Mezzo & Pirus, King of the Flies Vol. 1: Hallorave. Fantagraphics, 2010.
7-page PDF excerpt containing the entire first chapter
Set in a suburb that is both nowhere and everywhere, King of the Flies is a glorious bastard, combining the intricacy and subtlety of the best European graphic novels with a hyperdetailed, controlled noir style derived from the finest American cartoonists.
Mezzo and Pirus, previously best known in Europe for a series of cynical, brutal gangster stories, have abandoned their guns and gals for this cycle of suburban stories, but in King of the Flies the violence has just (for the most part) been interiorized.
King of the Flies first appears to be a series of unrelated short stories, each starring (and narrated by) a different protagonist, but it soon becomes obvious that these seemingly disparate episodes weave together to form a single complex narrative, with events that are only glimpsed (or even referred to) revisited from different perspectives — revolving around Eric, a ne’er-do-well, drug-taking teenager at war with his stepfather and, apparently, the whole world. (He is the titular King.)
King of the Flies is designed as a trilogy of albums, which will combine to form a single graphic novel of stunning intricacy and intensity.
- www.flickriver.com/photos/fantagraphics/sets/72157623277676144/
Borderland Speakeasy #12
"I wanted my brain to explode, to splatter all over the fields and meadows."
King of the Flies is a storehouse of noir fiction, tapping such works as David Lynch's Blue Velvet and Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son.
The image of a young man
with an enormous insect head in place of his own recurs throughout the
first volume of Mezzo and Pirus’s stunning King of the Flies, published earlier this year by Fantagraphics.The strange sight recalls not only the classic horror movie, The Fly (the 1958 and 1986 versions), but also the 1957 story by George Langelann that inspired it, and the Simpsons Treehouse of Horror VIII segment, “Fly vs. Fly.” The Simpsons even make a couple of notable appearances in King of the Flies.
The young man who wears the fly’s head (a Halloween costume that he likes to wear at other times) is Eric, and he narrates most often. He calls himself the “King of the Flies,” altering a nickname his mother has given him, “a reference to some book she’d read.” It’s never revealed why she called him that, or why he chose to change “Lord” to “King,” but it’s a suggestive allusion. The story might be intended as a riff on the concepts of William Golding’s classic novel, Lord of the Flies. If nothing else, the literary reference seems to open the comic to more than one level of reading.
“I hadn’t felt this great in a long time. It was as if my brain was being inflated with a bicycle pump. I felt like it was growing inside my fly-head and about to burst,” Eric narrates early in the story. “And I wanted it to happen. I wanted my brain to explode, to splatter all over the fields and meadows.”
No one seems to learn much, either. Middle-aged men and women either hang on to their youthful recklessness for too long, with destructive or at least pathetic results, or they seem to buckle under the incomprehensibility of their own existence.
“Tomorrow. When I woke up, that’s what was running through my mind. Tomorrow, tomorrow…like a virus,” says Eric, coming out of a drug-induced haze near the end of the book, when he begins to piece together a possible meaning of the prior events we’ve witnessed.
Translated by Helge Dascher and John Kadlecek, presumably from French (Mezzo and Pirus are both French), the story takes place in what appears to be a French suburb, although no specific locations are given. Among the clues: one story mentions a plane crash in a German suburb “only 120 miles or so from here”; people use Euros; Eric reads a magazine with French text visible; and one character identifies a bar patron as “a German.”
The story by Michel Pirus uses top-of-the-panel captions exhaustively, with few dialogue balloons until later in the collection, as the various plot threads begin to tighten and the narrative speeds up. Combined with the strict, three-by-three panel layouts (broken up by occasional double-wide, double-tall, or rarely, triple-wide panels) and the 9” by 12.5” format, the captions and lettering style capture the bande dessinée style, although if Tintin ever got this debauched, the Thompson Twins would have to shoot him.
By grounding its surreal, noir and horror aspects squarely in reality, the story also evokes David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, which told a similar tale of suburban strangeness punctuated by sex and violence. Where Lynch gave us Dennis Hopper’s legendary Frank Booth, Mezzo and Pirus supply us with Ringo, the mad bowler.
