Temperance - Tapa dura

This is why I read comics.... the end is nothing short of transcendent.... This is an amazing example of what comics can be.--Eden Miller

Starred Review. Expressive and generously detailed pencil sketches serve as an excellent complement to the spare but exacting text to form a narrative that should cut through any reader's disbelief. ... Malkasian continues to demonstrate bravura storytelling skills... Excellent work for both fans and serious literary readers ready to try sequential art.

In Cathy Malkasians' follow-up to 2007's award-winning graphic novel Percy Gloom, Temperance, Lester has no memory of his prior life after a brutal injury in battle. 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. Malkasian creates a fully realized, multi-layered world, inhabited by vividly realized characters. 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.