King of the Flies

Set in a suburb that is both nowhere and everywhere, King of theFlies combines the intricacy and subtlety of the best European graphicnovels with a hyperdetailed, controlled noir style derived from the finestAmerican cartoonists. Mezzo and Pirus, previously best known in Europe for aseries of cynical, brutal gangster stories, but for the most part, they'veinternalized the violence in King of the Flies. The book firstappears to be a series of unrelated short stories, each starring (and narratedby) a different protagonist, but it soon becomes obvious that these seeminglydisparate episodes weave together to form a single complex narrative, withevents that are only glimpsed (or even referred to) revisited from differentperspectives - revolving around Eric, a ne'er-do-well, drug-taking teenager atwar with his stepfather and, apparently, the whole world. (He is the titularKing.) The comics-reader's appetite has been whetted for such books byGipi's acclaimed Notes for a War Story, about teenagers running wild inan Italy as a war shakes loose the social order; David Lapham's Eisner-winningnoir opus, Stray Bullets, which has a similar story structure, and, ofcourse, Charles Burns smash hit teenage dystopia, BlackHole.