“Nobody can look at me and not have to look away,” Ringo tells us, in an odd mirror-image version of Frank’s classic “don’t look at me” line. “Nobody except a few chicks and my own reflection.”
The hard-boiled tone brings to mind two early works by Denis Johnson, whose 1985 debut novel, Angels, told a similar story of disaffected and drug-addled youth, and contained such memorable lines as this one (a personal favourite): “All around them men drank alone, staring out of their faces.”
But even closer in tone, structure and style is Johnson’s renowned story collection, Jesus’ Son. Passages like this one would feel at home in King of the Flies: “But nothing could be healed, the mirror was a knife dividing everything from itself, tears of false fellowship dripped on the bar. And what are you going to do to me now? With what, exactly, would you expect to frighten me?”
- Oliver Ho
The King of the Flies. A dispossessed punk with a papier-mâché fly head for a costume; infesting a town shrouded in permanent twilight where the only places of worship are cathedral-like malls.
(1) His name is “a reference to some book” his mother once read, a name which he self-consciously alters even as he sits astride his plush throne.
In appearance, a bellicose mutate of David Hedison in The Fly, …
It’s never as slick as with either of those artists, never that strange tension between deformity and perfection of line you find in Burns. The unease which Mezzo brings to King of the Flies is ever present in the twisted shapes of his men and women, the oversized drops of an acrid drizzle…
[Bottom tier, Pg 18 – Reality]
[Bottom tier, Pg 19 – Fantasy]
Thus the laundry money which changes hands on one page is transformed into a sexual transaction on the next. The girl’s reminder with regards her employer’s washing (“But your laundry.”) becomes a cry of protest directed at his unclothing; his curt demand that they should get rolling (“Let’s go!”) becomes a demand for penetration; the descent of his organ two pages later an echo of disaster, injury and death.
[Page 21; see first and last panels]
(4) The terrain is suffused with voyeurism and barely restrained sexuality; the unease we feel due as much to this as the inherent self-reflexivity: a gynecologist gazes intently at Sal’s vagina; she strips insolently in front of us and her friend, Marie, in a cafeteria locker room; …
Every piece of the puzzle provides a moment of epiphany: a long desired conquest; …
Hillary Brown: Reading this slim but seriously illustrated volume was a pleasurable experience in disorientation. I'd never heard of Mezzo (Pascal Mesemberg) or Pirus (Michel Pirus) before, and even if you try to find out more about them, it helps to read a little French to get to their various Wikipedia pages. I didn't know jack about this book or the project or whether it was even American. In fact, I totally assumed it was, and in many ways it reads as an American comic, which makes the occasional reference to Euros all the more startling. The Fantagraphics website says it's "set in a suburb that is both nowhere and everywhere," which I guess is as accurate as anything else, and when I think about some of the darker European films set in the suburbs that I've seen, I suppose the tone translates between countries (and continents), but it's still... strange. The touchstone is, of course, Charles Burns, down to the art, which makes use of a similar coloring palette (garish, but not too much so) and woodcut-type style of shading, but also because of the content, which is heavy on weird sex and mind-altering experiences. Really, I'm not even sure if I liked the book or not as a whole. It's as though the things I liked and the things I didn't like can't come together and agree on a compromise, but it gets inside your head regardless. There are plenty of easy criticisms to make here--it relies on shock value, too many panels have the same visual set-up, who cares about these jerkwads anyway?--but it seems to me to end up being a bit more than that. I'm really curious to see what you think.
Garrett Martin: Our thoughts might align on this one. Hallorave is beautiful, but tries too hard to be hard. The sex and drugs are a little overblown, too often coming off as cheap and obvious "shock" value. But it's not as simple as that, as sex is also vital to the vignettes that do work, like the piece where the girl loses her virginity and afterward feels just about every single human emotion possible at the same time. There are a few believable and genuinely touching character moments within Hallorave; they're not subtle, but I know I was never particularly subtle in my teens. I am perhaps a little troubled by how the two male authors basically define every single female character by her sexuality, but then that's true for the male characters, as well, so I'm probably just being a dumb uptight prude again, and a very American one, at that. I'd probably like it more if all the sex was replaced with machine guns and soaring eagles. And then you also have the clear David Lynch inspiration, which normally is the kiss of death for me (even with a lot of Lynch's stuff); the fact that Pirus and Mezzo are able to evoke that obvious comparison without immediately alienating or angering me is a sign of how talented they are, even if I'm not completely in love with this book.
