Perpetually Out of Place: A Guest Post by Nate Powell
Fall Through is the story I’ve been trying to tell all along.
I spent two decades deeply intertwined within the libertine, do-it-yourself network of underground punk, traveling the world and playing a small role within a perpetually evolving hydra of creativity. These adventures—especially their pitfalls and our own shortcomings—profoundly shaped my perspectives on agency, love, activism, ethics, and power. Inevitably, these are central themes around which my comics work has orbited for twenty years, but nothing has been quite as validating as finally exploring these issues through punk itself.
Fall Through chases the ephemeral nature of creative movements as something utterly new and undefined emerges. In these transitional moments, a free space is cleared out for fresh possibilities, followed closely by our human urge to simplify, flatten, and mythologize these moments as we accept a certain way of remembering them. Within that, there’s space to play as we follow the band Diamond Mine through their cursed, looping 1994 tour– while refusing to be contained or defined by the limitations of punk. It’s an interdimensional mystery and love story owing as much to LeGuin and Murakami as the cosmic soap opera of X-Men.
I love swimming around in my characters’ relationships, falling deep into Jody and Diana’s nebulous friendship as it overlaps with their roles as bandmates and creative partners. They struggle together within spaces consecrated to let each other grow, including giving love the bandwidth to choose its own shape. Fall Through follows Jody’s path coming into her own queerness in a hesitant, binary 1990s way that’s occasionally jarring from our 2024 perspective—and that’s the point.
As a story about pre-internet human connection built around penpal networks, payphone scams, and gossip spread through self-published fanzines, the pursuit of openness carries the possibility of strangers becoming neighbors, collaborators, and loves to each other. Time spent drawing Fall Through served as essential pandemic therapy, mourning these temporary social spaces we often take for granted. Pages are filled with sweat, breath droplets, hands clutching each other, shouting into the air together in confined spaces– magnified in light of their loss.
What links all my fiction and nonfiction work, from Fall Through to the March trilogy to Save It For Later to Come Again, is a focus on complex, messy, beautifully human efforts to transform our ideals into something real—and how that affects our most intimate relationships with each other. A band-family like Diamond Mine embodies that in microcosm, especially as these young adults become aware of their own trajectories. They’re perpetually out of place, even in their own story—a misfit band within a misfit scene from a misfit state. Overlapping cultural misconceptions loom over the richness and complexity of both punk and the American South itself. Coming of age in Little Rock’s vibrant underground, we thrived by embracing what was unique to our often-overlooked city. Fall Through is, above all else, a love letter to the Arkansas weirdness which shaped and nurtured me.