5,000 km Per Second, first published in 2010, is, without doubt, the comic that has placed Fior on the international stage. It already contains some themes that will recur in the artist’s work; the book opens with the idea of travel and moving house, with Lucia and her mother arriving in a town in Romagna.

Lucia attracts the attention of Piero and Nicola, the two male protagonists of the story. They are school friends who have just finished high school and find themselves having to face their futures: Piero will go to university with the dream of becoming an archaeologist, and Nicola will stay in the city to work in his father’s warehouse. Their fates are already decided, as the narrative later confirms, following an elliptical trajectory, with jumps and pauses: Piero becomes entwined in a love story with Lucia, which abruptly ends when the girl goes to Norway through the Erasmus program. There, in the house of her host family, Lucia meets the Norwegian son of the homeowner, with whom she falls in love and has a daughter. One day, when she is close to giving birth, she reads an article in a newspaper about a dig in Egypt in which Piero is involved. In the meantime, he has managed to pursue his ambitions. It is the spark that ignites the fire: Lucia decides to leave Norway and her partner and returns to Italy, perhaps chasing a memory lost in a distant past whose outlines are fading. The jumps in narrative continue: Piero also becomes a father, and we understand that he experiences a family situation with highs and lows, where his adolescent dreams have given way to the reality of adulthood. Even as a man, he is torn between an idealized memory and an impending present, until the moment when the two dimensions come together to give life to bitter delusion: the new encounter between Lucia and Piero is steeped in a well of melancholy, memories give way to ‘expired’ claims, the erotic charge withers in the impossibility of the act. Then late that night Piero, setting off in a self-driving taxi, turns to see Nicola approaching his life-long love Lucia, to finally become companions.