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The other reason is that I love comics as a medium. I love the fact that in comics you can slip stuff in without drawing the reader's attention to it. (In the latest Hulk people are gradually replaced by anthropomorphic lizards, first just one or two in the background of a panel here and there, then more prominently, until nearly everyone's a lizard. This happens without comment, and the protagonist doesn't notice. Imagine trying to achieve a similar effect in prose. "Bruce drove down the street past sidewalks full of window shoppers, one of whom happened to be a big-ass reptile." Yeah, that's smooth.) I love that in comics you can have the action of the story running simultaneously with an internal monologue through inset captions, rather than having to switch back and forth between the two. I love aspect-to-aspect transitions. I love being able to linger over a panel, to let my eye wander back and forth over the page and take in the composition. I could go on, but you get the point. My interest in the comics goes beyond my interest in the superhero genre — I love the art form. So why is so little of my comics shelf taken up by offerings from outside the world of spandex?
A lot of it comes down to this: a lot of comics are just plain ugly. So often I've read a review of a new comics opus outside the superhero genre that sounds really promising — just recently I came across a rave review of a piece about prewar Berlin that sounded interesting enough, so I headed down to the comics shop to check it out — and then found that the art is just not at all to my taste. I can't enjoy a story told through pictures that I find ugly, any more than I can enjoy a rock opera, no matter how compelling the story, if I don't like the band. So, knowing nothing about author Eric Shanower, I flipped through Age of Bronze: A Thousand Ships prepared to be disappointed; a telling of the Trojan War saga in comics form sounded like a fascinating project, but if I didn't like what I saw, no sale.
My worries were groundless. It's gorgeous!
Shanower's art is simply superb. This is pen-and-ink line art, no color, no tones, all the shading done by cross-hatching. It's a tricky choice, especially given the highly detailed, naturalistic style; each added detail threatens to turn the panel into mud, but somehow that never happens. The draftsmanship is first-rate throughout, the landscapes breathtaking, the buildings rendered such that an architect would have no choice but to applaud, and the figures immensely appealing. They have real dimensionality to them, anatomy is spot-on, body language is excellent, and the faces — here Shanower has the proverbial cast of thousands, they're all from basically the same ethnic group (and yes, the people actually look Greek), they mostly dress alike and all the rest, and yet he gives them all a distinctive look such that at a glance we know who we're looking at. Such a key thing and yet so rare. And the faces are all well-chosen, and range from grotesques to... well, to the face that launched a thousand ships. (When Helen first appears, her face is kept hidden from us, and at first I thought that this was a rare misstep on Shanower's part; it is, of course, a common trick that to make something seem really superlative — along whatever axis — an artist will avoid depicting it at all. Thus, while Salinger assures us that Seymour's poetry is among the finest ever penned, we never actually see any except a farcical quatrain about Keats; or, closer to the example at hand, in the painting The Babylonian Marriage Market by Edwin Long, twelve girls are arranged in order of beauty, but only numbers two through eleven are visible to the viewer — the alpha and omega have their faces hidden, such extremes, we're thus led to believe, being beyond the artist's brush. But as it turns out, Shanower is just being coy, waiting for the dramatic revelation... which he nails. Fleetworthy? You betcha.)
Shanower's handling of the mythos is similarly deft. From among the infinitude of variants of each thread of the Trojan War cycle, he's chosen to select a consistent set rather than play through the variations — the storyteller's choice rather than the academic's. But he hasn't restricted himself to the Iliad, nor even to the myths that were contemporary with it: he's got Troilus and Cressida in there, an invention of the Middle Ages. (I would also be remiss if I didn't mention the wonderful and unexpected changed of art style when we enter a flashback featuring Heracles. It's a brilliant means of separating out a potentially troublesome plot point.) And while the characters do play their roles as scripted, Shanower has added layers of complexity underlying the surface; so, yes, recapturing Helen is the ostensible motivation for the assembly of an army against Troy, but these Achaeans are not at all unaware of the geopolitical motives for massing a force to take the city controlling the chokepoint between the Black Sea and the Aegean. And while the gods play as great a role in the story as they did in Greek culture — honored with sacrifices, cited by mystics as the source of their visions — they do not appear in the flesh. This is a human tale, not a supernatural one.
I really can't recommend Age of Bronze enough. This is the first of a planned seven volumes, and I'm already itching to get my hands on the next six. I tell you: when an Astro City trade paperback comes out and is not the best comics TPB released that week, you know that it's a great, great time to be a comics fan. (And — sneak preview time — the first Black Panther collection comes out tomorrow! Look for that review in a day or two... I can guarantee it'll be as effusive as this one. [Addendum: or would have been, had the book actually come out as scheduled. Feh.])
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