Jeff Lemire made a name for himself in the comic book industry by writing and drawing powerful and personal stories that not only examine the human spirit, but also blend, bend and break genre lines. For the past several years, the cartoonist has been focusing on writing creator-owned books like "Descender" and "Black Hammer" for Image Comics and Dark Horse respectively, and titles like "Extraordinary X-Men" and "Old Man Logan" for Marvel -- or so it would seem.

Lemire has actually been drawing ever since he ended his runs on "Sweet Tooth" and "Trillium" for Vertigo Comics. It's just that these new projects have yet to be released.

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We knew "A.D.: After Death," which is written by his pal Scott Snyder, was coming from Image in November, and "Roughneck," which he wrote and illustrated for Simon & Schuster, is slated for next spring. But news broke right before Comic-Con International that Lemire had also secretly been working on a new ongoing series for Image that he again is writing and drawing: "Royal City."

After reading the already completed, 40-page, first issue, we connected with Lemire to discuss the upcoming series he says is expected to launch in March 2017. Lemire also shared an exclusive reveal of the covers for the first five issues of "Royal City," which the New York Times best-selling creator expects will run 20 issues over the next two years.

CBR News: I loved the first issue of "Royal City," and I'm watching "Bloodline" right now on Netflix. Why does observing dysfunctional families in our fiction give us so much pleasure?

Jeff Lemire: [Laughs] Whenever you tell stories about families, there is always all of this built-in history. And you can never really escape from your family even if you don't like them. [Laughs] It automatically creates all of this tension and hang-ups that you can never really just walk away from. I always find that really interesting to explore. I don't think any family is perfect. The Pike family certainly loves each other, but like any family, there is tons of baggage and tons of history that makes it more complicated than it needs to be.

The plan with the first issue was to introduce the family and the town, but you're also immediately thrown into the dynamic of it. We won't see the family built from the beginning in "Royal City." We don't see the kids growing up. We're coming at it as the kids are reaching middle age, and there is a whole unseen history that I get to explore as the series goes on. I get to reveal it with something I love to play with, time, telling their story in the past and present. This is something that I have done in the past with "Essex County" and "Underwater Welder," and it's one of my favorite things to do. This series, which is ongoing, allows me to do that on an extended basis.

I don't want to give away too much, as we are nine months away from the series launch, but there is a great line on the first page that lays it out pretty clearly: "Things are different here."

There is a real fine line that you can walk, and I think I've done it in the past with "Welder" and "Essex," between there are magical or fantastic things happening but they are not necessarily supernatural. The term people use is 'magical realism.' There are amazing, extra-normal things, but they are not sci-fi or supernatural. They are just part of everyday life. They are more like poetic expressions of what's going with the characters, like what's going on in "Charlie." I love doing that stuff. I have set Royal City up as this place where, yes, it is a very grounded, thriving-now-dying industrial town, but underneath it all, something different, something strange and even magical, binds this family and, as we go on, the whole town together.

This first issue is 40 pages and is quite satisfying as a complete story. It's like a really awesome and weird episode of "Twilight Zone," with a spectacular ending.

Thanks. I think that If you are going to do something like this, I want to reward the monthly readers as much as possible. I want to try and keep that monthly audience as much as possible and not just have readers waiting for the trade, which I do [understand], and that's fine, but I would love to build a monthly readership for "Royal City" and make it special to the people who follow it. And especially, for the first issue, I wanted to give a lot of story and really hook the reader into this world.

So yes, the first issue is 40 pages of story, plus a bunch of backgrounder stuff that ties into the story. I will keep it all at the very affordable price of what a normal 20-page comic would be, and hopefully that will attract a lot of people to the book. Beyond that, on a monthly basis, I want to include a lot of additional material. Usually Image comics have 22 pages of story and a little bit of backgrounder and some ads, but I want to try use all 32 pages available to me and make the whole thing "Royal City." There won't be any ads or anything like that. The story will be a little bit longer than 20 pages each month, and the back of each issue will have things that won't be in the collected edition, that won't be in the trade paperbacks.

For example, in the first issue, there's one of the journals of one of the kids when he was a teenager in the '90s. The second issue will have the New York Times book reviews of the character Patrick's novels. [Laughs] That will really fill in his backstory and show how his books have been received over his career. Doing things like that, stuff that won't be in the trade paperbacks, in the monthly series will really start to build the history of this family a bit more. I really want to make the monthly something important and vital so you can't just wait for the trade all of the time.

I'm glad you mentioned Patrick Pike, because I was going to ask you about him next. You have compared him to your "opposite doppelgänger."

Yeah, I think there is a little bit of me in each of the characters in the family -- either exaggerated versions of me, or extreme versions of me. And yes, Pat is the easiest to draw comparisons to. He's the same age as me. He grew up in a smaller town and moved to a bigger city, like I did. It will be revealed later that his career path followed very closely to mine. He was a cook in kitchens in the city and was writing all of the time and finally wrote this one breakthrough novel called "Royal City" that was set in his hometown, just like I did with "Essex County." And that made his career.

