Do ideas of war and enemies hold a people together? Is a culture of conflict too seductive not to be irresistible? These are the questions Cathy Malkasian explores in her second graphic novel, Temperance.Malkasian creates, as she did in the critically acclaimed Percy Gloom, a fully realized, multi-layered world, inhabited by vividly realized characters. After a brutal injury in battle, Lester has no memory of his prior life. For the next thirty years his wife does everything to keep him from remembering—and re-constructing—a society, Blessedbowl, that elevates him as a hero. Blessedbowl is a cultural convergence of lies, memories, stories, and beliefs. Its people thrive on ideas of persecution, exceptionality, and enemies, convinced that war lurks just outside their walls. They have come to depend on Lester, their greatest war hero, to lead the charge once the Final Battle begins.What kind of enemy could topple such a people and its walls? Mere memory, it seems, as Lester gradually emerges from his amnesia. Temperance is an eyewitness’s account of recovery and awakening. The graphic novel works on two levels. It considers the concepts of violence, stories, and belief, and their place in holding a culture together, slyly echoing contemporary political issues in a nation at a stressful time currently at war with a ubiquitous enemy. Secondly, the fissures in Lester and Minerva’s marriage is echoed in the greater political upheaval around them.Malkasian creates a densely textured social context, masterfully conveying the idiosyncratic physical domain with its spiraling structures and quasi-medieval architecture along with intimate yet plastic portraits of her characters in a rich, tonal pencil line. Temperance is a galvanizing work of empathy and violence by one of today’s the most thoughtful and accomplished cartoonists.

Jack Frost, son of Jack of Fables, has left our world and has decided to make his way to the Imperial Homeworld, where his mother is still trapped under a city of thorns. Along the way he will encounter many fantasy monsters, brigands and troops of roving goblins, and have to battle his way through them. And while Jack Frost undertakes his quest, Jack of Fables is slowly transforming into something unexpected -- and deadly.

What's "Vizz," you say? It's a cool new showcase of contemporary, bold, provocative imagery, a gathering at the crossroads where art and commerce come together to intrigue, influence, and even shock today's consumers. Plus it's a swipe file. Oh, we know you have one. All designers have one--a swipe file packed with torn-out ads, scribbled layouts, intriguing photos, anything that might turn into an idea. "Vizz" is a ready-made swipe file, with great ideas from ads, catalogs, direct mail, postcards, guerilla marketing flyers, fashion spreads. Anyone looking for design inspiration will want to swipe great ideas from "Vizz." * Bold ideas and inspiration for all creatives * Ads, layouts, postcards, direct mail--a compendium of provocative ideas from all over * A ready-made swipe file

Philip K. Dick comes to Saturday Morning TV Catland Empire by Keith Jones is a graphic novel that is a melding of a Philip K. Dick novel and a Saturday morning cartoon. There will exist a future world where human beings have become empty husks stripped of all memory when it comes to things like how to have fun and play games, or so says Mr. Space to his associate Mr. Time. The solution? Get the cats to teach humans how to have fun again. This is all the Cat People do with their lives. They are the fun and game masters.What follows is a tangled web of psychedelic science fiction blending anti-consumerist politics and intergalactic liaisons between cats and dogs--bitter enemies kept secret from each other to avoid a planetary race war. Victor Burg is plotting to wipe out all of mankind by having his brain-chipimplanted drones commit genocide.

In the United States, ninety miles from Cuban shores, tempers flare on the subject of Fidel Castro: some say he is a liberator, some say a dictator. In Fidel, Nestor Kohan and Nahuel Scherma present one of the towering figures of the twentieth-century as he is seen by Latin Americans: as the leader who, for over fifty years, has stood up to the greatest military power in the world, and remained standing. Here, in Kohan's incisive prose and Scherma's passionate illustrations, is the man who, inspired by decades of Latin American Marxist thinking, fought from the mountains of the Sierra Maestra to free his country—the man who walked the razor's edge between military threats by the United States and political coercion by the Soviet Union—the man who became a leader in the revolution against colonial governments from Angola to Vietnam to Latin America—the man who fought, above all, to transform the conscience of his people, spreading literacy, culture, and free medical care to everyone on the island. Here is Fidel—the man who became the symbol of the revolution in the New World.

Written by BRIAN WOOD * Art by RICCARDO BURCHIELLI & RYAN KELLY * Cover by BRIAN WOOD Matty Roth redefines his role in the DMZ, rolling with a private security force and self-defined mandate to heal the city. But is this the start of a brand-new day - or will this Rise of Matty end with the fall of just another petty warlord? Collects DMZ #42-49!