Any Empire [Hardcover]

Nate Powell (Author, Illustrator)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 13, 2011 | Series: Any Empire

Nate Powell's follow-up to the Eisner award-winning Swallow Me Whole examines war and violence, and their trickle-down effects on middle America. As a gang of small-town kids find themselves reunited in adulthood, their dark histories collide in a struggle for the future. Any Empire follows three kids in a Southern town as a rash of mysterious turtle mutilations forces each to confront their relationship to their privileged suburban fantasies of violence. Then, after years apart, the three are thrown together again as adults, amid questions of choice and force, belonging and betrayal.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"The most prodigiously talented graphic novelist of his [generation] ... Powell's exceptional visual-storytelling gift transforms a potentially obvious antiwar parable into a ravishingly beautiful, emotionally resonant, thoughtful, and provocative work of art." -- Booklist (starred review)

"[It] is everything a graphic novel should be, and few are. Spare, to the point dialog, fluid and effortless visual storytelling devoid of pretensions... I very rarely read graphic novels because I usually can't get past the first few pages. Any Empire drew me in from the start and didn't let up." -- Larry Hama, GI Joe

"At times poignant, at at others surreal, Any Empire is an engaging, never preachy work about childhood, centering on those secret currents that define our youthful rivalries and the games we play." -- MTV Geek

"We've all experienced the world's endless cycle of innocence shattered, and Powell renders it all in lovely chiaroscuro... he crafts memorable and heartfelt characters that linger in the mind and scar the heart." -- Under the Radar

About the Author

Nate Powell (b. 1978, Little Rock AR) is the New York Times best-selling graphic novelist whose work includes The Year Of The Beasts (2012, Roaring Brook), The Silence Of Our Friends (2012, First Second), Any Empire (2011, Top Shelf), Swallow Me Whole (Eisner Award winner for Best Graphic Novel, Ignatz Award winner, Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist; 2008, Top Shelf), and Sounds Of Your Name (2006, Microcosm). He lives in Bloomington, Indiana.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Top Shelf Productions (September 13, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1603090770
• ISBN-13: 978-1603090773
• Product Dimensions: 6.5 x 1.1 x 9.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #399,378 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Nate Powell is a New York Times best-selling comic book artist/writer born in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1978. He began self-publishing at age 14, and graduated from School Of Visual Arts in 2000.

His work includes "March", the graphic novel autobiography of Congressman and civil rights icon John Lewis (Top Shelf, 2013); the critically acclaimed "Any Empire" (Top Shelf, 2011); "Swallow Me Whole" (Eisner Award winner for Best Graphic Novel, two-time Ignatz Award winner, YALSA selection, and LA Times Book Prize finalist; Top Shelf, 2008); "The Silence Of Our Friends"(YALSA selection; First Second, 2012); "The Year Of The Beasts" (Roaring Brook, 2012); and "Sounds Of Your Name" (Microcosm Publishing, 2006).

From 1999 to 2009 Powell worked full-time providing support for adults with developmental disabilities alongside his cartooning efforts. He managed DIY punk record label Harlan Records for 16 years, and performed in the bands Universe, Soophie Nun Squad, Wait, and Divorce Chord. He currently lives in Bloomington, Indiana with his wife and daughter.

Powell is currently drawing a graphic novel adaptation of Rick Riordan's best-selling "The Heroes Of Olympus: The Lost Hero" (to be released by Hyperion Books in 2014), writing and drawing his own next graphic novel, "Cover", as well as the short comics collection "You Don't Say" (forthcoming from Top Shelf in 2014).

www.seemybrotherdance.org

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Beauty in Chaos...Surrealism as the Profound... October 5, 2011

By swarmsparrows

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I have never really felt the need to review a product, but I felt so strongly about this that I just couldn't pass it up. So I thought I could write a long, gushing praise for the author Nate Powell. His work has impacted my life since late youth until the present in more ways than one. Why force readers to drudge through such wordplay hogwash and rob them of the experience of his latest work, Any Empire (2011)? It's brilliance is of the profound fabric that comes rarely in this lifetime. We bitter cynics chew our nails yelling obscure obscenities at the chicken hawk Yankees whose colorful display emanates from our high definition Television screens while espousing some self-fulfilling, pocketbook profundities (Okay, okay - just once! Sorry!). Then something as simple as Nate's latest work lands in our laps and we are quiet, flipping through the pages in awe of such powerful imagery.