HB: Right. There's an ability they have to poke you in the eye or make you uneasy that's genuine, even while it's obviously out to do just that. Another comparison I was thinking of that didn't come up when I first wrote you about this because I hadn't seen his most recent film yet is Lars von Trier, who spends a lot of his time trying to piss off his audience and say things about America, but he succeeds a little better than these guys because he has a wider range of things to say. I don't think you're being a prude. I think that you could probably justify Mezzo and Pirus's repetitive focus on sexuality by talking about the other things that repeat in these pages, which seem at first to be made up of unconnected stories before they're revealed as part of a web that we just haven't pulled back far enough from to grasp in its entirety, but they're not exactly feminist either. The thing is, every female character drawn from the boobs down, recumbent, in a frame we see over and over, looks exactly the same, and that may signal a problematic outlook, one that has more in common with superhero comics than the book would seem to otherwise.
GM: The women pretty much are interchangeable, aren't they? And it doesn't help that every male character can basically have sex with any of the females whenever he chooses. Apparently Hallorave takes place in a Europe where every man is R. Kelly. And yes, Von Trier might be a better comparison than Lynch. The light surrealism and blue collar Americana of the bowling alley definitely owe more to Lynch, but that European tone and the final moment of graphic yet banal violence feel more like Von Trier. And speaking of film, how Sundancily shitty was that Rolling Stones-worshiping story?
HB: Yeah, if I had to pick out the weakest one, it's definitely that story, which just feels jammed in, like it was part of an assignment ("Draw a comic about your favorite band"). Speaking of which, were these published previously and separately? They're pretty graphic to show up in most things, but it might lend to the slow-building realization that the narratives are interrelated. And it might account for the vague feeling I have that, while all the stories overlap, there may be some missing pieces or some parts may be told twice but contain slightly different events. I haven't gone back to the book because I'm not sure that there's an answer, especially when everyone involved is out of his or her mind on some substance. But this is sounding like I don't like the book. I like aspects of it, but I'm also cognizant of its weaknesses, and I suspect that pickier people than I might like it less.
GM: Right, I also liked it more than this makes it sound. Like I said, I love the art, with great layouts, nice thick lines, and coloring that's somehow both rich and muted. Even when I don't like the characters or find their actions believable I still love the way everything looks. And the elliptical structure was a smart choice because it adds at least a little bit of mystery; instead of just reading to see what happens next you keep going to better understand what's already happened. I don't know if the stories were published individually anywhere, but Hallorave is basically the first book of King of the Flies, with two more on the way. I'm interested to see how closely they intersect with each other.
HB: Yeah, I'll read the next one, too. It's successful at very least in that! - shazhmmm.blogspot.com/2010/04/king-of-flies-volume-1-hallorave.html
Let's Talk of Kings and Kingdoms - Broken Frontier - Comic Book and Graphic Novel News & Communit...
"King Of The Flies by Mezzo & Pirus is one hell of a
hardcore comic. It is noir on acid, dark and unrelenting. It is one of
the most thorough examinations of the cimmerian darkness the human
species can dwell on and it will hit you square in the chest."
"20) King of the Flies- 1. Hallorave by Mezzo and Pirus —
King of the Flies, the first part of a proposed trilogy, is surreal and
unsettling. It requires repeat readings to unearth the interwoven
secrets at play." – Greg Townley, Carve Your Name Comics
"The unease which Mezzo brings to King of the Flies is ever
present in the twisted shapes of his men and women, the oversized drops
of an acrid drizzle, the fur like scrub which seem like the myriad hairs
of a fly’s appendage, a modern day dance of death choked with the dregs
of modern life; the strange underbelly of free will and capitalism —
sex, drugs and alcohol; death, lust and tainted beauty; the unsettling
horror of kitsch; the nauseating mingling of youth, disease and
dementia." – Ng ...
