<DIV><P><B>A not-so-classic yarn about a mysterious stranger in a small midwestern town</B><BR><BR>It's a story line we know all too well: “A mysterious stranger comes to town.” Only the town is not really a town and the stranger is a gigantic cell-phone tower. The town is Birdseye Bristoe—a portmanteau name created from an interstate sign that points to two real towns—and it has only one real permanent resident, an old-timer known as Uncle. A confirmed bachelor and World War II veteran, he owns most of the real estate in town. His teenaged great-niece and -nephew visit occasionally, though the town doesn't have much to offer apart from an adult superstore, a gas station, and a tackle shop. <BR><BR>Uncle reluctantly agrees to lease his land to a conglomerate of telecommunications carriers, and sets the somewhat random condition that the tower be built with a huge crossbar set horizontally into the mast, making it also the world's largest cross. <I>Birdseye Bristoe </I>begins with the destruction of the cell tower and works backward to unravel the story of its fall. <BR><BR>This is the first full-length graphic novel from the acclaimed artist Dan Zettwoch, who is well known for his comic books and anthology work (in <I>Kramers Ergot</I>, <I>Beasts II</I>, and the <I>Drawn & Quarterly Showcase</I>). Zettwoch has a sharp eye for the iconography of small-town USA, and his stylized prose reveals the intermingling of a keen wit and a strong affection for his characters. <I>Birdseye Bristoe </I>brims with larger-than-life personalities, hilarious anecdotes, references to midwestern/mid-southern pop culture, and diagrams of the cell-tower/cross construction process.</P></DIV>