Fishflies begins with a feeling of overwhelming nostalgia, a sliver of adolescence that feels instantly recognizable: three friends out for a summer walk. It ends in body horror.
Even if you didn’t grow up in that spread of land beset by fishfly season – around the Great Lakes and specific waterways of North America – the scene at the beginning of Fishflies #1 might feel familiar to anyone who has spent their adolescent summer ambling about with friends. Every town has its own summer events and its own summer infestations, and though few are as overwhelming as a blanketing of bug corpses, the youth of small towns endure all the same.
It’s the single-mindedness of our opening trio of young teens that feels universal: a trip to the convenience store for ice cream to beat the sweltering heat of the night. Anyone who has spent time with teenage boys (or, of course, has been a teenage boy) will recognize the goofy ribbing, the mostly toothless and pointless teasing. As our trio comes upon the fishfly-swarmed convenience store, anyone would recognize the teasing dare: cross the insect-strewn pavement – barefoot – and I’ll give you twenty bucks.
What’s decidedly unfamiliar about this sequence is its gruesome conclusion: the discovery of the clerk, dead and swarmed with the unrelenting mass of insects. This is where the tragedy comes in.
Writer/artist Jeff Lemire, already a master of idyllic small-town nostalgia and horror, strikes on something Stephen King-like in this first half of the issue; finding the perfect balance of the everyday and the catastrophic makes the horror of a story strikes hard at a reader’s heart, brings reality with the unreality.
The back half of the issue follows the source of the catastrophe: a criminal on the run, but it’s here that Lemire veers more firmly into the weird and baffling while also establishing what appear to be our primary characters of the book. There’s an element of Frankenstein as a young girl befriends a monster, but there is also the grim morality play of old EC Comics, wherein the villain of the piece suffers some cosmically ironic fate.
Fishflies #1 is an impactful (and large) issue, one which doesn’t telegraph the larger story so much as yank a reader into its depths. It feels like the beginning of something curious and powerful, and with Lemire’s distinctive pencils and colors (not to mention its rural Canadian setting), it seems like it might be a unique companion piece for Essex County.
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