Age of Bronze Comics Homepage

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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 the comic book series. The story is then collected into volumes. 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 the story of Age of Bronze 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 unfolds within the pages of Age of Bronze. Come along for the ride!

Age of Bronze T-shirts are HERE!

Click here to read the complete first issue of Age of Bronze 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.

Recommended Graphic Novels
A list for teachers and librarians.

Web interviews with Eric Shanower
can be found at:
Comicdom (text)
MangaForever (text)
Silver Bullet Comics (text)
Comic Book Resources (text)
Comicon.com (text)
Fist Full of Comics and Games (audio)
Strategy First (video)
Silver Bullet Comics (earlier than above, text)
Bookshelf Comics (text)
Suicide Girls (text)
PopCultureShock interview (text)
Archaeology Magazine extended interview (text)
Comics Corner (text)
The Comics Journal excerpt (text)
Big Monkey Comics (text)
The Comic Zone scroll down to 6/21/04 (audio)
World Famous Comics interview (text)
Sequential Tart interview (text)
Ultrazine interview (text)
Jazma Online (text)
Minuit/Dix (audio in French)
PlaneteBD interview (text in French)
Comicus interview (text in Italian)
BDesenhada interview (text in Portuguese)
Videos For Family (audio) an interview
about Oz
TopTwoThreeFilms (text) an interview
related to the film
"Adventures into Digital Comics"

Behold! The Walls of Windy Ilios: A Cartoonist's Adventures in Troy
Click on these links for my photo-illustrated report on visiting Troy:
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four

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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.

To read a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT retelling of the Trojan War legend, visit:
Hungry Tiger Press and click on "The Trojan War" under Tiger Treats.

CURRENT NEWS
Click for UPCOMING APPEARANCES
Click for BLOG
20 August 2008 - Click here to listen to "The Future of the Comic Pamphlet," 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.

2 August 2008 - Here's Greg McElhatton's review of Age of Bronze #27.

14 July 2008 - Age of Bronze #27 appeared in stores last week, so it's ON SALE NOW! Here's the cover:

Age of Bronze #27

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.

17 April 2008 - The brand new fourth printing of A Thousand Ships is available! Now with page numbers! And a few other minor upgrades.

29 March 2008 - A detailed interview with me about Age of Bronze and Adventures in Oz is here (complete) in English on MangaForever.net, and in Italian both here on Comicsblog.info and here (partial) on AfNews.info which also has a lot more pictures. This coverage is to publicize the new Italian 2-volume edition of my Adventures in Oz.

March 2008 - Comicon.com has a new Age of Bronze interview by Christopher Beckett here.

March 2008 - Newsarama has an interview here about a major new Oz project I'm involved in, Marvel Illustrated's 8-issue comics adaptation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. Skottie Young is drawing the art from my script.

Feb 2008 - Salon.com has Douglas Wolk's extremely nice review of Betrayal and Age of Bronze as a whole. I'm particularly gratified by his attention to detail. Wolk is certainly not to blame for the way the commentary after his article quickly descends to the ridiculous. Ah--the age of the internet!

Feb 2008 - Here's a short video shot by my friend zan--me at Wondercon at the Moscone Center in San Francisco:

Jan 2008 - Age of Bronze: Betrayal makes Honorable Mention here on the Publishers Weekly Comics Week critics' poll for the best graphic novels of 2007.

Click here to see a bunch of cartoonists in costume from Hallowe'ens past, including me as a Frank Miller ninja.

Dec 2007 - Age of Bronze T-shirts are now available in Double Extra Large (in addition to the rest of our sizes). Choose either "Achilles and Patroklus" or "Paris and Helen" on a colorful regular 100% cotton preshrunk shirt.

Dec 2007 - The Italian publisher Free Books is issuing my Oz graphic novel series collected into two volumes, using the remastered files from IDW's omnibus collection Adventures in Oz. The first Italian Oz volume is out now: Avventure nel Mondo di Oz, vol. 1 in Italian, and here's the same page in English. And vol. 2 is scheduled for January 2008.

Nov 2007 - Click here for a short interview conducted by Darrell Rohl of Newsvine. This interview focuses on my attendance at the Annual Meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research.

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:

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Akamas and Laodike, issue #26

Unauthorized Magic in Oz is a puppet play by Edward Einhorn with designs from my illustrations. The entire video on Youtube is about 20 minutes long: Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

A Thousand Ships is now available in Serbo-Croat as Brončano doba: Tisuću brodova from Bookglobe.

An article by Ola Hammarlund on Age of Bronze that ran in the magazine Bild & Bubbla back in 2002 is now online here. It's in Swedish, but you can still look at the pictures even if you can't read it.

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Helen and Menelaus, issue #25

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

Free Books, publisher of Age of Bronze in Italian, offers a free downloadable Italian version of the Age of Bronze map on their web site. (You need Adobe Acrobat to view it.)

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The Rape of Ganymedes

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Paris aims his bow from hiding

ARCHIVES

ORDER NOW!
AGE OF BRONZE
Volume 2:
SACRIFICE Selected as one of the
Best Books of 2004
by the Editors of Publishers Weekly

"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

More...

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Paris holding the Golden Apple