The visuals clash at many points and the text follows a less is more approach, constructing sentences carefully to not rob the images emphatic nature. The switch between time periods creates a paradox that only a surrealist like Dalrymple could pull off so eloquently, while providing to the overall meaning of the story. Perhaps most important is the nature of the book itself, which follows such an odd contradiction in the nature of man...to quote a slogan from the book itself, and its many cliche' overuses - "War is Hell".

That said, the story lends itself more to a visual display rather than that of text with some hidden agenda, or soapbox preaching. It is a powerful piece of surrealism that catches its reader unaware at many points. It doesn't shock you, anger you, outrage you...it does its best to confuse you....but mostly it captures nostalgia in a way that is so entertaining and knowledgeable that you can't help but give it your undivided attention. Perhaps those of us who grew up in the South feel a slightly closer connection. Truly anyone from a small town full of Americana-ideologies can relate. To give such a great piece of work a cursory glance would be to spit in the face of its constructor's finest intentions.

This is a story whose meaning is so poignant in today's troublesome political, militaristic climate that it is certainly a must read for any graphic novel fan. An amazing follow up to Swallow Me Whole (2008). While Nate Powell's work may be overshadowed by the parallel release of Thompson's latest dazzler, Habibi (2011), I do hope this comic doesn't go unnoticed.

The hardcover and binding, as well as the cover art, make this more than worth the 20.00$ USD price tag (not to mention the Amazon discount!) and I suggest this to anyone who is a fan of Farel Dalrymple, Craig Thompson, Jeffery Brown and many other contemporary cartoonists < I do not mean that in a demeaning fashion).

Winter's approaching, order this book (Support the artist and his big time publisher, ha), grab a blanket, and turn on whatever relaxes you while you dive into this must have!

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Any Empire: A LitStack review excerpt September 23, 2011

By Rob Vollmar

Format:Hardcover

Any Empire is a complex knot of a book and one likely to provoke a wide range of emotions in the reader. What is not up for debate is the mastery of Powell's visual storytelling which is evident from the opening panels. Powell embeds his drawings with stunning narrative precision. It is, for long stretches, a quiet book, composed of nearly textless sequences sparsely punctuated by dialogue. What dialogue there is deceptively powerful, more often characterized by what it doesn't come out and say rather than by what it does.

With a story that unfolds over a decade, beginning in the 1980s, Any Empire uses language and setting very carefully to evoke the passage of years, ringing true in a haunting fashion to those who experienced them firsthand. Powell's manipulation of time in the book is fascinating, with past, present and future intruding in on one another. Any Empire emphasizes the fluidity of our experiences--how the past not only influences the future but shapes our understanding of the present. It accurately reflects how consciousness often ignores the boundaries between them in making connections that might otherwise be lost.

Long sections of the book have the patina of autobiography superimposed upon an odd narrative that doesn't differentiate between the actual, the possible and the fantastic. There is a tension between memory, reality and fantasy in Any Empire that becomes progressively insistent. The first half is more linear, with only occasional intrusions of the future upon the past. It begs to be read as an accurate account of how things were, what characters experienced and (in some cases) endured. It contains forays into the fantastic but they are usually delineated as such, acted out by exaggerated and archetypal constructs of the characters' minds that are firewalled away from the events of the story.

As it moves into its later sections, however, this line becomes increasingly blurred until, by the ending, the fantastic exists alongside the mundane in such a way that it is difficult to say what happens and what is imagined. This tendency reaches a climax in the ending to such a degree that the more newly introduced elements may seem jarring or forced to some readers. After three reads, I'm not certain whether the ending "works" in the traditional sense.

