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Looking Ahead – King Of The Flies: Hallorave by Pirus and Mezzo

Published Fri, 11 Sep 2009 09:41:18 -0500

Last updated Sat, 12 Sep 2009 06:26:21 -0500

I was rereading Black Hole by Charles Burns the other day, sighing to myself that I never really see this kind of comic any more. A detailed suburban surreal horror, portraying the mundane reality in as lush a fashion as possible. Black Hole was possibly the pinnacle of this kind of approach, but Jeff Nicholson's Through The Habitrails (the second version's Dave Sim ending for preference) was also in the ballpark, as was Jamie Delano and Al Davison's Tainted. And browsing away, I came across this upcoming volume from Fantagraphics which seems to be occupying similar territory. King Of The Flies: Hallorave.

Just in this scene, the use of Hallowe'en costumes is incredibly freaky, using the comics medium to make the reader accept the possibility that this is actually what the people look like, on the page there can be no difference in texture between the clothes they wear and the skin they live in. The kind of thing only a comic book can actually portray without pulling the audience out of an accepted reality.

King Of The Flies looks like it should disturb and entertain on an equal basis.

French creators Pirus and Mezzo are best known for their European gangster comics, this is a very different tack for them.

The first part of a trilogy of books, Hallorave, published in February, takes a series of seemingly unconnected suburban stories with dfferent narrators and begins to wind them together, pitting a teenager against his stepfather. The second book, The Beginning Of All Things, will be published in the summer.

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