Age of Bronze Comics Homepage - The Story of the Trojan War

Age of Bronze, the Story of the Trojan War, Logo

AGE OF BRONZE, the continuing graphic novel series by Eisner Award-winning cartoonist Eric Shanower, presents the complete story of the world-famous War at Troy, freshly retold for the 21st century. All the drama of the ancient and thrilling tradition unfolds before your eyes, with all the familiar people and events of the Trojan War.

Age of Bronze Character Sketches

Age of Bronze is first serialized in individual issues of the comic book series. The story is then collected into volumes as graphic novels. The first several of seven projected volumes are available now. Volume one is titled A THOUSAND SHIPS, volume two is titled SACRIFICE, and the first part of volume three is titled BETRAYAL.

Primary sources for Age of Bronze's version of the Trojan War story begin with Homer's Iliad, include major and minor works from classical Greece and Rome, many Medieval European sources, and continue through Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida and beyond. The art of Age of Bronze draws upon the archaeological excavations of the places where the story took place: Mycenae, Knossos, and Pylos, among others, and especially Troy itself.

Shanower draws from life

While everything in Age of Bronze is based on existing sources, whether mythological or archaeological, the final product is a version for the 21st century. All the comedy, all the tragedy, all the wide canvas of human drama of the Trojan War unfolds within the pages of Age of Bronze. Come along for the ride!

Click here to read the complete first comic book issue of Age of Bronze, the Story of the Trojan War, online at the website of the publisher, Image Comics. These are the first 20 pages of A THOUSAND SHIPS (Age of Bronze, vol. 1).

Click here to read a 22-page high resolution excerpt from SACRIFICE (Age of Bronze, vol. 2). This is a large PDF file viewable with Adobe Acrobat.

Web interviews with Eric Shanower
can be found at:
Silver Bullet Comics (text)
Comic Book Resources (text)
Fist Full of Comics and Games (audio)
Archaeology Magazine extended interview (text)
Comics Corner (text)
The Comics Journal excerpt (text)
Big Monkey Comics (text)
World Famous Comics interview (text)
Sequential Tart interview (text)
Ultrazine interview (text)
Minuit/Dix (audio in French)
PlaneteBD interview (text in French)
Comicus interview (text in Italian)
BDesenhada interview (text in Portuguese)
Theater of Ideas (text) an interview
about Oz illustration
TopTwoThreeFilms (text) an interview
related to the film
"Adventures into Digital Comics"

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Recommended Graphic Novels
A list for teachers and librarians.

ERIC SHANOWER
Winner of the 2003 Will Eisner Comics Industry Award
Best Writer/Artist

2001 Lighthouse Awards

For more work by Eric Shanower, visit our other websites:
Hungry Tiger Press.com and Eric Shanower.com.

CURRENT NEWS
Click for UPCOMING APPEARANCES
25 June 2009 - The website Ideology of Madness is running a contest to win a signed copy of issue #8 of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. All you have to do to enter is submit a question for me to answer in an upcoming interview. Click here to enter.

The 45th Annual Winkie Convention of the International Wizard of Oz Club will be held at Asilomar Conference Center in Pacific Grove, CA, on July 10-12. Click on Upcoming Appearances at the top of this column for details. Sunday morning at 10am at the convention, I'll be talking and showing images about writing Marvel Comics' current comic book adaptations of L. Frank Baum's Oz books. On Friday evening at 7:30 pm, I'll be dancing in a short ballet based on Baum's fifth Oz book, The Road to Oz. Click here for an interview about the ballet.

17 June 2009 - Issue #7 of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz goes on sale today, with script by me and art by Skottie Young. Here's a video review of the series by A Comicbook Orange:

24 April 2009 - New pencil art for Age of Bronze #29 is right here. Click on the link for the first eight pages. It's a large PDF file, so it might take a few moments to download. You need Adobe Acrobat to view it.

24 April 2009 - This month's Free Feature is the poem "Iphigeneia," from the Hellenics by Walter Savage Landor.

21 April 2009 - For a Spanish interview with me by Eduardo Seradilla about Age of Bronze, Oz, and other stuff, click here. You may need to scroll down.

7 April 2009 - Here's Tom Spurgeon's review of Age of Bronze #28 at The Comics Reporter.

21 March 2009 - Lots of stuff to post today:

Age of Bronze #28 is on sale now! See the conclusion of the first battle between the Achaeans and the Trojans. Watch more development in the Troilus and Cressida relationship (mostly incorporating material from Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida in this issue). Hektor confronts Achilles. And there's a really unfortunate scene of children watching the battle from Troy's walls. Yes, the Trojan War has finally begun in earnest. Here's a six-page preview at Comics Bulletin.

All subscription copies of Age of Bronze #28 were mailed out yesterday.

I'll be a guest at Planet Comicon in Kansas City next weekend, March 28 and 29. Click on "Upcoming Appearances" above for details and a link to the Planet Comicon website. Then, if you live in the midwest--or even if you don't--come see me at the convention.

