It’s a crisp autumn night in the Midwest. My mom drops me off far enough away so my friends don’t have to see me climb out of a Honda Odyssey in my Underoath hoodie. I wasn’t just worried about my image, I wanted to be able to go to the hardcore shows in the shack by the river without her getting cold feet if she saw some 16-year-old puffing on a stolen cigarette outside the sorry excuse of a venue. I was always an outsider there, but I felt closer to home moshing to some Christan harcore band than I did in youth group.
So What’s The Furthest Place From Here?, the new comic by Matthew Rosenberg and Tyler Boss about a band of teens living out of a record store after the end of the world? Yeah, it clicked for me.
Where many sci-fi stories, comics especially, think of worldbuilding in terms of rules and lore; the culture and hierarchy of the world that needs to be established before it can be torn down, What’s The Furthest Place From Here? trusts its readers to follow along. They ground the world with characters you know and iconography that means something to you. It doesn’t matter if you have never heard “Maneater,” you just have to look at an album to know Hall & Oats are lame. [Grote’s note: Agree to disagree.] What’s important isn’t the castes, it’s the characters. We are tied to Sid, young, scared and pregnant. We grow to love her as this oversized issue progresses, twisting the knife when the inciting incident of the series closes the chapter.
Boss, fresh off the fantastic Dead Dog’s Bite, delivers high, tight pencils and evocative colors. There’s a precision to his craft, an intentionality in how he approaches the craft of comics. It’s not unlike the blocking of a Wes Anderson film if Wes Anderson didn’t think Vampire Weekend was hardcore. Juxtaposing the crustpunk existence of these teens with some of the most controlled cartooning in the business is the same winning formula Boss used in 4 Kids Walk into a Bank. It avoids the dreaded sophomore slump and instead refines the previous outing.
Rosenberg gives you the heartfelt and humorous story you expect, with just enough grit to keep you on your toes when the shit goes down. If you know Rosenberg’s work, you know if his dialogue is going to endear you or repulse you. The voice is authentic, cheeky to a fault and drenched with the lived experience of a dude who spent time in the independent music culture. His characters are earnest and exhausted; even the most competent only give off the impression of maturity and not the reality of it.
What’s The Furthest Place From Here? exists to be a sequential celebration of over-distorted guitars, poetic lyrics, pounding beats and bassists who are happy to be included. It’s broken, calloused kids looking for a reason to keep on fighting for their shitty little piece of home because it is all they have. This is a book that is going to creep up on you, an opening track that isn’t going to blow you away, but sets the tone for the track three single that gets burnt onto mixes and passed around because you gotta check this out. It’s a comic that captures the anarchic joy of a concert put on by dudes who had no business calling themselves promoters, but for a few hours, made us all feel like we were thousands of miles from whatever we were running from back home.
Zachary Jenkins co-hosts the podcast Battle of the Atom and is the former editor-in-chief of ComicsXF. Shocking everyone, he has a full and vibrant life outside all this.
