Following its debut in print on Free Comic Book Day, Jeff Lemire’s Fishflies will launch as a series from Image Comics in July.
The series, which initially debuted as a subscriber-only digital series on Lemire’s Substack, is a tale of small-town surrealist horror set in Ontario. Each issue of Fishflies will be giant-sized at 56 pages each, and it’ll run for six bimonthly issues.
“For years the books I both write and draw seem to switch back and forth between grounded, slice-of-life human drama like Essex County and Royal City or more genre driven work like Sweet Tooth,” said Lemire. “With Fishflies I really tried to combine these two aesthetics into one big story. Fishflies has the scale and drama of my more grounded work but also the genre fun and mythology of things like Gideon Falls. I think the result makes it unlike anything I’ve done before, yet very familiar at the same time.”
Here’s how Image describes the series:
When a brutal and violent crime puts the life of an innocent teenage boy in the balance, it sets off a chain of events in bucolic Bell River, Ontario that will permanently change several residents’ lives. And as the manhunt heats up, a lonely girl named Franny Fox will form an unlikely friendship with a fugitive that leads them on an odyssey of discovery and redemption. Fishflies is a new tale of small-town surrealist horror that begins with a special extra-length debut issue.
And here’s a look at some of Lemire’s interior pages:
The first issue will also have a variant cover by Peach Momoko:
Look for the first issue on July 12.