What’s the Furthest Place from Here? Vol. 3: Born Under Punches
Tyler Boss & Matthew Rosenberg, storytellers; Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou, lettering
Image Comics, 2024

This collection begins with Sid (still pregnant) encountering a group called the Spill, who wear animal masks. She eats some of their food, which is evidently laced with psychedelic mushrooms. She goes to the Boneyard with them, where she meets the Rested (who were born dead). This is definitely one of the most surreal scenes so far. She finds her way to the fabled City, but it looks abandoned, and she collapses at the entrance. Meanwhile, Prufrock, Mallory, and Merrill are still on the run, also seeking the City. Sid and Prufrock see the seemingly desolate city and go away. But in the next issue we see Sid as she was welcomed by the City denizens. They are grown-ups (something she has never seen) and only want to help her. They avoid the children in the wild because they carry the illness that destroyed the world once already. Then, the other members of the Academy come to battle the Keepers, and in the process, they see the Strangers as well. The whole arc is mainly about the many secrets that the Strangers keep. It turns out that they are responsible for the current structure of the world. Sid and her baby are headed for the end of the world, the titular furthest place from here. The narrative sometimes seems jumbled, but it points to exciting new developments.

Subgenre
Matt Kindt, script; Wilfredo Torres, art; Bill Crabtree, colors
Dark Horse Comics, 2024

Private detective Verge is awoken by his 3D virtual assistant, before heading to a murder investigation at Decipher Cosmics (a megacorporation that generates all media, a frightening extrapolation from our current situation, with a few large companies dominating the media landscape). The extremely gory murder is a mystery which will make sense later in the story.  The scene shifts, and it turns out that he is living two lives. First, the private detective in a dystopian cyberpunk future. But when he falls asleep he wakes up as a wandering adventurer in a barbaric fantasy world where magic exists. Finally he meets an ancient order who tell him that crossing realities has been happening since the written word began, when Greek stories began to bleed into Roman ones. The hero was escaping a reality he wasn’t happy with, running away to become a hero in his own story. They tell V (one of many names he uses) that he is tearing the universe apart every time he jumps. But really they want him to jump, which he does (accompanied by trippy visuals and text that refer back to earlier Kindt projects). In the end he returns to the source, his original identity. But he is not satisfied, and the cycle begins anew. A lot of information in four issues, although it does occasionally become hard to follow.

Subgenre is the latest release from Flux House Books, which Dark Horse describes as “a new boutique imprint that will feature the writing (and sometimes) art of acclaimed comics creator Matt Kindt, with crime, science fiction, horror, and humor stories, all told and presented in startling and untraditional ways.”