Fall Through - by Nate Powell (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"Devastating and gorgeous," the New York Times Book Review proclaims. "Perhaps it's a ghost story, perhaps it's a fantasy story, but it's refreshingly oblique. The images are heightened and stylized, the better to pass along that frisson so essential to punk art--rock or otherwise."

Love and Rockets meets Russian Doll in this original, full-color graphic novel about an underground punk band caught in a loop of an eternally repeating tour--from National Book Award-winning cartoonist Nate Powell.

Master cartoonist Nate Powell has crafted a graphic novel that serves as both a brilliant example of circular storytelling and a love letter to the spirit of punk communities. Fall Through will stay with the reader long after they've turned the last page, asking the impossible question: Would you burn down everything you love in order to save it all?

At first glance, Diamond Mine seems to have emerged in 1979 as Arkansas's first punk band. Instead, this quartet is revealed to be interdimensional travelers from 1994, guided--largely against their will--by vocalist Diana's powerful spell embedded into their song "Fall Through."

As Diamond Mine tours the country, each performance of the song triggers a fracturing of space-time perceptible only by the band members as they're transported to alternate worlds in which they've never existed, but their band's legend has. That is, until Jody, the band's bassist and the story's protagonist, finds herself disrupting Diana's sorcery, even at the cost of her own beloved work and legacy.

While some band members perpetually seek the free space offered by the underground punk scene to escape from their mundane or traumatic lives, others work toward it as a means of expression, connection, and growth--even if that means eventually outgrowing Sisyphean patterns and inevitably outgrowing their beloved band-family altogether.

Review Quotes

Fall Through is magical. It somehow conjures the fever dream of memories I have of my years spent playing in punk basements, sleeping on floors, driving for hours to play for a few minutes, falling in love with music and people, turning into someone new along the way. Careening in a ride you created but can barely control."

-- "Hrishikesh Hirway, host of the Song Exploder podcast"

Nate Powell has been one of our finest cartoonists for a while, and with Fall Through, he delivers an emotional and visceral tour de force. You'll fall in love with these characters and feel like you're on the road and on stage with them, feeling what they feel. You'll feel more alive. It's cathartic, powerful. An absolute masterpiece."

-- "Jeff Lemire, creator of Sweet Tooth and Essex County"

"Nate Powell's Fall Through captures the feeling of ephemera. Like notes reverberating in the air, Powell illustrates the intangible. He showcases the stunning power of art to make sense of a fleeting movement. The fleeting nature of love and loss, life and death."-- "Irene Velentzas, Comics Journal"

About the Author

Nate Powell is a National Book Award-winning cartoonist who began self-publishing as an Arkansas teenager in 1992. His work includes Fall Through, Come Again, Save It For Later, Swallow Me Whole, civil rights icon John Lewis's March trilogy and its follow-up Run, a comics adaptation of James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me, and more. Powell's work has received multiple Eisner and Ignatz Awards, ALA and YALSA distinctions, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, the Comic-Con International Inkpot Award, and is a two-time finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He fell into the hardcore punk community in 1991, playing hundreds of shows in underground legends Soophie Nun Squad and other bands, and managed do-it-yourself label Harlan Records from 1994 to 2010.