"Pirus and Mezzo’s King of the Flies is a dark romp through a
strange drug filled, sex crazed world of small town Europe. [...] Pirus
and Mezzo aren’t afraid to tell a story full of our darkest desires and
needs, but they’re also startlingly poetic." – Adam Waterreus, Politics
and Prose
Mezzo & Pirus, King of the Flies Vol. 2: The Origin of the World. Fantagraphics, 2011.
7-page PDF excerpt containing the entire first chapter and read Kim Thompson's informative Editor's Notes for this book!
King of the Flies Vol. 1: Hallorave was named one of
Amazon's Top 10 Graphic Novels of 2010. Now, here is the second
installment in Mezzo and Pirus’s creepily sexy suburban soap opera — a
French Twin Peaks graphic novel as written by Stephen King and drawn by Charles Burns.
Eric the fly-head-wearing teenager is back (as well as his hapless mother and her “fiancé”), as are not-quite-ingénue Marie, the worldly Sal, Denis the drug dealer and his now one-handed father, and of course the loopy retro bowling thug Ringo... plus several new cast members, including one who died at the very beginning of the first volume and has now returned to roam the earth.
Once again, the story is told through a series of seemingly unrelated short stories which eventually become intricately braided into one sprawling tale of a community haunted by obsession, rage, regret and despair — in sum, a graphic novel for the 21st century.
King of the Flies is designed as a trilogy of albums, which will combine to form a single graphic novel of stunning intricacy and intensity. (The concluding chapter will appear in late 2013.)
Eric the fly-head-wearing teenager is back (as well as his hapless mother and her “fiancé”), as are not-quite-ingénue Marie, the worldly Sal, Denis the drug dealer and his now one-handed father, and of course the loopy retro bowling thug Ringo... plus several new cast members, including one who died at the very beginning of the first volume and has now returned to roam the earth.
Once again, the story is told through a series of seemingly unrelated short stories which eventually become intricately braided into one sprawling tale of a community haunted by obsession, rage, regret and despair — in sum, a graphic novel for the 21st century.
King of the Flies is designed as a trilogy of albums, which will combine to form a single graphic novel of stunning intricacy and intensity. (The concluding chapter will appear in late 2013.)
The creators of this book are clearly enthralled with American culture, particularly the pulp version, dark and seedy. They are writer Michel Pirus and artist Pascal (Mezzo) Messenburg. They are French. Pirus was born in 1962. Mezzo was born in 1960. An excellent vintage. For creative types, that means they can still be as surly as any teenager. They are not young upstarts only commenting on "Ghost World" or "Black Hole." They are contemporaries with similar cultural references points: The Sex Pistols, The Smiths, David Lynch.
The narrative is intertwined through various stories following the misadventures of various misfits, outlaws and ghosts. This is the second installment of a trilogy. Pick any page at random, and you'll find something wonderfully curious. Whether or not it all adds up in the end, seems beside the point. It's not like David Lapham's noir masterpiece, "Young Liars," where the plot promises an amazing ending. No, "Flies" is more about the journey than the end. It's about one odd moment after another.
Take, for instance, our hero Eric, he's seated in his lawn chair, wearing his huge fly head, when Francis, his stepfather, swoops down on him. He's been busy moving into Eric's home. He's been playing his music loudly. He begins to yell insults and bang on Eric's mask. Eric recalls, "I could hear Kajagoogoo echoing in my skull." Suddenly, Eric hits Franics in the eye and sets up tragic consequences up ahead.
Another arresting moment is when Ringo abruptly arrives at Marie's home just after she and Eric have made love. Ringo drops off a bag in the shape of a toy elephant and demands he guard it. Like any good McGuffin, we really can't see how or if this mysterious bag has any meaning beyond keeping the characters moving. This scene is also a fine example of the interesting use of caption and dialogue. The caption boxes and dialogue balloons are all the same rectangular shape. The captions sometimes include dialogue and don't bother with quotation marks. So, the narrative spills off very smoothly from caption box to dialogue box.
There's one bit I especially like where one character is providing social commentary. I'm not sure if something is lost in translation. In this particular scene, Karine, feeling rather miserable, fixates upon some seemingly coy youth. She is certain he's putting on an act by his casually leaning up against a trash can. But, in the book, she is supposed to be fed up with his "I-give-a-shit attitude." Wouldn't be more accurate to say she was fed up with his "fake I-don't give-a-shit attitude"? Either way, it's nicely creepy.
