What's The Furthest Place From Here #5?
After Alabama makes a deal with the Blue Boys, the other members of the Academy keep inadvertently messing it up in What’s The Furthest Place From Here? #5, by writer Matthew Rosenberg, artist Tyler Boss, and letterer Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou. This issue comes across as a comedy of errors but a fascinating one.
As Alabama comes to a deal with the Blue Boys, the rest of the Academy keeps getting into hijinx across the Carnival. Polly and Oberon’s fight with the Bankers goes bad until Polly’s new boyfriend and his friends help out. Prufrock is attacked by Strangers in the house of mirrors and goes through the wall, where he has a disturbing vision of Sid and what to do next. Lafayette and Mallory steal from one of the Carnies, which leads to the group coming together to save Mallory after Alabama and Blue Boy’s leader deal with the Academy’s shenanigans. Things go poorly, but the meeting in the morning is still on.
This issue has a lot going on, and it really illustrates just how young the members of the Academy are. Rosenberg has done a good job of showing readers how young people would react to being left alone in the world, but this issue definitely shows what would happen with a bunch of teenagers left to their own devices. The consequences are much more significant than they’d otherwise be, as Mallory learns, and the whole story keeps making things worse and worse for the members of the Academy, putting their deal with the Blue Boys in jeopardy.
It definitely feels like a comedy of errors. Rosenberg basically pauses the plot to show the pratfalls of the Academy as they all go their own ways. Alabama is definitely the brains in this group, and seeing how they react to things without her tells readers everything about how good of a leader she is. This is a fun comic but putting the whole thing on pause and losing out on the world building that Rosenberg usually does hurts it just a bit; beyond Prufrock’s vision, this issue is just an entertaining filler issue. It compounds the plot at the Carnival and pads out the run time of the story, as it were. Still a good read but not as vital as some of the others.
Boss’s art is great as usual. The colors seem a little crisper in this issue, which is really the only change from previous issues. There are lots of great visuals in this issue, especially in Prufrock’s vision, and as always, Boss’s character acting and the way he draws the Carnival sell the story.
What’s The Furthest Place From Here? #5 is a filler issue, but that doesn’t make it any less entertaining. Rosenberg and Boss do a fantastic job on this issue and show a filler issue should be done.