Sticks and Stones

In a barren landscape, an empire is about to rise and an epic struggle is about to unfold. Sticks and Stones illuminates this earth-shaking tale without a single word. It is as elemental as hieroglyphics, a timeless story for all ages.

In Sticks and Stones, Peter Kuper has created a picture story of epic proportions. It is an intricate tale of birth and death, war and peace, artfully told without a single word. Sticks and Stones chronicles the rise of an empire and the consequences of hubris. This is a timeless allegory and a coutionary tale for our present-day world.

"Given that Peter Kuper's work is usually wordless and silent, it is all the more extraordinary that he should be one of the strongest and truest radical voices to emerge from contemporary America. In Sticks and Stones, Kuper crafts a Bush-era parable so beautiful, simple, and lucid that it could be understood and enjoyed by anyone, regardless of nationality. This is a powerful, angry, and compassionate document, and in its perfectly measured silence there resides a profound human eloquence. Highly recommended." —Alan Moore, author of Watchmen and From Hell

"Kuper is one of the masters of wordless comics, and his earlier works, from Metamorphosis to his recent reinvention of the Spy vs. Spy series in MAD, has showcased his fierce political wit and lushly textured, stencil-based, woodcut-inspired design sense. This allegory about the vanities of empire is both a story for children and a political commentary for their parents. A stone giant is born from a volcano and demands the fealty of the people around him. He makes them build him a stone castle; then he discovers a nearby peaceful village made entirely of wood and sets about conquering it and plundering its resources. Meanwhile, a small resistance front develops, led by a woman from the stone tribe and a boy from the wood tribe, and eventually the stone empire and its despot meet a grim fate. Kuper's narrative is beautifully constructed, from its grand sweep to its minute details. It's hard to give characters distinct personalities in a silent allegory, especially with such stylized drawing, but Kuper pulls it off by giving everyone ingeniously exaggerated body language. Almost every page is a joy to look at: even the landscape echoes the story's mood, and the spray speckles of Kuper's stencil technique become the grain of the tale's rocks and sky." Publishers Weekly (Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Kuper uses vividly rendered sequential art to tell a timeless story that incorporates only the most elemental forces--sticks and stones, fire, diamonds, and rain. The result is a witty, powerful saga of life and death, and war and peace.

PETER KUPER is the author of numerous graphic novels, among them The System, Speechless, and an award-winning adaptation of Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis. His illustrations appear regularly in the New York Times, Time, and MAD, for which he draws the world-famous "Spy vs. Spy" every month. He lives in Manhattan with his wife, Betty, and his daughter, Emily. He can be reached though his website, www.peterkuper.com.