Fishflies Review (Jeff Lemire, Shawn Kuruneru)

Franny is a lonely schoolgirl with a permanently runny nose who befriends a convenience store robber that transforms into a giant bug for shooting a kid during his botched robbery. The two become unlikely friends and go on the lam. A giant bug… what??!

Jeff Lemire’s non-work for hire/non-genre stuff is usually among his best comics but Fishflies unfortunately isn’t up there with the likes of Roughneck or Essex County. It’s an overlong, meandering and quite boring shrug of a story.

The setup is solid. The fishflies that swarm the coastal towns of eastern Canada is a real natural phenomenon and lends an eerie atmosphere to the tale. Franny - who, like all of the characters in the story, has a broad characterisation - is genuinely likeable, and I felt for her lot in life. There’s an exciting incident and the mystery of the giant bug is presented.

And then… nothing much happens after that. Lemire doesn’t seem to know where to go and the book can’t be said to have much of a plot. Franny and Bug are sorta on the run but it never feels all that tense because they’re always too far ahead of the cops. There’s a lot of stuff on the fishflies themselves that’s just dull and irrelevant. It’s unclear what the stakes are or what the point of it all is, so things just sorta happen at the conclusion in a way that’s unsatisfying. The ending is too neat and the explanation for the magical stuff is plain silly.

Fishflies does have maybe the best version of Lemire’s art that’s out there, whether or not you’re a fan of it, and Shawn Kuruneru’s pages (he draws the 19th century flashback part) are a nice break in the visual presentation. Franny and Bug’s relationship was sweet and the episode at the old people’s house wasn’t bad.

But it’s too much of a directionless story without any great, nuanced characters to be at all compelling to read, and, after that initial promising start, I found myself slogging through the rest of the book, hoping it’d improve, and it never did.

Jeff Lemire’s done better versions of this kind of story - poignant small town life with supernatural elements mixed in - in comics like The Underwater Welder, Roughneck and The Nobody; all comics I’d recommend over the rather weak and forgettable Fishflies.