Ella Belle Landgren

“Nothing Can Stop Us” is a graphic novel about my high school years during Covid-19. A time that feels like a vacuum chamber of teenage angst, already intense on its own was heightened by having to live through a pandemic with no clear end in sight. Two years that should have been spent partying and shit-talking in the corridors instead turned into a restless search for ways my friends and I could outrun the boredom and break the quarantine.

We met where our subway lines met and wandered through empty streets. We shoplifted beers from the supermarket and thousands’ worth of clothes to satisfy our hunger for self-expression. Our diagnoses became self-fulfilling prophecies for skipping school. We joined a sauna cult. We turned into militant feminists in steel-toe boots, nearly recruited into dominatrixes, all while I had a boyfriend. We lived inside our own bubble of perfect self-righteousness, until eventually, it burst.