Shanower Speaks

Tonight on the internet radio program Karl Show! (starring Jason) join Jason Lamb as he interviews Eric Shanower about his life and work, including Oz, Age of Bronze, and just being a cartoonist. They'll also play some music that Eric picked especially for the show. It runs from 8 PM to 10 PM PST, and you can listen here at Portland Radio Authority: www.praradio.org/

If you can't listen live tonight, the show will be available for your listening pleasure in a few days at: www.karlshowstarringjason.com

La Edad de Bronce

Eric Shanower's award-wining Age of Bronze comic series is popular all over the world. It's available in French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, and Indonesian!

But the very popular Spanish translations from Azake Ediciones are now going digital! The first issue is now available as a download on the Koomic website. The first ten pages are available as a free sample.

You can go check it out at this link!

Age of Bronze and the Eagle

Great News! Eric Shanower's Age of Bronze comic series has been nominated for an Eagle Award -  "Favorite American Comic - Black and White." So hooray and congratulations to Eric!

Introduced in 1976, the Eagles are the comics industry's longest established awards. Acknowledged as the pre-eminent international prizes, they have been featured on the covers of leading US and UK titles across the last 30 years. Unique in that they reflect the people's choices.

The Eagles are voted on by readers - so you can go add your vote. You can register your vote by clicking here. There is no obligation to vote in every category. The awards will be presented on May 27, 2011 at London's Comic Con EXCEL LONDON.

So congratulations, Eric!

Classics and Comics

Here's a heads up to all of our Age of Bronze and Eric Shanower fans! Oxford University Press has just released Classics and Comics, a critical study of the way the comics medium has dealt with classical texts and mythologies. Of special interest to our readers is a 12 page comics-essay written and drawn by Eric Shanower.

Here's a bit more from Oxford's website:

"Since at least 1939, when daily-strip caveman Alley Oop time-traveled to the Trojan War, comics have been drawing on material from Greek and Roman myth, literature and history. At times the connection is cosmetic - as perhaps with Wonder Woman's Amazonian heritage - and at times it is almost irrelevant - as with Hercules' starfaring adventures in the 1982 Marvel miniseries. But all of these make implicit or explicit claims about the place of classics in modern literary culture.

"Classics and Comics is the first book to explore the engagement of classics with the epitome of modern popular literature, the comic book. The volume collects sixteen articles, all specially commissioned for this volume, that look at how classical content is deployed in comics and reconfigured for a modern audience. It opens with a detailed historical introduction surveying the role of classical material in comics since the 1930s. Subsequent chapters cover a broad range of topics, including the incorporation of modern theories of myth into the creation and interpretation of comic books, the appropriation of characters from classical literature and myth, and the reconfiguration of motif into a modern literary medium. Among the well-known comics considered in the collection are Frank Miller's 300 and Sin City, DC Comics' Wonder Woman, Jack Kirby's The Eternals, Neil Gaiman's Sandman, and examples of Japanese manga. The volume also includes an original 12-page "comics-essay," drawn and written by Eisner Award-winning Eric Shanower, creator of the graphic novel series Age of Bronze."

Below you can see a sample page from Eric's comics-essay. It's really great! As you can see, it's a sort of drawn-documentary on the creation of Age of Bronze and it's narrated by a cartoon version of Eric Shanower himself!  I highly recommend the book - please note that it is available in both hardcover and paperback. The hardcover is ridiculously expensive! The paperback on Amazon is a bargain! 

Eating in Oz

When Eric Shanower and I were in Bristol, England, on the recent Age of Bronze tour, we were taken out to eat at a restaurant with a most unusual name!

The Oz Restaurant served Turkish cuisine. Both the food and the drink were delicious. The Oz restaurant served a dish called Oz, too. It was lamb.

We spent a splendid evening with a dozen or more participants in the Imagines II Conference, which took place at Bristol University. The conviviality and conversation among a diverse crowd of folks from a couple continents made for a fine and memorable time.

We first arrived for dinner at the restaurant after dark one evening--too dark for a good photo. But when Eric and I saw the name of the restaurant, we knew we had to return to snap a quick record of our meal in Oz.

AGE OF BRONZE: The European Tour!

Finally I can take a moment and fill our readers in on our European antics during the European Age of Bronze tour! It's a long blog!

The first stop was Bristol, England. Eric had been invited to speak at the Imagines II - Seduction and Power conference which is about the use of Antiquity in the Visual and Performing Arts. There was also an exhibition of Eric's original Age of Bronze artwork at The Bristol Gallery where the artists being shown were Eric Shanower and Henri Matisse! Hah! 

We managed to work in a day trip to Cardiff (Eric and I had never been to Wales before), and many of us at the conference took day trips to Bath and a stunningly beautiful estate called Stourhead near Wiltshire. The last day we took the train to London (where we spent a few hours) before heading to the airport to fly to Athens.

