This October at New York Comic Con, Throwaway Horse, the venture behind graphic adaptations of Joyce’s Ulysses and T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, will debut Age of Bronze Seen, an iPad app for Age of Bronze, Eric Shanower’s award-winning comics and graphic novel series that retells the epic story of the Trojan War. The app will feature the series in full-color for the first time, along with an Age of Bronze Seen Readers Guide and offer 20-24 pages of comics content updated on a monthly basis for 99 cents.
In addition, Throwaway Horse also announced that they will release the Ulysses Seen 1.5 app in September, an update of the graphic adaptation with the “Calypso,” section, the 54-page fourth chapter of the novel that introduces the main character Leopold Bloom. The Ulysses Seen iPad app, which is free, will now feature about 123 pages of the novel along with a page-by-page Reader’s Guide and a new fully functioning comment sections that will eventually allow readers to comment and respond on each page across all of Throwaway Horse’s digital publications. The adaptation is also available online and Throwaway Horse will continue to add new sections to the work until the Ulysses adaptation is complete.
Robert Berry, the artist-creator of Ulysses Seen, and a cofounder of Throwaway Horse, said the new Age of Bronze Seen app will be available through iTunes beginning with New York Comic Con. First published in print in 1998, the new digital Age of Bronze Seen, will be restarted as an app “taking it back to its initial run.” In color for the first time, Age of Bronze Seen coloring is by John Ballaire, who worked closely with Shanower to add color to his original black and white drawings.
Asked about taking the longtime Image Comics serial and trade paperback print series digital, Eric Shanower said, “My hopes for the forthcoming Age of Bronze Seen Reader are to broaden the audience for my version of the Trojan War story, to deepen the audience's experience of that story, and to demonstrate in a practical and attractive manner the enhanced possibilities for comics reading through digital publication.”
Besides creating imaginative comics adaptations of classic works, Throwaway Horse also creates Readers Guides for each of the classics they publish. The Readers Guides are critical to the venture and offer conversational but well-researched commentary and annotations on the literary and historical context of every page of these works. The Age of Bronze Seen Readers Guide was created by Thomas Beasly, a classics professor at Yale University. The app will also include a list of characters updated with each monthly episode.
Throwaway is a new venture specializing in creating graphic adaptations of classic, often “difficult” public domain literature and creating accompanying accessible and well researched page-by-page Reader’s Guides. The company’s mission is to foster “ understanding of public domain literary masterworks by joining the visual aid of the graphic novel with the explicatory aid of the internet.”
While the Ulysses Seen app (and online version) is offered for free, the digital apps for Martin Rowson’s The Wasteland ($9.99) and the forthcoming Age of Bronze Seen (99 cents monthly) are both for-pay apps. Throwaway is working to establish a business model that will offer these digital works to the trade and educational markets at reasonable prices. The venture is also looking to add print formats at a later date.
“People are used to getting more from digital content for less,” said Berry. “We don’t want to undervalue Eric’s work, 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.”
