When cameras started rolling on the pilot of Sweet Tooth back in 2019, Jeff Lemire‘s Vertigo comic series had been fully wrapped up for at least seven years. As readers already know, the Eisner Award winning writer and artist went back to Sweet Tooth after almost ten years when he published Sweet Tooth: The Return as a six-issue miniseries through DC Black Label in November of 2020, and it was in part thanks to being on the set of the TV Series. Speaking with ComicBook.com during a junket for the Netflix show, Lemire said that he never wanted to ruin the ending he wrote for Gus in the comics but seeing it come to life got his mind working in the world again.
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“Generally, when I finish a book, I move on to the next thing, and I don’t really look back on my old stuff too much, and Sweet Tooth was probably the longest project I worked on,” Lemire said. “It was close to four years from start to finish of drawing it every day. So, when I finished that, I was pretty burnt out on the world and ready to move on to new things. But over the years, you just get so many requests at conventions and signings and stuff to draw the characters, and you miss them when you draw them again, and you miss them being part of your life. And then, so I’d always wondered about a way back into the world. But as a reader you know the ending of the series, and I was always really proud of that ending and I didn’t want to ruin it.”
He continued, “So, I didn’t really have a good idea of how to get back in, but then when I got to go on set, and I was there and I saw the passion, and everything that Jim (Mickle, showrunner) and the cast and the crew were bringing to it, it reignited my love of the world again and reminded me of why I loved it so much when I started it, and it got my wheels turning for sure. It inspired, the whole Return came from that experience of me really wanting to get back into the world. And then I came up with the idea of how to do that, without upending what I’ve done in the original series.”
You can read all forty issues of Sweet Tooth on DC Universe with Sweet Tooth: The Return arriving on the service in monthly installments.
Sweet Tooth stars Christian Convery as Gus, Nonso Anozie as Tommy Jepperd, Adeel Akhtar as Dr. Aditya Singh, Aliza Vellani as Rani Singh, Stefania LaVie Owen as Bear, Dania Ramirez as Aimee Eden, Neil Sandilands as General Abbot, Will Forte as Father, and James Brolin as Narrator.
The first season of Sweet Tooth is now streaming on Netflix.
