What's The Furthest Place From Here? #9
Sidney leaves the Academy to find the city in What’s The Furthest Place From Here? #9, by writers Matthew Rosenberg and Tyler Boss, artist Sweeney Boo, and letterer Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou. This issue is a wonderful little heartbreaker, a bittersweet little gut punch.
The story focuses on Sidney, an older member of the Academy whose grown-up day is coming. After a party, he begins to walk, trying to find the city. In the woods, two Blue Boys accost him, but he’s saved when a man in a frog mask attacks one of them. Frog Mask becomes his companion as he keeps going, talking to him about the city the whole way. They go to the Market and have nothing to trade, but Frog Mask shoplifts. The two escape, and Sidney thinks about going back to the Market to trade his Talking Heads record - his only prized possession - for supplies when he’s stabbed in the stomach. As a member of the Academy tells the children a story that ends with Sidney living, he’s left to die by Frog Mask as a man with a lion mask walks away cleaning off his blade.
This issue is another prequel, and it’s a doozy. Rosenberg and Boss give the impression that this is going to be some story that answers a lot of questions. Readers will get the answer to the question of what happens when members of the houses grow up! However, this is What’s The Furthest Place From Here?. This book holds its secrets close. These prequel issues feel more like a way of building the world even more rather than something that will answer a whole bunch of questions.
The Strangers don’t take Sidney away; he just walks. He’s still bound by the rules of the houses, as the confrontation with the Blue Boys reveals. He’s still bound by the rules of the Market. This is all very revealing, but not in the way readers imagined it would be. It’s much more mundane. Frog Head is a strange surprise, one that seems kind of funny at first. There’s no answer here, just a tease of something bizarre. What makes this book so good is that it finds a way to answer questions with questions in the least frustrating way. This issue is a shocker. Getting to the end, seeing what happens to this character that readers have never seen before, the callousness of the whole thing, is completely surprising. It helps that Sidney is both a likable character and someone missed by Polly, who tells the story at the end. It’s all so terrifically done.
Sweeney Boo’s art is gorgeous but also completely unexpected. Boo’s style is extremely bright and colorful, with characters sometimes seeming like cut-outs pasted on an impeccably designed background. The detail is intense, in a cartoony manner. It fits the story much better than it seems, though, because Boo’s character acting is on point. Boo’s colors are beautiful, helping the whole thing look that much better.
What’s The Furthest Place From Here? #9 is a heartbreaker. The creative team gives readers a compact gut punch of a comic. Again, Boss and Rosenberg pick the perfect artist for this issue. The great part is Boo’s art at first doesn’t feel like it should fit the tale as it gets darker, but it does brilliantly. This issue is wonderful, and that’s all there is to say about it.
