This tale of teens on the run began as a 2013 series of eight-page comic strips set in the American midwest. Reissued as a graphic novel on the back of the acclaimed UK-set adaptation shown on Channel 4 and Netflix, it’s a short, satisfying modern ballad of angst and mass murder.
James and Alyssa flee their homes after he punches his dad and steals the family car. They narrate alternate chapters of a book that’s at once a brutally honest tale of teenage dislocation and a lurid portrait of a small-town America inhabited by bullies, abusers and Satanists.
Tales of doomed fugitives often adopt a rosy lens, but there’s little sentimentality in this line-drawn miniature epic, which begins with a starkly funny account of a damaged childhood (“When I was 9 I realized I had no sense of humour … At 16 I pretended to fall in love with Alyssa”) and roams from town to town, as the pair squat in houses and hitch lifts, and James becomes increasingly violent. Forsman’s panels render brutal stabbings and twitchy adolescent conversations with the same unsettling simplicity throughout.
• The End of the Fxxxing World is published by Faber (£12.99).