One more good scene gets inside the head of Ringo, the thug. Apparently, there is more than beer, porn and murder on his mind. In this scene, he is contemplating the lack of intuition in today's generation. He concludes that they're all anesthetised, "force-fed by their folks and eaten up by shrinks till every last shred of intuition is gone."
"Flies" is essentially about moments, one strange moment after the other. It brings to mind David Lynch but it should also bring to mind Alfred Hitchcock. Rigorously planned out ahead of time, his best work retains the freshness and kinetic energy of so many strange moments perfectly timed. Undoubtedly, "Flies" will - Watch your step as we spiral further down the rabbit hole in the second volume in the King of the Flies trilogy, entitled The Origin of the World. Last May, we featured Volume 1: Hallorave in an Omni spotlight and then selected it as one of our Top Comics and Graphic Novels of 2010. Volume 2 begins in the thick aftermath of Volume 1 and shifts its narrative in favor of something new.
While publisher Fantagraphics described King of the Flies “as written by Stephen King and drawn by Charles Burns,” in Volume 2 the squirming underbelly of suburbia feels much more like Twin Peaks than King’s Castle Rock. The unease that once crept through the residential basements now spreads vulture wings and takes flight. Volume 2 justifies the previous paranoia and displays it in full view: protagonist Eric returns as the titular king and is violently beaten in broad daylight, dethroned. His assailant nonchalantly details Eric’s mother’s sexual preferences after wiping blood from his head. “But kids don’t want to know, do they, Eric? Not the normal ones.”
Whereas Volume 1 unsettles with its unflinching look at violence, Volume 2’s focus lies more in the carnal. It’s going to be a while before I feel like visiting a bowling alley, for example, and I’m not sure I’ll ever look at a soda can the same way again. The manic, pompadour-sporting, anti-irony Big Ringo is back in this volume, still wearing the bowling shirts and permanent scowl. He lives in fear of losing a bowling pin that’s really more like some sort of power totem, warping sex and violence for all who touch it.Eric is once again the focal character--try to find a female character who doesn’t succumb to his inexplicable spell; even his mother is subject to his Oedipal hallucinations--and writer Michel Pirus turns up the narcissism and self-loathing. Eric believes his own hype, only now he hates himself for it. He teeters on the edge of control in an especially convincing drunken sequence at a party:
The glass fell from my hands. It flew through the air, piercing a hole into the night--the fake night--and I lunged to follow it. To dive through the breach before it closed up again.
Several chapters highlight a new aspect to the trilogy: the ghosts of dead characters lackadaisically haunting the living. In a possible nod to Alan Moore’s Watchmen, several of the deceased meditate on the red planet Mars before traveling back to Earth to revisit those who’ve wronged them--which, in King of the Flies, is everyone. Early in Volume 1, Daniel is struck by a car and killed as he crosses a street at night. In Volume 2, he revisits the scene to find the driver sitting alone in the middle of the road. “I tell the man that I hold no grudge and there’s still time,” Daniel narrates as headlights appear. “The glare of the lights is blinding, but his eyes stay wide open. Like he’s already dead.”The Origin of the World's plots coil and ceaselessly shift; the characters tasting and testing one another with serpentine instincts. When the whole thing threatens to surrender under its bleakness, the last page morphs to resemble something akin to hope if the reader squints just right. That would have been a fine ending to this second installment, a palate cleanser before whatever lies ahead in Volume 3. But then it’s broken by the sound of a doorbell--and the promise of a doorway darkened yet again.
--Alex
P.S. Fantagraphics' co-publisher, Kim Thompson, offers a few notes on Volume 2 in a piece here, along with a flip-through tour and higher resolution images of those in the above post. - Alex Carr
Exclusive Preview: King of the Flies: The Origin of the World - Techland - TIME.com
See an exclusive 7-page excerpt from King of the Flies Vol. 2: The Origin of the World at TIME.com - Techland! Introducing the pages, Douglas Wolk says "The first volume of European comics creators Mezzo and Pirus' King of the Flies, subtitled Hallorave, was one of the creepiest graphic novels of 2010... The follow-up, The Origin of the World, comes out soon, and it makes the story's vortex of terror spin even faster - the vibe is somewhere between Charles Burns' Black Hole and Blue Velvet, with a soundtrack of Misfits singles, Stones bootlegs and too-intense techno."