Eric had been invited to speak at The American School of Classical Studies at Athens. We stayed in the huge mansion of a house occupied by the Director, Jack Davis, and his wife, Shari Stocker. The first day we went to the National Museum in Athens. The next day we took a long day trip to Delphi to visit the oracle. Delphi was stunningly beautiful - the first place I have ever visited that may rival Yosemite for sheer natural beauty.

We departed Athens the next day for a three-day  personal tour of important Bronze Age sites in the Pelopenese. First up was Mycenae. Seeing Eric's face as we saw the Lion Gate for the first time was wonderful. Eric and I were both surprised that the approach was so steep! It doesn't look like that in photographs. Next up was Tiryns, and then a stop for the night in Nafplion. Next day gave us a trip to Pylos and on to Kyparissia where we were to spend the night with friends. It was very warm and Eric and I went to the beach for an hour or so and watched the sun set. The next AM we departed for Athens but stopped to visit Corinth (even though it isn't primarily a Bronze Age site).

We spent the next couple days seeing Athenian sites, the Acropolis, the Temple of Olympian Zeus, Hadrian's Libary. Eric did multiple interviews and ended up on the front page of two of the biggest newspapers in Greece! Eric finally did his lecture in Athens, on the same program with Apostolos Doxiadis and Alecos Papadatos, the creators of the graphic novel Logicomix. We left Greece just in time to dodge a strike of the Air Traffic Controllers thanks to Olympic Airlines moving our flight-time up by several hours.

We were now off to Paris where we had to immediately catch our train to Saint Malo for the Quai des Bulles Comics Festival. Saint Malo (at left) is a wonderful old walled town that looks like it was built in the Seventeenth Century. It was actually leveled during World War II, but was carefully rebuilt as before.

This was our second time at the French comics festival. I love it! Eric sits and signs books all day long. And I get to walk the ramparts, drink little cups of coffee, hike out to little islands when the tide is out, and have fun. Twice Eric and I had lunch on one of the islands, Grand Bé. We'd buy some bread, cheese, grapes, and a bottle of Cidre Brut. Voila! Le dejeuner a eté preparé!

After Saint Malo we began the Age of Bronze signing tour! A new volume of Age of Bronze had just come out. The French are actually ahead of the USA at this point in AOB collections. The beginning of the signing tour coincided with the beginning of a French national strike, so our train connections were doubtful at times. But only one stop on the tour, Tours, had to be canceled because we just couldn't get there by train on the day scheduled. The rest of the tour went relatively smoothly. Our first stop was Caen where Eric signed at a wonderful comic shop called La Cour des Miracles. We also visited the castle of my 29th great grandfather, William the Conqueror.

Next up was a signing in Bordeaux (at BD Fugue) where we stayed with the family of Eric's French publisher; and then on to a signing in Poitiers where Eric signed books at Bulles d'Encre and I played tourist visiting two lovely 1000 year old churches. We returned to Paris where Eric had his final signing in Boulogne, a suburb of Paris, at Le Comptoir de BD. We spent the last day in Paris on our own. We saw a major exhibit on cartoonist Moebius (Jean Giraud) and then went to the Musée d'Orsay and finally dinner with friends.

The next day we flew to London where we had eight hours to kill before our train to Bristol. We went to the British Museum followed by a nice dinner. The next day we began our flights home.

It was a truly grand trip!

When in Amsterdam ...

In 2006 Eric Shanower journeyed to the site of the ancient city of Troy in northern Turkey. You can read his great report on his travels by Clicking Here. There are a lot of great photos, and a lot of terrific background information on Eric's Eisner Award-winning series Age of Bronze. You can also see photos of the all-blond Eric Shanower.

On the way home from Turkey Eric had to change planes in Amsterdam and he had a several hour layover. And knowing I have a fondness for foreign editions of the Oz books, Eric wandered into an antiquarian bookstore and found me a present! A copy of the 1940 Dutch translation of The Wizard of Oz titled De Grote Tovenaar van Oz. Hooray!

This edition is translated by Henrik Scholte and features handsome pictorial endpapers and many black and white illustrations by Rein Van Looy. This translation and Van Looy's illustrations have been reprinted multiple times most notably in the 1962 and 1971 editions of Wizard.

While Van Looy's cover is very much inspired by the 1939 MGM Wizard of Oz film, his interior illustrations are much more his own. Interestingly, Rein Van Looy also illustrated the 1959 Dutch translation of Eloise Jarvis McGraw's Moccasin Trail.

Needless to say I was very pleased with my present. But do take a few minutes and read Eric's account of finding it in Amsterdam - or better yet read the whole travelogue!

Dag!