Eric Shanower has been working in comics for about 15 years, and he was best known until recently as "the Oz guy"—the artist behind a decade-old series of graphic novels inspired by L. Frank Baum's Oz books. That's all changing now. A few months ago, Shanower won the comics industry's Will Eisner Award for Best Writer/Artist for his Age of Bronze series, a synthesis of virtually every story ever told about the Trojan War.

Shanower started writing the series in 1996. He's done an enormous amount of research into scholarly accounts of the period. After first being published as periodical comics, the first Age of Bronze graphic novel collection, A Thousand Ships, was published by Image Comics (www.imagecomics.com) in paperback and hardcover.

Shanower's ideal audience, he said, is "readers who enjoy books like Mary Renault's The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea, or Robert Graves's I, Claudius and Hercules, My Shipmate."

Shanower estimated it will take him another 10 years or so to complete the remaining six volumes, and, he pointed out, "The story's been told for thousands of years, so I know where I'm going—and so does everybody else." For the early part of Achilles's life, for instance, Shanower noted, he's drawn on "Statius's Achilleid; the second-century Library of Apollodorus; The Chronicles of Dictys of Crete and Dares the Phrygian; and the Fabulae of Hyginus, which has interesting readings of some of the details." Shanower based his characters' appearances and their settings on archeological sources for the era. "I'm really trying to set the story in the late Bronze Age, so that if the Trojan War ever really happened, it would've happened that way."