ZEGAS

There’s a city that exists a few degrees sideways from our own, where the light hits at wrong angles and the sidewalks seem to breathe. This is where Emily and Boston Zegas live—orphaned siblings tangled in each other’s orbits, trying to keep their heads above water in a world that won’t stop warping around them.

Running from 2011 to 2013 under Michel Fiffe’s own COPRA Press imprint — home to his explosive epic COPRA — ZEGAS is the quiet, surreal heart beating beneath the surface of Fiffe’s more explosive work. Where COPRA detonates, ZEGAS simmers. The anthology follows Emily and Boston through a series of hyper-stylized urban vignettes that blur the line between kitchen-sink realism and full-throated psychedelia. Their parents are gone, the rent is always due, and something strange keeps flickering at the edges of the frame—a superhero silhouette, a hallucinatory detour, a moment that opens like a trapdoor into another dimension.

What makes ZEGAS so quietly devastating is how it refuses to choose between the mundane and the miraculous. One page is a raw, aching conversation about survival and sex and the weight of memory; the next is a bold, expressionist plunge into pure visual abandon. Fiffe’s lettering and jagged page compositions evoke the feeling of a lost underground comix from the 1970s—cheap paper, bleeding ink, a handmade intensity that no digital tool could replicate. But the emotional register is utterly contemporary: anxious, searching, tender in its brutality.

ZEGAS debuted with issue #0 in 2011, followed by issues #1 and #2 over the next two years—each a full-color, magazine-sized artifact produced entirely by Fiffe’s own hands. The tiny print runs made these issues instant collector’s items, passed between fans like contraband. In 2017, Fantagraphics gathered the complete run into a single definitive paperback edition, preserving the series’ handcrafted energy while introducing Fiffe’s surreal masterwork to a wider readership. Publishers Weekly called out Fiffe’s “expressive, thick-lined art,” noting how it “perfectly captures the siblings’ urban ennui.”

This is Michel Fiffe at his most introspective—the artist as poet rather than architect, lingering on the spaces between words, staring into the middle distance. For readers who know him only through the controlled chaos of COPRA, ZEGAS is a revelation: proof that his talents stretch far beyond the superhero genre into something stranger, more personal, and more vulnerable.

Perfect for fans of Ghost World by Daniel Clowes, Jimmy Corrigan by Chris Ware, and the surrealist literary comics of the Hernandez Brothers.

Pick up the collected edition from Fantagraphics, and explore more of Fiffe’s world at michelfiffe.com.