"Age of Bronze: Some Thoughts and Sketches" is a ten-page article of mine published in Yikas: A Journal of Art, vol. 1, issue 1. The text is similar to the "Afterword" of A Thousand Ships and the text of Age of Bronze: Behind the Scenes, but many of my accompanying sketches are newly published, including character designs for Helen and Patroklus, costume design for Deidamia, sketches for the armor of Achilles and three other major characters, and step-by-step art construction for a page in Age of Bronze #27. A copy of Yikas is $7.98, available by Phone, email, or in person from:
Book Loft
Kathy Mullins
1680 Mission Dr
Solvang, CA 93463
Telephone: 805-688-6010
Fax: 805-688-9930
Email: mail@bookloftsolvang.com
Website: bookloftsolvang.com

And speaking of Age of Bronze: Behind the Scenes, it's out of print and no longer available through this website. The expanded French version L'age de Bronze: les Coulisses de L'oeurve is still available, however. Click here for ordering info.

At the end of February I was a guest on Fanboy Planet. Click here and scroll down to Podcast #130 to listen.

15 March 2009 - Issue 4 of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz went on sale last Wednesday, the 11th. Issue 28 of Age of Bronze goes on sale next Wednesday, the 18th.

15 March 2009 - This month's Free Feature is a Summary of the Epic Cycle, the lost ancient poems telling the entire story of the Trojan War.

18 February 2009 - A new entry on the main menu bar to the left has just been added - Free Features. Some established features, such as Age of Bronze desktop wallpaper and my Troy Trip Report have been moved to Free Features, but brand new is an English translation of Theocritus's Idyll 18 - Epithalamium for Helen. Every so often I'll be posting lesser-known texts related to the story of the Trojan War in Free Features.

30 January 2009 - Age of Bronze #28 went off to the publisher this week. It'll be on sale the second week of March. You can look at a preview of three pages here. And here's wallpaper of the cover image for your computer desktop.

CLICK HERE
For Free Desktop Wallpaper
Hektor in Battle, issue #28

5 January 2009 - Happy New Year, everybody! New interview here, mostly about Oz, conducted by Blair Frodelius of The Daily Ozmapolitan.

14 December 2008 - Here is an interview with me about Oz and Age of Bronze by Jay Tomio of Book Spot Central.

24 October 2008 - Listen here to the October 14 performance of Comic Book Club Live at People's Improv Theater in New York City. I was a guest along with Jacob Chabot.

1 October 2008 - The music video for the song "Worst Presnadent Ever" by Charlie Imes is here. I appear as a member of the White House Press Corps. Watch "The Movie" version--it's only 13 minutes long--and see me ask "W" the second question. WARNING: if you A) admire President Bush and B) have no sense of humor, DO NOT WATCH THIS VIDEO!

18 September 2008 - Here's my latest interview. It's conducted by Edward Einhorn, several of whose books I've illustrated. It's mostly about Oz, but Age of Bronze gets mentioned a couple times.

20 August 2008 - Click here to listen to "The Future of the Comic Pamphlet," a recording by Jamie Coville of a panel I participated in last month at San Diego's Comic Con International. At this point I don't remember exactly what I said. Hope it wasn't too embarrassing.

5 August 2008 - My graphic novel Adventures in Oz is the subject of last Sunday's Unshelved online comic strip.

31 May 2008 - Click here for a lovely review of Age of Bronze by John Hodgman in The New York Times Book Review. It starts about halfway down the page.

Nov 2007 - AT LAST! Betrayal, the third Age of Bronze book, published by Image Comics, is NOW AVAILABLE. Both a $27.99 hardcover [ISBN 978-1-58240-845-3] and a $17.99 paperback [ISBN 978-1-58240-755-5] edition are waiting to be read by you. It's available here now through this website and arrives in comic book stores November 28. Betrayal collects issues #20-#26 of the comic book serialization. Here's the cover:

NEWS ARCHIVES

WHAT THEY'RE SAYING ABOUT AGE OF BRONZE

Wow! Celebrated author Ursula LeGuin likes Age of Bronze! You want proof? Click here and scroll to the bottom.

"History never read so good."
--Entertainment Weekly

"Besides being beautifully drawn and intelligently, even intellectually, composed, it is archaeologically accurate--by those qualities it's better than any film I've ever seen on Bronze Age Greece. . . ."
-- Archaeology

". . . the story also has many amazing scenes for an artist . . . and Shanower makes the most of them."
--Publishers Weekly

". . . a feast for those new to Homeric tradition and modern archaeology as well as those who simply love mythology. . . . Shading, texture, and Shanower's use of a single image across several panels give depth to the black-and-white cartoon artwork that carries the story."
--Booklist

"Shanower may not create the poetry of The Iliad but he tells a story in a straightforward, clean manner that will keep you reading through one sitting."
--Andrew D. Arnold, Time.com

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