The Underwater Welder by Jeff Lemire

The protagonist of The Underwater Welder, Jack Joseph, is a man in his early thirties who’s about to become a father. Jack has recently returned to the small Canadian seaside town where he grew up and has found work as an underwater welder. As his wife’s delivery date approaches, he begins to have visions of his own father – also a diver – who disappeared on Halloween Night when Jack was only a child. As Jack processes his feelings about his impending fatherhood, he realises he needs to make sense of the past before he can let go of it and truly inhabit the present.

A few years ago, when I read Jeff Lemire’s renowned Essex County trilogy, I said the following: “my favourite thing about the trilogy is probably the depth of Lemire’s characterisation. Sometimes a single exchange, or even a single dialogue-free panel, is enough to reveal a character’s whole history, the entire dimension of their unspoken sorrow, and thus to fully humanise them in the readers’ eyes. The characters that people Essex County are often hurt, anguished people, but not in a heroic or romanticised sort of way. They’re ordinary people doing their best to deal with loneliness, grief, family secrets, failed attempts to connect with others, losses and disappointments; all in everyday and very human ways.”

The exact same could be said of Lemire’s latest graphic novel. Unlike Essex County, The Underwater Welder has an eerie atmosphere and a fantastic feel to it – Jack’s visions of his father, which happen when he’s diving, just might be supernatural in nature, and things become increasingly strange as the story progresses. But what matters in this story is not the realistic or supernatural nature of what Jack is experiencing, but rather its emotional resonance.


The Underwater Welder is a simple story of a man making sense of his troubled relationship with his father before he can embrace fatherhood himself. It’s a story about grief and abandonment and anger, about fear and guilt, about being terrified that you’ll become the person who has hurt you the most in your life. But its simplicity doesn’t make The Underwater Welder any less moving. The story stands out because Lemire tells it with immense subtlety and sensitivity – he lets his characters’ gestures, silences and facial expressions speak for themselves, and allows the little moments of connection between people to really shine.


This is graphic storytelling at its very best. I can’t wait to see what Lemire will do next.


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Affiliates disclosure: if you buy a book through one of my affiliates links I will get 5%. I downloaded a review copy of this book via NetGalley.