Cartoonist Eric Shanower and Throwaway Horse, the venture behind the graphic adaptations and iPad apps for James Joyce’s Ulysses and T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, have teamed up to release an iPad app for Shanower’s Age of Bronze, an award winning comics series that retells the epic story of the Trojan War. The Age of Bronze Seen app will be released October 14 to coincide with the opening of New York Comic Con and will feature the series in full color for the first time with an interactive Readers Guide and offer 20 pages of comics content each month for 99 cents.
Originally published in print in black and white in 1998 by Image Comics, the series will be relaunched with color added along with an Age of Bronze Seen Readers Guide, which offers accessible commentary and detailed and well-researched annotations for every page of the work. Throwaway Horse’s Readers Guides are designed to help readers engage the text of classic and often difficult works. Readers Guides are a central feature of Throwaway Horse’s efforts to use comics adaptations and the internet to make “difficult” public domain classic works accessible to a general audience.
While Ulysses Seen, the online comics adaptation and iPad app for Joyce’s Ulysses, was released for free, Throwaway Horse has since released T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland Seen, adapted by cartoonist Martin Rowson ($,9.99) with the Readers Guide produced by Mike Barsanti. The Age of Bronze Seen App will be updated each month with about 20 pages of new comics content, initially for 99 cents. The relaunched Age of Bronze will feature color by John Dallaire and the Readers Guide has been compiled by Thomas Beasley,
In an earlier interview with Robert Berry, creator of the Ulysses Seen graphic adaptation and a cofounder of Throwaway Horse, about the Age of Bronze Seen App, he told PW, that “People are used to getting more from digital content for less. We don’t want to undervalue Eric’s work, but 99 cents seems to make new audiences try new material. We want new readers to see his work and that means keeping it at an affordable price.”
