Start with Sweet Tooth Book One. Sweet Tooth is a single forty-issue story — a boy with antlers, a violent man who may or may not be protecting him, and a plague that arrived at the same moment as the hybrid children — written and drawn throughout by Jeff Lemire, which is why it holds together as one long book rather than a serial. The reading order is therefore trivial. The buying is not, and that is what this guide is for.
The run exists in three overlapping formats: six slim numbered trades, three larger Book collections, and a later sequel. Use the Book collections. Sweet Tooth Book One is 300 pages and collects the first two slim trades, so starting there means nothing has been skipped; Sweet Tooth Book Two is 304 pages; Sweet Tooth, Book Three is 368 pages and is catalogued with a comma, which is the same collection. Three books, no gaps, no duplicates. The full ordered list is on the Sweet Tooth path.
Why not the six numbered volumes
Because our catalogue cannot tell the first two apart. A query for volume one and a query for volume two both return the same undifferentiated 2010 record, so a path built on the slim trades would silently list one book twice and skip another. Volumes three through six resolve correctly, but a run that is reliable for four books out of six is worse than a run that is reliable for three out of three. If you already own the slim trades, keep reading them — the content is identical and the numbering is straightforward.
The story, and where it turns
Book One is Gus alone in the woods after his father dies, and the arrival of Jepperd; it is a road story and it moves slowly. Book Two is where the Preserve and Dr Singh take over and the series stops being a road story — this is the volume that pays back the opening, and where most readers either commit or stop. Book Three is the Alaska sequence and the ending, and it leans hard on flashbacks whose weight decays if you leave a long gap after Book Two. Read the second and third close together.
The sequel, and the trap in the listing
Sweet Tooth is the six-issue sequel, set long after the main run and built as a deliberate mirror of its opening. Our catalogue holds it under the bare display title with a 2021 date rather than under its full title, which means it is very hard to distinguish from the original series in a search result. Check the page count — the sequel is 152 pages against the collections' 300-plus — and check the date. Read it after Book Three or not at all; it is a separate story rather than a continuation, and knowing that in advance prevents the usual disappointment.
Where Lemire came from
The Collected Essex County is the omnibus of the three linked stories about farms, hockey and silence in rural Ontario that made his name, and at 517 pages it is the closest thing to Sweet Tooth's emotional method without the science fiction. The Underwater Welder is a standalone about a diver, a dead father and a coming child, published while Sweet Tooth was still running, and it states the theme the main series buries under plot. Roughneck handles violence and addiction in a northern Ontario town with no genre cushion at all.
Where he went next
Trillium is an eight-issue science fiction love story told in inverted and interleaved halves, drawn by Lemire himself, and it is the natural next step from Sweet Tooth's artwork. Descender, Vol. 1 opens a long space-opera run about a boy robot, painted in watercolour by Dustin Nguyen. Royal City Vol. 1 puts him back in a dying Ontario town with a family and a ghost. Gideon Falls, Vol. 1 is horror with Andrea Sorrentino doing some of the most aggressive page layouts in mainstream comics; it shares almost nothing with Sweet Tooth tonally, but it is where a lot of the audience went. Mazebook is a late, short, self-drawn book about grief, and a good place to stop.
Two edition warnings for that last section: our records for The Collected Essex County and Gideon Falls, Vol. 1 carry Italian and Spanish ISBNs respectively, so confirm the language before ordering either. And the series itself involves the death of children, sustained violence and medical experimentation on minors — it is drawn gently and it is not a gentle book.
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