Fall Through A Graphic Novel

"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.

Nate Powell is a National Book Award–winning cartoonist who began self-publishing as an Arkansas teenager in 1992. His work includes Save It for Later; civil rights icon John Lewis’s Run: Book One, Come Again, Two Dead, and its follow-up Any Empire; and Swallow Me Whole.

Powell’s work has received four Eisner Awards, two Ignatz Awards, the Comic-Con International Inkpot Award, and multiple ALA and YALSA distinctions. He has discussed his work at the United Nations, on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, PBS, and CNN. As for his music career, Powell was introduced to the hardcore punk community in 1991, played over 500 shows across North America and Europe in various bands, including underground legends Soophie Nun Squad and Universe, and managed the do-it-yourself label Harlan Records from 1994 to 2010.