That said, Any Empire is not a traditional kind of story and Powell's unflinching examination of the moral/ethical motivations of his characters doesn't really cry out for a simplistic resolution upon its conclusion. The reader is left with a strong sense of who these people are and the winding paths they traveled to arrive at the place we leave them without Powell's precluding where they will travel forward from there. The effect feels intentional and serves the greater themes of the book earnestly.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars "...and you'll hear this too much, but you should know it well: War is Hell." February 14, 2012

By Deer In The Xenon-Arc Lights

Format:Hardcover

(Originally Posted at deerinthexenonarclights. com/any-empire )

Any analysis of Any Empire begins at an instant disadvantage, no matter how manically you proclaim that "It's an anti-war book and bloody good to boot!" the readers reaction will always be to yawn, already bored by the now pedestrian political premise. "War is Hell," they'll say, "I get it. How 'bout you tell me something that I don't already know?" The real trick to this tome's success though is that it does just that; hammering home the fact that while war is figuratively hell, literally it is entirely of this plane, an act of and involving people just like you and me. Instead of focusing on the fear and failures of the battlefield like all the tales that have made the position such a familiar one do ( Actual war doesn't even show itself until a few hundred pages in, and even then it is only a snippet in the story) , it takes us to the genesis of violence and conflict, the gensis of war's people - it's soldiers, politicians and civillian casualties - childhood.

We are constantly informed of how influential our childhood is on us, the way it warps and changes our cores into what they are today and it is that process that is at the core of this comic. Where we live, which books we read, the movies we watch, who we hang out with and what we do with them are all seemingly small decisions in the grand scheme of things but it is these external elements that determine exactly what kind of people we are on the inside today. These small town boys read G.I. Joe, watch Platoon and then go out into the fields to play Army or torture turtles and so it is not surprising that some of them develop into soldiers, while the book-smart girl who seek to save and care for the turtles and other creatures turn into a social worker; all the while our protagonist and prism of perspective is stuck in the middle, torn between the two conflicting sides like a civillian in the midst of a so-called civil war.

It is jsut that though, a book and not an essay or stump speech, and so it conveys all of this through the telling of a story. In this way Powell's depiction of childhood is perfect; despite all that potent cerebrality I just spouted about the world that he creates feels entirely natural and without contrivance, it's real childhood captured on the page of a comic. The conversations, the imagination, the emptyness all ring true but it is the much smaller details that make the story sing; the way that you are friends with people that you have to hang out with rather than those that you want to hang out with, because they are all you know, because it's better than being alone. The violence that drives the story is shocking but also innately innocent, there is almost no malice behind it; this is just what boys do, it's in their nature not to respect other lives because no-one ever really respects theirs. All of this is exacerbated by the fact that it is occuring in such a small town; a place where life is just that simple, that black and white.

Speaking of binary palettes, the art in this book - which is also by Powell - is incredibly interesting. The sparseness of the black and white, predominantly full page panels, is shocking to see and initiallly makes reading the book a little too difficult; following the flow of motion is tricky thanks to the common, unheralded narrative jumps and lack of traditional structure. Once you seep into the style fully though you really start to feel just why it is Powell has chosen to picture in this way; the greyscale on display here is ultimately akin to that in great films like The Last Picture Show, in that the town and the life of its people is simple, sparse and colourless so drawing it any other way would be false. The writing takes a similair approach in its style: the dialogue is rare and when we are actually given some, feather light. It's not empty, it's just that these people speak around what they actually mean, saying one thing while their actions suggest another. Neither of these are approaches that I, a fan of scripts and super high concepts, usually like but here they are handled impeccably, reminding yous just why people implement them in the first place.

Funnily then the final part of the book, in which we the reality of the future breaks down allowing the characters to cross paths with every iteration of each other in the midst of a massive conflict, is actually my least favourite, though the images are stunning and what they say so very important. The flashes in this final chapter elucidate my earlier point in a simple, but tragically effective way; simply showing us how small changes in the choices made back then - art instead of anarchy, the tipping over of a box in the wind - could so drastically change everything ten years down the track. We so often forget about where the war came from and focus only on the current conflict, which means that we are missing the most important lesson, something that this book strives to adress. It also hammers home the grand message that each and every soldier in each and every army, past and present is a Purdy and thus a person in a sublime aping of 'The Evolution of Man'. All amazing points that are breathtakingly depicted, but it is the little things that most effected me and will stay in my mind much longer, like the passing of notes and the holding of hands. Maybe i'm just a child? Either way this is a very mature, masterful piece of literature that every reader should rush out and buy, even those who think that they know everything there is about war.