory in your present life, the thin line separating past and present in people's memories and emotions, lonely alienated characters who want to connect emotionally but are progressive frustrated by their lack of success at doing so, the line the separates reality from non reality.

The novel also shows again Lemire's drawing mastery and graphic versatility to convey into images stories and situations that are far from easy or straight forward to depict. Also common to Lemire are his wonderful landscape composition, and the framing and composition of his vignettes.

The novel reads easily and with gusto, and is very intriguing. However, it has a predictable ending that you can sense from half way the novel. Perhaps the tempo of the novel should have been different and some of the information provided at the beginning omitted so the reader would have had less clues to unveil the mystery. Having said so, the story is intriguing enough and odd enough to keep you interested. The characters are well sketched psychologically, especially Jack, although sometimes the reader, or at least me, wanted to know more about Susie.