Premise
Having fucked up their first attempt to invade Troy, the Achaeans try again and fuck up maybe thirty percent less. Philoctetes is bitten by a snake and abandoned on an island, and Achilles dooms himself by being so quick with the stabby-stabby, but at least they find Troy this time. Some of the leading Achaeans even have a tête-à-tête with Priam, the Trojan princes, and, yes, Helen. She is a pretty!

Reaction
Hooray, more Age of Bronze! Pretty much everything I said about the first volume back in the day still holds true for this one, the two-and-a-halfth. Yeah, only half a volume since 2004, 144 pages in three and a half years... but then you look at those 144 pages and wonder how the guy completed them all in such a short time. Every panel is so intricate!

For all that Shanower attempts to place the Trojan War in a broad geopolitical context, it is hard to escape the feeling that, ultimately, 90% of the problem lies with the fact that Paris is an asshole. You might even go so far as to call him a smirking chimp. And yet Helen seems to find his smirking chimpiness a turn-on. If only she'd been born three thousand years later! She could have been a Washington correspondent.

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