“We Can Never Go Home” resonates with me long after I finished the last page. The book is a strange tale of being an outsider and finding a sense of belonging not in a club or a group but through a single person, powerfully communicated on the page by Matthew Rosenberg and Patrick Kindlon. I couldn’t help but feel sharp pangs of nostalgia when flipping through the comic because it captured exactly how I, and I imagine, we all felt during one of the shittiest times in our collective lives. Its incredible realized, poignant, and powerful stuff.
WRITTEN BY: Matthew Rosenberg & Patrick Kindlon
ART BY: Josh Hood
PUBLISHER: Black Mask Studios
PRICE: $3.99
RELEASE: March 25, 2015
After a rather tumultuous introduction Duncan sees something special in Madison, a girl who conceivably has everything and a boy who seemingly has nothing. It’s a story you’ve seen before, but never like this. The opening scene does a phenomenal job at selling who these characters are, and the odd attraction between them. “We Can Never Go Home” shows highschool as a breeding ground for isolation. You can’t possibly be treated like a normal human being, and the shitty result is a hierarchy of social status. We all know the one, and we all know where we fit.
But Duncan seems oddly oblivious to it. He walks the line between oblivious and enlightened. Of course he sells it as enlightened but Rosenberg and Kindlon give you plenty of reasons to doubt his claims. Despite this, throughout the issue Duncan and Madison grow closer through shared experience. They find solace in one another. And in a beautiful scene they share a mixtape. Seriously, there is nothing better than sharing music with someone you are into. You can learn so much about a person in the music they are willing to share with you, and in doing so Maddie feels some sort of attraction to Duncan, or pity, who knows?
But what they share leads them to commit something that changes their world forever. For better or worse it remains to be seen. Yet, I can’t help but read into the issue and believe that Duncan isn’t exactly truthful in his interactions with anyone. Perhaps its just me, but there is something oddly melancholic about this book, and in an even weirder way it’s liberating. Perhaps its that classic loss of innocence, or something more, I’m not quite sure yet.
Josh Hood does a phenomenal job at creating a world of teenage drama that feels authentic and violent. His art captures the vulnerability of anyone below the first rung of that social hierarchy and captures body language like it was his second nature. There are a few pages in which he manages to comfortably fill the page with more panels than I thought possible and the book still reads like a dream.
“We Can Never Go Home” will remind you of that ugly time when you thought you were so alone, but enlightens that moment by showing you the beautiful solace one can find in another person. Sometimes rebellion is the best answer, and some people weren’t made for the system they were thrown into. This is a book for everyone who ever experienced loneliness as a teenager, which, last time I checked was just about every single person I knew.