The effect is paradoxical: a spaciousness that rigidly encloses. Though unframed, the panel edges are also sharp, cutting off image content with a precision that contrasts Fior’s watercolors and often thick gestural lines. As a result the interior of talk balloons share the white of the background page. That distancing effect is heightened where his unframed panels merge with the white of the page background, especially along speech bubbles, which Fior divides with sharp black lines within panels but leaves open to the gutters along outer edges.

Fior’s pages are not as extreme as Abel and Madden’s “too wide” example, but his gutters do subtly suggest the lack of unity between his characters and the falling apart of their relationships. Jessica Abel and Matt Madden warn graphic novelists in their textbook Drawing Words & Writing Pictures: “Don’t go too wide with gutters, because the panels will tend to visually fall apart from one another and not look like a unified page” (80). His white gutters are atypically wide, creating a discursive distance that draws attention to the thematic distances at the heart of the novel. Fiore’s storytelling is especially effective in its nuanced use of the comics form. The intervening years include multiple heart breaks and the one-second delay Lucia in Norway and Piero in Egypt experience as they speak while five thousand kilometers apart.įior’s art is cartoonish in its simplistic shapes-noses are triangles, ears half-circles-and his colors can be expressionistically lavish, and yet the overall effect seems oddly naturalistic. Its love triangle begins when the teenaged Piero and his best friend Nicola ogle Lucia as she moves into an apartment across the street and concludes twenty estranged years later on that same street. As suggested by its title, the graphic novel explores the effects of distance across continents and decades.

Manuele Fior’s 5,000 Km Per Second was originally published in 2009 and, after winning the Angouléme and Lucca comics festivals awards in 20, was translated and published in English for the first time in 2016.

Manuele fior 5000 km al secondo