In this book, Alan Krell investigates the place barbed wire holds in the social imagination.

The Ridgeway family faces their greatest challenge when a devastating drought threatens to spark an open range war, forcing them to fight for their ranch, their dream—and their lives . . . DEATH BY THE DEVIL’S ROPE It’s the summer of 1883. A severe drought threatens to bankrupt the Ridgeway’s Rocking R Ranch and every rancher in northwest Texas. The cattle are thirsty and hungry. The ranchers are getting desperate. And a simple new invention called barbed wire—the devil’s rope—is their only defense against illegal herders grazing on their land. Percy Ridgeway and his brother Eli are working overtime to stake a fence around their sixty thousand acres. But someone keeps cutting the wires. The Ridgeways keep fixing them. And soon Perry is tangled in a high-stakes showdown with a thieving cattleman named Northcutt and his cutthroat henchmen. Let the battle begin . . . History would call it the Fence Wars of 1883. The Ridgeways would call it the summer they fought back—come hell or dry water . . .

A sparking new adventure from multiple Eisner Award nominee MARK RUSSELL (The Flintstones) and BOB Q (The Green Hornet '66 Meets The Spirit)! 1883. The advent of barbed wire is creating havoc in the Texas panhandle. A corrupted state senator conspires with dirty ranchers to make land unnavigable for open rangers and native tribes, passing new laws allowing cattlemen to kill anyone caught cutting the wire. Good people are getting hurt, and The Lone Ranger must act. But to truly stop this rampant villainy, he'll need to go all the way to the top, and rely on an old friend for help...

It is 1958 and the Sputnik satellite has taken a god up into space; back on earth, five-year-old Andy has a new sister, Elaine - a baby who, his father insists, is 'not quite all there'. While his parents argue over whether or not to send elaine away, Andy sleeps beside her cot each night, keeping guard and watching as his mother - once an ambitious, energetic nurse - twists away into her private, suffocating sadness. Knots keep treasures safe, Andy's rope-maker grandfather tells him, and, as he listens to stories of the great Harry Houdini, Andy learns the Carrick Bend, the Midshipman's Hitch and the Monkey's Fist. Then a young painter, hired to decorate the family's house, seems to call Andy's mother back from the grief in which she is lost. But one day, at The Siding - the old railway carriage that serves as the family's seaside retreat - Andy is left in charge of his baby sister on a wind-chipped beach, where he discovers that not all treasure can be kept safe for ever. Three decades later, when his father dies and his other sister calls him home, Andrew returns from self-imposed exile to The Siding, the place where his life first unravelled. Looking back on the broken strands of his childhood, he tries, at last, to weave them together, aided by his grandfather's copy of The Ashley Book of Knots and the arrival of a wild-haired, tango-dancing sculptor - a woman with her own ideas about making peace with the past.