The American Way: Those Above and Those Below

The Oscar-winning screenwriter of 12 Years a Slave returns for an all-new chapter in his alternate history of The American Way!

In 1962 Jason Fisher was given astonishing powers by the United States government--powers he used to defend the nation as the New American. He and his teammates in the Civil Defense Corps were real-life superheroes.

Except that it was all a fraud. A conspiracy. And now, 10 years after the CDC was torn apart by racism, infighting and murder, the Corps' surviving members find themselves pulled in very different directions. Missy Devereaux--a.k.a. Ole Miss--is transitioning from the First Lady of Mississippi into a candidate for governor and defender of a vanishing and hateful way of life. Amber Eaton--formerly known as Amber Waves--has become a domestic terrorist, using her powers to infiltrate and destroy the country's centers of power.

Somewhere in the middle stands Jason Fisher, who has remained a crime-fighter even as evidence mounts that he is accomplishing nothing besides propping up a system that's rigged against him as a black man in America.

In a nation being torn apart, what does it mean to fight for the American way?

A decade after the debut of their groundbreaking WildStorm series The American Way, Academy Award-winning writer John Ridley (12 Years a Slave, American Crime) and artist Georges Jeanty (Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8) revisit their parallel Earth for a look at its gritty 1970s--a time frighteningly like our own--in The American Way: Those Above and Those Below. Collects issues #1-6.

John Ridley is an American screenwriter, film director, novelist and showrunner, known for 12 Years a Slave, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. After both writing and directing his film debut, the 1997 crime thriller Cold Around the Heart, Ridley went on to write the novels Love Is a Racket and Everybody Smokes in Hell. His novel Spoils of War was adapted into the film Three Kings. Ridley then became a writer and a supervising producer on the NBC crime drama Third Watch. His other novels are The Drift, Those Who Walk in Darkness and A Conversation with the Mann.