Scribes Sounding Off: Most Rocking Comix 2010
"King of the Flies: 2. The Origin of the World... is the second volume in a three-book series on the creepy doings of a Twin Peaks-like small city seriously doped and boozed, thrashed by random violence and impulsive sexuality, the old deforming the desires of the young, and unfulfilled ghosts melt through everyday lives. [...] It is a multi-leveled, wide expanse of delicate things falling apart and souls keeping it together somehow, full of... sexy, damaged, freaky people. That you somehow care deeply for, even if they can't help but hurt themselves, stalk each other, and screw with the universe itself." - Chris Estey, KEXP
Mezzo & Pirus, King Of The Flies Vol. 3: Happy Daze, Fantagraphics, 2014.
In the concluding volume of this graphic novel trilogy, narrated by different characters (some dead), Eric tries to escape the increasingly violent and depraved goings-on back in town.
Eric the fly-head-wearing teenager is barreling down the road at 100 mph in his convertible, high as a kite... But it isn't sufficient for him to escape the increasingly violent and depraved goings-on back in town, where he is unwed father-to-be, kept man, drug dealer, and small-town boy on the run from everything and everyone. Once again the disturbing story is told through a series of individual chapters narrated by different characters (including his fellow drug dealer Denis, the sisters Marie and Lisa, the bowling-obsessed retro thug Ringo, and of course the nihilistic, increasingly desperate Eric himself ), often with cleverly overlapping time frames and switches in perspective — with dead characters from earlier chapters showing up periodically to offer their sardonic commentary on the goings-on — delineated in Mezzo’s clinically detailed, hallucinatory style. As event piles upon event and things brutally spin further out of control, the reader will begin to realize that this cannot all possibly end well... or can it? Three years after the release of King of the Flies’ critically acclaimed, eye-opening first episode Hallorave, the concluding installment Happy Daze answers that question — good and hard. Full color
"Although King of the Flies... is anchored in a sharply delineated but deliberately generic suburbia, the book plunges us into an often violent, always profane environment that recalls David Lynch's Blue Velvet. Using multiple narrators, the book is an intricately constructed series of interlocking short stories that acidly etch a disquieting portrait of modern alienation and unease.” – Cliff Froehlich, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"King Of The Flies Vol. 1: Hallorave is an extremely promising title from French crime comics artists Pascal 'Mezzo' Mesenburg and Michel Pirus. ... Its approach to violence and turmoil is surprisingly fresh, although the story bears obvious debts to David Lynch, and the art just as obvious ones to Charles Burns; it all combines in surprising, powerful ways. ...King of the Flies is a fascinating new take on the nearly exhausted subject of youthful alienation... B+" – The A.V. Club
"...[T]his dark, disjointed story about an assortment of misfit suburban characters plagued by bad luck and their own poor choices is a compelling, bitterly funny read... Despite its obvious influences King never feels like a pale imitation, especially in the second volume, where the ante is upped considerably, both on an aesthetic and narrative level." – Chris Mautner, Robot 6
"[King of the Flies Vol. 2:] The Origin of the World, as its title... signals, is a little more mature in its provocateur stance, but there’s still plenty of envelope pushing. The characters have grown richer and more varied... and the narrative more focused, with fewer bodies to keep track of. The art, certainly a highlight of the last book, features some clever use of color to indicate fantasy and the supernatural, both of which appear more extensively this go-round. Consider it, on the whole, analogous to Friday the 13th Part II: a step in the right direction and an improvement on the original rather than a boring retread." – Hillary Brown, Paste
"The first volume of European comics creators Mezzo and Pirus' King of the Flies, subtitled Hallorave, was one of the creepiest graphic novels of 2010... The follow-up, The Origin of the World, ...makes the story's vortex of terror spin even faster — the vibe is somewhere between Charles Burns' Black Hole and Blue Velvet, with a soundtrack of Misfits singles, Stones bootlegs and too-intense techno." – Douglas Wolk, Techland – TIME.com
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