The System Peter Kuper • Preface by Calvin Reid Actions speak louder than words. It’s said that the flutter of insect wings in the Indian Ocean can send a hurri- cane crashing against the shores of the American Northeast. It’s this premise that lies at the core of The System, a wordless graphic novel created and fully painted by award-winning illustrator Peter Kuper. From the subway system to the solar system, human lives are linked by an endless array of interconnecting threads. They tie each of us to our world and it to the universe. If every action has an equal and opposite reaction, get ready to run for cover! A sleazy stockbroker is lining his pockets. A corrupt cop is shaking down drug dealers. A mercenary bomber is setting the timer. A serial killer is stalking strip- pers. A political scandal is about to explode. The planet is burning. And no- body’s talking. Told without captions or dialogue, The System is an astonishing progression of vivid imagery, each brilliantly executed panel containing a wealth of infor- mation, with layer upon layer forming a vast and intricate tour of an ominous world of coincidences and consequences. ABOUT THE AUTHOR SUBJECT CATEGORY Peter Kuper is a cofounder of World War 3 Illustrated. His illustrations and Graphic Novel/Politics/ comics have been featured in Time, The New York Times, and MAD Magazine, Art-Illustration for which he has written and illustrated SPY vs SPY since 1997. He has pro- duced over 20 books including The System, a Will Eisner Comic Industry Award PRICE Nominee, Drawn to New York: An Illustrated Chronicle of Three Decades in $19.95 New York City, and Diario De Oaxaca, a visual journal of two years in Mexico. He was the 2009 gold medal recipient at the Society of Illustrators for sequen- ISBN tial art. 978-1-60486-811-1 ABOUT CALVIN REID PAGE COUNT 112 Calvin Reid is a contributing editor for Publishers Weekly and is also the head of its comics department. He heads the magazine’s annual African American SIZE issue, and coedits its online comics newsletter, PW Comics Week. 10 x 8 ACCOLADES FORMAT Hardcover “Kuper’s brilliant visual novel, much like Fritz Lang, creates a comic noir of corruption and innocence in a city where the devil is always in the details.” PUBLICATION DATE —Sue Coe, artist and author of Dead Meat 07/14

“A dark, dense, subtle portrait of the intricate continuum of urban life—and DISTRIBUTED BY death—done in such bold strokes and shapes that you will never see the city in Independent Publishers Group the same way again.” (312) 337-0747 —Kirkpatrick Sale, author of After Eden: The Evolution of Human www.ipgbook.com Domination DISTRIBUTED IN THE UK/EUROPE BY “Though it has no word balloons or thought bubbles, The System is filled with Turnaround Publisher Services Ltd so much urban clatter, you’ll want to seal your windows shut. Kuper uses his t: 020 8829 3000 trademark spray-paint/stencil art to send us careening through a kinetic New [email protected] York landscape, jump-cutting from a crooked cop to a stripper, panning from a homeless guy to a cell-phone yuppie. The star of the story is the dark city ° PM PRESS ° itself, and the point is how money ties all its occupants—whether they know it P.O. Box 23912 • Oakland, CA 94623 or not—together.” www.pmpress.org —Gavin Edwards, Details [email protected] (510) 658-3906

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