Age of Bronze

When I was in high school, and started learning about the Greek myths from the source material rather than from adaptations/sanitations, I was always puzzled by the Trojan War. It seemed to be this big, complex mess, and I was confused as to how it was told. How rude of those ancient Greeks, teenaged me thought, to not put the whole story in one easily digested work?

Of course, as I became more familiar with it, I came to understand that this was because they were more interested in telling individual stories of tragedy and heroism rather than just history, and also that we still do that today - dozens of individual stories have been told about World War II, and Vietnam, but there aren't really many plays/films/poems that try to tell the whole story of those conflicts.

Eric Shanower, however, has decided to try to tell all of the Trojan War in one work, a planned 7-volume collection called Age of Bronze. The first volume is really all backstory, starting with Paris first coming to Troy, going through the taking of Helen, and ending with the Acheans first launching their ships against Troy. Taking 200 pages to tell just that part of the story shows how much detail is going into the story here, something that is carried through in the artwork - Shanower has obviously done a lot of research into the archeology, geography, architecture, society, and art of the Mediterranean, and that research is evident in the depth of the story and artwork.

Of course, being well-researched is not a substitute for being a good story, and the adaptation holds up on those grounds as well. He's working from classic material, in every sense of the word, and he tells it well, adding his own interpretations to a couple of things, but expertly combining religion, history, and myth into an Epic story of love, respect, and betrayal.