These images from the Norman Rockwell collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, chart the connections between Rockwell's iconic images of American life and the movies. Telling Stories, based on the Rockwell collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, is the first book to chart the connections between Rockwell's iconic images of American life and the movies. Rockwell, the quintessential American mythmaker of the twentieth century, was a storyteller on a par with the great Hollywood directors of his day. Within his art, the fantasies and foibles of ordinary people are given life, central among them the themes of love of country, the sanctity of family, and the value of personal honour. Spielberg and Lucas - masterful storytellers and mythmakers themselves - are kindred spirits whose early introduction to art and the American dream came via Rockwell's famous magazine art. Rockwell composed his scenes with precision, carefully controlling each detail to enrich his characters. Spielberg and Lucas used similar techniques to shape some their most successful films, among them American Graffiti, Star Wars, ET: The Extraterrestrial, the Indiana Jones series and Saving Private Ryan. Essays by curator Virginia Mecklenburg and film critic Todd McCarthy explore this influence, also revealing Rockwell to have been an artist used techniques inspired by Hollywood movies in his visual storytelling. Telling Stories, which accompanies an exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, is richly illustrated with Rockwell images, photographs, and film stills.

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.