All throughout April and May, we’re crowdsourcing a coronavirus quarantine comics reading list. Each weekday for a month, we’ll post a new recommendation from someone in the comics industry to help folks get through the isolation. This includes writers, artists, letterers, editors, comics journalists, publicists, and more…all paired with a local shop that’s currently selling the books via mail order.

Today’s pick comes from art collector Josh Crews…enjoy!

Sweet Tooth is an incredible post-apocalyptic story with heart and charm, featuring 40 issues of beautiful comics with one of the best endings ever. It's special to me for many reasons, but primarily because it helped bring me back to comics. I was pretty much out of comics from 1993-ish until 2010. I had started going to SDCC around 2004 or 2005, though. Not for comics originally, but because I live in San Diego and always wanted to go. Initially I just checked out big Hollywood stuff and toys. In 2009, I decided to start bringing a sketchbook. I had seen others doing it, and it seemed cool. That first con I met a then much-less-known Jeff Lemire at the DC booth. He had a signing related to The Nobody. He had no line, and I decided to ask for a sketch. He gave me a lovely sketch and chatted with me about Essex County and Sweet Tooth. I decided to check them out at the library. I think Sweet Tooth was only 1 or 2 trades in, and I loved them both. Seeing as Sweet Tooth was still going, I found myself a comic shop and set up a pull list in early 2010 for the first time since 1993. I added more and more books and was fully immersed in comics again before you knew it. Sweet Tooth will always have a special place in my heart, and I highly recommend reading it right now, either again or for the very first time. -Josh Crews

Josh Crews is a nurse and a comics art collector from San Diego, California.

Sweet Tooth
Writer/Artist: Jeff Lemire
Publisher: DC Comics - Vertigo
Out of the deep woods, from the mind of acclaimed cartoonist Jeff Lemire, comes a series like no other! After being raised in total isolation, Gus--a boy born with deer-like antlers--is left to survive in an American landscape devastated a decade earlier by an inexplicable pandemic.

Get it from a local comic shop with this directory from the Comics Industry Collective of stores open and doing mail order!

Click here for the full coronavirus reading list!