The Mars Family base is under attack, besieged by Hum and his army of deadly cryptids. To save his people in this epic battle, Grahame must step forward as a leader, putting everything he cares about on the line to salvage the broken remains of the Cryptocracy. A blend of The X-Files and Marvel's A.I.M. Cryptocracy sets up a grand stage that will play out for years, and creates enough questions that it leaves the reader enthralled after the last panel.Capeless Crusader
For time beyond memory, the Nine Families watched from the shadows, believing themselves shepherds and manipulating whole societies as they saw fit. Nothing happened that they didn't observe or control. Outsiders knew naught of the Families, much less threatened them. Until now. Van Jensen (Green Lantern Corps, The Flash) and Pete Woods (Action Comics, Deadpool) join forces for a high-octane sci-fi thriller. Delve into a conspiracy millennia in the making.
In the wake of tragedy, Grahame makes a desperate gamble for leadership of the Mars Family. But to do so, he must battle with his stepsister Temple for the Spear of Mars. Elsewhere, Bela's document leak has brought her fame and attention, but she begins to question the motives of her new ally, Hum. Also: The Lizard Men attack! A blend of The X-Files and Marvel's A.I.M., a fun and thrilling adventure melding conspiracy theories, alternate history, trippy sci-fi, political thrills, and intense action!
The Nine Prophecies foretell a great cataclysm and the end of the age of the Nine Families that secretly rule the world. The first has come true, and now the mysterious and deadly Hum aims to fulfill the others. Agent Grahame is desperate to prove that Hum is just a mana man who can be killed. Elsewhere, radio host Bela is drawn into the fight for the fate of the world as she learns some of the FamiliesÈ long-hidden secrets.
From the acclaimed DC Comics writer and the artist of the #1 New York Times bestselling and National Book Award–winning illustrated trilogy March comes a stunning crime noir graphic novel exploring the intertwining threads of crime, conspiracy, racism, and insanity in the post-World War II Deep South. After World War II, tensions rise in a Southern city ruled by organized crime, touching countless residents as they struggle to make sense of the new world. A sudden act of violence sets off a series of bloody events between the police and mafia as they lash out against one another. As the violence worsens, desperation grows to stop it, by any means necessary. Told in multiple perspectives—from a seemingly untouchable mafia don, to a gun-happy seasoned detective succumbing to the depths of his schizophrenia, to a newly minted police lieutenant haunted by his recent service in the war, and two African-American brothers, one mired in corruption and the other leading a local militia in an effort to see that justice is served—Two Dead is at once a white-knuckled and unputdownable thriller, a roman à clef inspired by true events, and a book about post-traumatic stress disorder and the underlying social traumas of how war and segregation affect their survivors on all fronts.
When nations decide to disown their troubled pasts, how does this strategic disavowal harden into social fact? In Negative Exposures, Margaret Hillenbrand investigates the erasure of key aspects of such momentous events as the Nanjing Massacre, the Cultural Revolution, and the Tiananmen Square protests from the Chinese historical consciousness, not due to amnesia or censorship but through the operations of public secrecy. Knowing what not to know, she argues, has many stakeholders, willing and otherwise, who keep quiet to protect themselves or their families out of shame, pragmatism, or the palliative effects of silence. Hillenbrand shows how secrecy works as a powerful structuring force in Chinese society, one hiding in plain sight, and identifies aesthetic artifacts that serve as modes of reckoning against this phenomenon. She analyses the proliferation of photo-forms—remediations of well-known photographs of troubling historical events rendered in such media as paint, celluloid, fabric, digital imagery, and tattoos—as imaginative spaces in which the shadows of secrecy are provocatively outlined.
The rise of the platform economy into statelike dominance over the lives of entrepreneurs, users, and workers. The early Internet was a lawless place, populated by scam artists who made buying or selling anything online risky business. Then Amazon, eBay, Upwork, and Apple established secure digital platforms for selling physical goods, crowdsourcing labor, and downloading apps. These tech giants have gone on to rule the Internet like autocrats. How did this happen? How did users and workers become the hapless subjects of online economic empires? The Internet was supposed to liberate us from powerful institutions. In Cloud Empires, digital economy expert Vili Lehdonvirta explores the rise of the platform economy into statelike dominance over our lives and proposes a new way forward. Digital platforms create new marketplaces and prosperity on the Internet, Lehdonvirta explains, but they are ruled by Silicon Valley despots with little or no accountability. Neither workers nor users can “vote with their feet” and find another platform because in most cases there isn’t one. And yet using antitrust law and decentralization to rein in the big tech companies has proven difficult. Lehdonvirta tells the stories of pioneers who helped create—or resist—the new social order established by digital platform companies. The protagonists include the usual suspects—Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Travis Kalanick of Uber, and Bitcoin’s inventor Satoshi Nakamoto—as well as Kristy Milland, labor organizer of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and GoFundMe, a crowdfunding platform that has emerged as an ersatz stand-in for the welfare state. Only if we understand digital platforms for what they are—institutions as powerful as the state—can we begin the work of democratizing them.
In 1935, the Great Depression had driven Lester Webb into total poverty. Faced with starvation and without hope, he decided to end it all. As he was within seconds of pulling the trigger fate intervened and Lester suddenly came into possession of a great deal of money. But he could not spend a penny for fear of being caught by men who would kill him.
Brody hoped it was just a hallucination. But no, the teenaged ghostly girl who'd come face to face with him in the middle of a busy city street was all too real. And now she was back, telling him she needed his help in hunting down a dangerous killer, and that he must undergo training from the spirit of a centuries-old samurai to unlock his hidden supernatural powers. Thirteen-time Eisner nominee Mark Crilley joins Dark Horse to launch his most original and action-packed saga to date in Brody's Ghost, the first in a six-volume limited series. * Paramount Pictures and Brad Pitt's Plan B have acquired Miki Falls, a four-volume manga series created by Mark Crilley. * Crilley is best known for his Akiko young-adult novels and comic books. From the creator of the Eisner-nominated Akiko!