Battle Lines, a monumental graphic history co-authored with award-winning historian Ari Kelman, offers a series of wholly new perspectives on the conflict that turned America against itself. 
     Each chapter in Battle Lines begins with an object; each object tells its own story. A tattered flag, lowered in defeat at Fort Sumter. A set of chains, locked to the ankles of a slave as he scrambles toward freedom. A bullet, launched from the bore of a terrifying new rifle. A brick, hurled from a crowd of ration-starved rioters. With these objects and others, both iconic and commonplace, Battle Lines traces a broad and ambitious narrative from the early rumblings of secession to the dark years of Reconstruction. 
     Beautiful, uncompromising, poignant, and utterly original, Battle Lines is a daring vision of the war that nearly tore the nation apart.

“Battle Lines is the best film about the Civil War that has never been made. It is a penetrating account of the war's deepest dramas, told in the fewest words imaginable. It is history as poetry.”

—Stephen Kantrowitz, Professor of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison

“Battle Lines is thoughtful, sophisticated, and beautifully wrought. Jonathan Fetter-Vorm and Ari Kelman offer further proof that the graphic novel is a powerful medium for exploring the nuances of history.”

—Gene Luen Yang, author of American Born Chinese, finalist for the National Book Award