Fishflies: 04/11/25

Fishflies by Jeff Lemire and Shawn Kuruneru (Illustrator) (2025) started as a seven issue comic. As I'm not a regular comic reader, I typically wait for these omnibus releases. Belle River has an annual invasion of fishflies and every so often the town is hit by violence on those days. This comic takes place during one of those confluences.

Paul, a tween, is in a coma after having been shot during a robbery at the local convenience store. He was there to get popsicles. The man who shot him has run off and turned into a bug like creature. Franny, an abused child, has found the man, named him Bug, and sees in him a way to escape her life.

In the afterword, Lemire confirms that he wrote this story on the heels of Mazebook (2022). There is a repetition of themes—a parent working through the loss of a child— and a reuse of certain visual elements, like the red thread.

The rural setting and the ways in which the past and present intertwine, this reader is also reminded of his much longer Gideon Falls series. Time unwinds to show Bug and Helen (Paul's mother) the origin of the curse, and then it wraps in on itself to give Bug a way to end the curse and undo his crime.

Belle River is a real town. It is in the path of the annual bug invasion. Working with visual clues of the layout of the town and the types of cars on the streets, this story is set in the past, probably thirty or forty years back.

Regardless of when it's set, Fishflies does sit on the Road Narrative Spectrum, as do all the other Lemire comics/graphic novels I've read. Bug as both a monster and a protector of Franny is the embodiment of a scarecrow/minotaur traveler (99). His destination is the rural areas (33) around Belle River. His route there is the labyrinth as represented both by the spiraling timeline and his transformation (99).

Five stars

Comments (0)