But then his career took a nosedive and, thankfully, my career hasn't yet. [Laughs] He made some bad creative decisions once he "made it," and got lost in the whole fame thing. When we meet him now, his career is really on the downturn and he's desperate to turn it around. He's got money issues and marital problems and lot of things that I'm not dealing with. It's like me if I had made of all these wrong decisions after making "Essex County" and my life had fallen apart and thankfully, my life has gone the opposite way. But it's kind of fun to explore those what ifs and the dark side of things.

I would totally read a book called "Canoeheads."

[Laughs] No one else did. Or at least nobody liked it. That was his second novel that was not well received. And with a title like that, I don't know how it cannot be.

Will we get a chapter of "Canoeheads" in the back of one of the issues?

I'm sure we will. We're going to get chapters of all his books.

You have a long history of examining families in your stories -- more specifically, father-son relationships. In "Royal City," it's a mother at the center of the story.

That's right. Like you said, I've done the father-son thing a lot. It's something that I have explored right from the beginning of my career with "Essex," and obviously, more literally with "Welder" and "Sweet Tooth." I've told those stories, but I felt like I'd never done a real mother-son relationship, which again, there is tons of stuff to mine there, and explore.

Patty is the matriarch of this family in every sense. She's a very strong character with a very big personality, and her influence on this family will be revealed as we go. We'll see what has happened and what the history is. Sometimes the decisions she makes and the way she treats her kids causes a lot of the problems. She wants everyone to get along and she wants the family to work, but her actions make the opposite happen a lot of the time.

As opposed to some of my father figures in some of my other books, Peter is not this strong, dominant personality. He's much the opposite. He's meek and sheepish and beaten, really, by Patty.

You're writing and drawing this series, which I know from past conversations remains a priority for you. Obviously, this makes the project a more intense one for you as a creator.

Yeah, it has to be. Inherently, it's all you. Every line on the page is right from your hand. It can't help but be part of you. The whole thing becomes one process rather than separated and segmented the way that it does when you are collaborating. Even when you have an amazing collaborator like Dustin [Nguyen] on "Descender," there are still two voices there. This is fully me -- good and bad.

The last couple of years, it seems like I have been doing more writing and less drawing, but the truth is that I have been drawing more than ever. It's just that I have been doing graphic novels, so they don't come out every month. Nothing's come out yet, but starting in November with "AD," there will three graphic novels released within a five or six-month span.

I missed drawing the monthly book after "Sweet Tooth." There is something about the discipline of that I like. There is something about having your art come out every month as opposed to every two years with a graphic novel. I just like the feedback and having people see my work every month. I think I have become a much better artist over the last couple of years, working on those few graphic novels. Like "Trillium," I will be painting this, as well. It's a labor of love in every sense. It's you, alone in a room, and whatever you put on the page is what the reader gets. It's completely from your hand. There are no editors and no collaborators, so it's thrilling and scary -- but I love it.

Why produce this series with Image rather than Dark Horse or Vertigo?

The Image boom over the past decade, that I'm thankfully a part of now with "Descender" and things like that, is amazing. It's really brought out the ability for creators like myself and everyone else who is doing great work to do really personal projects and explore different genres. Now, you can find an audience for all kinds of different books beyond traditional superhero comics. And I think that's great. And at the same time, sometimes I feel like we're becoming too dependent on genre. "This guy is doing a horror book. This guy is doing a sci-fi book." You can find a genre with a built-in audience and do your thing with it, and I'm as guilty of that as anyone with "Descender." It's not guilt. I love genre. I love sci-fi. I love horror, and so does everyone else. [Laughs] It's not like it's something to be ashamed of or look down on, but I do feel that there is this huge audience out there for things that aren't necessarily genre or high concept-based.

If you look at the way television is going over the last decade, it's become the Golden Age of storytelling on television. Cable networks and even traditional [broadcast] networks, TV has gone from episodic to a more novelistic approach, where we have seasons with beginnings and endings, and it's created some amazing television. Not all of that has been genre driven. You have shows like "Bloodline" and "Six Feet Under" and "Transparent" and all of these other shows that are just incredible human dramas. I've always felt that comics has so much potential to do that, as well. You see it in graphic novels for sure, and I've done it in the past with things like "Essex County," but you never really see it in monthly comics, except for maybe when "Love and Rockets" was monthly, or maybe Terry Moore's "Strangers in Paradise." There haven't been many human dramas where you follow the lives of these characters, and that's the challenge of doing a series like this and keeping it compelling every month.

I really wanted to do something like "Essex County," but on a monthly basis. I really wanted to lean into that serialized format where each month is a chapter of this bigger novel. My career since "Essex County" has been mostly genre driven. As personal as "Sweet Tooth" is, it is still sci-fi. And so is "Descender" and "Black Hammer" and all of the Marvel stuff that I am doing now. There was a part of me that was really yearning to get back to do slightly more grounded stuff that wasn't so genre-driven, a little more human and a little more grounded.

That's not to say that "Royal City" is going to be stifled and boring. There are still magical things happening and other odd and strange and hopefully wonderful things in the book, but it's not necessarily dependent on a sci-fi or supernatural hook. Right now, that's something really important for me to explore with all of the other stuff that I have going on.

"Royal City," written and illustrated by Jeff Lemire, arrives in March, 2017 from Image Comics.