#age of bronze

Eric Shanower’s “Age of Bronze,” a retelling of the Trojan War with an emphasis on historical accuracy and completeness. It’s not every day that a comic book gets positively talked about breathlessly by academic archeology journals. 

If you want to read it, the way to do this is simple and cost-free: just go to your public library, because it’s the kind of “important” eat-your-vegetables comic book that librarians doing collection development tend to buy, and patrons ignore. I know, I know…usually, the fact that librarians love it and push it tends to be the absolute kiss of death when it comes to actual readability (we connect emotionally and fall in love with pulpy, visceral, primal, real fiction with hot blood instead of “important” fiction), but…for once…they actually picked something cool, with boobs and blood, and a lingering sense of doom accompanied by an emphasis on historical accuracy unseen in comics since Carl Barks put down his pen. And there’s an awful lot, so if you want to read it all top to bottom, set aside a summer vacation (or a year) to get through it. And considering they’re probably (tragically) not checked out all that often, the comics are probably in like-new good shape and not dog-eared. 

Of course, that’s not the only way to read Age of Bronze. If you haven’t been to a public library in a while, you should go now, because it’s not like when we were kids. Among other things, most community ones have Netflix-like ebook and yes, movie services that you don’t even need to be in the physical building to access, and Age of Bronze is on some of them (obviously I can’t speak to your location’s circumstances, but I’ll bet real money you can be reading Age of Bronze free within the hour on your iPad if you visit your local library system site, in addition to probably more movies than Netflix). I give librarians a lot of flak because they are members of the urban professional class and their taste and sense of what counts as valuable reflects that, of course, but don’t get me wrong, here….aside from that, I am completely in accordance with the goals of the public library: there is a universal right to access and participate in culture these institutions are incredibly important in spreading (yes, especially for the little old biddies reading romance novels), a right that is far more important than bloated, illegitimate, rent-seeking squatter’s rights like copyright, and the interests of publisher middlemen parasites. If the choice is them or the universal social good of libraries, I pick libraries every time. 

The fact libraries exist is a little miracle, God, can you imaginetrying to start them now, in 2022?

The eerie, final, foreshadowing splash page for  Eric Shanower’s Age of Bronze Special #1, detailing the beginning of the Trojan War.