Review by Ian Keogh

What’s the Furthest Place From Here? is mystery and an experience. For a casually reduced term of reference imagine the bleak lack of hope about Cormac McCarthy’s The Road combined with the gang mentality and quest of Walter Hill’s 1979 film The Warriors. There’s also a hint of Stranger Things via time having stalled in the 1980s, the focus on youngsters and something weird out there.

Unusually for an American project, artist Tyler Boss is credited first, although he may well have collaborated with Matthew Rosenberg on the writing. Either way, they start out small and enclosed, then open up to the wider world. The focus is The Academy, a gang of younger end teenagers who occupy a used vinyl record store. We learn adults aren’t to be admitted, and any gang member becoming an adult is evicted. Weird, unknowable beings referred to as Strangers supply food, not just to the record store, but to other locations in the vicinity occupied by other gangs, each of which has their own themed look and lifestyle. A curfew is imposed, and an area referred to as the City is believed to be mythical.

The opening is the return of the now adult Slug, who’s injured and subsequently vanishes, followed by the disappearance of the pregnant Sid. The Academy feel there’s no choice but to go looking for her despite the dangers.

Roseberg and Boss populate their world with kids pretending to be adults, and gradually growing into the part, yet shunning the real thing. Theirs is a story where what’s given needs to be accepted, and anyone too concerned with explanations is going to miss out on the journey, and it’s the exploration of the world that exists that’s meaningful, not how it came to be. That journey and its stopovers are supplied in short chapters, some only a single page, frequently broken down by Boss into a nine panel grid that gives What’s the Furthest Place From Here? a density well beyond its page count. It’s alluring, fascinating and individual, so join the journey. It continues in Volume Two.