Running from 2009 until 2013, Jeff Lemire's Sweet Tooth remains a beloved tale of a young human/animal hybrid named Gus learning to make his way in a post-apocalyptic world that is often hostile towards him with the help of a dangerous man named Jepperd. In 2018, an adaptation of Sweet Tooth received a pilot order and was eventually greenlit at Netflix, with Jim Mickle  (Mulberry Street) and Beth Schwartz (Arrow) serving as co-showrunners on the project.

CBR talked with Lemire, Mickle and Schwartz about adapting Sweet Tooth and bringing the world of the comic to life.

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CBR: Jeff, how involved were you with the adaptation process?

JEFF LEMIRE: Jim and I spoke from the early days, when he was first starting his path to adapting. So I was speaking to Jim from the beginning. And then I was on the set for the pilot and got to be a part of that. And unfortunately, I couldn't go back for the rest of the shooting of Season 1 due to the pandemic. But yeah, they've been great about keeping me involved at every stage. So yeah, it's been wonderful.

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Jim and Beth, what were your reactions to reading Sweet Tooth for the first time?

JIM MICKLE: Well, I kind of had two stages with it, because I read it when it first came out, just as a fan and really loved it at the time. I'm a sucker for apocalyptic end of the world stories and loved Jeff's work and thought it was such a cool take on all that. And then I came back to it about six years later. Team Downey, I was talking to them about some other stuff. And they said, "You know, do you know this comic book, Sweet Tooth?" And I thought, "Yeah, absolutely."

And it was interesting then going back and looking at it, six years later, after sort of like all the apocalyptic TV shows and movies and comics that had come before, but also how much it happened in the world that really echoed the comic book. So it was almost like a brand new experience in some way. But I think the thing that connected both times was the heart of the story and how much emotion Jeff brings to it, especially in the character of Gus. I think that was the thing that I connected to both times and wanted to bring to the series.

BETH SCHWARTZ: So I had a different experience in terms of I saw the pilot of Sweet Tooth first. And I saw the pilot before I joined on and before I even read the comic book. So the pilot is what hooked me. And when I read the comic book and learned that Jeff wrote this about his experience with fatherhood, I had just had a baby myself, who was about six months old. And so I completely connected to this idea of wanting to shelter your child from the dangers of the big bad world. And it really spoke to me, and I was super honored to be a part of the project.

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Jeff, when you were when you were writing Sweet Tooth, we'd kind of had these threats of pandemics before, but we never had anything quite like COVID-19. Has your view of the comic changed as a result of what's kind of happened over the last year and a half?

LEMIRE: I don't think my view of the comic itself has changed, but I think, obviously, when I did the book it was a little over a decade ago. So it was really coming from this tradition of dystopian or post-apocalyptic fiction, where there's always some sort of cataclysmic event, usually, to start it. It's usually either some sort of plague or a nuclear, like, cold winter or something. So it really just came from that traditional of sci-fi, not from real-world influence.

And then, you know, the world's changed so much since I did it. And obviously, now, even since Jim shot the pilot, the real pandemic happened, so you can't help but feel a little different about it. But I feel like the themes and the characters in the comic, if anything, now they're more resonant, because we kind of have this universal shared experience of going through the sort of initial event of the story. And now you can just really dive into the characters and their story and kind of appreciate it in a new way.

Jim and Beth, there seem to be, on the surface, a fair number of changes in the adaptation process. How did you go about figuring out how to tweak things and how to change things to be the final product that you've got.

SCHWARTZ: Well, we obviously use Jeff's comic book as our inspiration and almost all the characters are characters that he created, and then we put our own spin on them. And, really, what we took mostly from the comic book was Gus and the heart that Gus brings to the show, which is present in his comic book as well. And then we built the show around Gus and Gus' point of view. And so we talked about characters and what kind of characters did we want? Gus, who was his sheltered half deer boy, living in the woods, what is the world that we want him to experience? And that's how we built this series. And we keep taking things from the comic book as well.

MICKLE: Yeah, same. It was an organic process. It wasn't so much about, like, what do we want to keep and what do we want to add to. But I think, once you start diving into this is Gus' story, there's a lot of stuff in the comics... it skips certain moments in his life. That it felt like there's actually some really cool material. We actually have a canvas that we can explore this stuff, like some of his childhood and stuff like that.

And then a lot of it was bringing in the characters who appear much later in the comic book, wanting to bring them in early. It felt like that was such a big part of the comic book. And we don't want to introduce them in Season 3. It's like, let's see them right off the bat. And that became really fun, because there are such rich characters there. So it felt like, if we can get into their origin stories and who they are, so that by the time Gus gets to meet them, we've already had our own experience with them. It felt like a very fun twist on the book.

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What are you most excited for people to see in Sweet Tooth.

LEMIRE: Yeah, I mean, it's cool. Just going off what Jim was saying about the differences and the similarities to the comic. It's obviously pretty fascinating for me to watch that as well. And you know, when I did the comic, originally, we hadn't seen nearly as much post-apocalyptic fiction, as we've seen now on screen. So I love the way they've kind of reinvented -- not even reinvented the world, but just sort of leaned into the idea of nature, and the beauty of the natural world a bit more than I did. So I love that aspect of it. I think it's very prescient and relevant today. I love that.

And even though there are some new characters, and certain other characters differ from what I did in the book, I feel like the main pillars of the story are still very much there, especially as we get further into the series. I think it's cool that it kind of struck this perfect balance between adapting what I did, but also broadening the world. Because I know that any adaptation needs to change things and broaden things to suit whatever medium they're working in. [...] I'm just excited about the whole process, really. And I love that the heart and the spirit of the comic is very much alive on screen.

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SCHWARTZ: I'm also excited for people to just be hopeful and happy when they watch this series. There's so much heart, and you walk away, at least for me, I walk away just feeling so good about the world that I just saw and wanting to be a part of it and the characters. I just hope that people enjoy themselves when they watch it and feel hopeful instead of, you know, bleak about a possible future.

MICKLE: Yeah, I think the world, you know. And I remember when we pitched it. We were just describing it to networks as, like, this will be unlike any other show on television. And some of when you say that it's salesmanship. You're trying to convince them [that] they're signing on to something really unique. But then, you look back at what we made. And it's like, this is really very a one of a kind show. So yeah, I'm excited to see how people respond to that and all the details of the world that we built.

SCHWARTZ: I'm also excited to see how the world reacts to the hybrids, because that's the most magical part of the show in some ways. And it's like Jim said, it's so different. And what Jeff's mind created, we were able to bring to the to the screen, and I just think it's extremely unique.

Sweet Tooth stars Christian Convery, Nonso Anozie, Adeel Akhtar, Aliza Vellani, Stefania LaVie Owen, Dania Ramirez and Neil Sandilands, with Will Forte and James Brolin. The series premieres June 4 on Netflix.

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