Eric Shanower

One of my main projects is Age of Bronze, which is a comic book retelling of the Trojan War. So that was sort of research because I’d never been there. I’ve just been working from photographs so it was really good experience.

I think I took 23 rolls of film, about six hours of video and I did some sketching. It was one of the best things I’ve ever done in my life. There’s not a whole lot left at the site at Troy, just mostly block walls that are crumpled down. But one of the most valuable things was being able to hike all around the area and visit geographical locations that Homer mentions in The Iliad and just look at places that I’m going to have to be using in the story in the future.

Not totally. But I can always do revisions in later printings of the book. But overall I’m not going to have to revise much. I began this project working from photographs so I knew the site itself pretty well. I didn’t feel any sense of fulfillment or anything like that. I was just like, “Oh yeah, this is what it’s like. Now I’m seeing it for real.”

It didn’t alter anything. It just gave me another layer. Now that I’ve been there I can feel a feeling for the atmosphere, the area, what the vegetation is really like, what it feels like, the heat, the bugs.

It was excellent, one of the best things I’ve ever done.

In Turkey?

When I was in Istanbul I stopped in a bookstore/newspaper stand in the airport and they had a few comics there, but I didn’t really visit any comic bookstores.

No and there is no Turkish edition of Age of Bronze. Maybe there will be someday, I’m hoping so.

The first one I did, The Enchanted Apples of Oz, is from 1986.

Thank you. I was really hoping the book would be out in April, because that would have been the exact month 20 years ago since the first book came out.

The artwork has been completely rescanned. I don’t sell my original artwork so I had it all still, except for one color page. Back in the 80’s a lot of people colored on what’s called blue lines where the original black line art is photographed in blue and then that was the thing that was painted so the color was still separate from the black lines. Back when they did that, they dropped the black plate from the color so it lost a lot of depth. For this current one, all the color and black line art were rescanned and combined so the depth that I had put into the original painting is there. John Uhrich worked for IDW to do all this work and he did an amazing job. He made sure the color levels are much closer to what I had painted. 90 percent of the current book is what I wanted it to be, which is pretty rare in publishing.

First Comics published the first four of them. The month that I finished the fifth one First ceased publishing and eventually Dark Horse Comics published it.

They were out of print for about ten years and I’d been looking for a publisher to bring them back into print. I talked to a lot of people in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. Then a couple years ago Ed Brubaker had been doing a project with IDW and he called me up and he said, “IDW is publishing a lot of projects that First Comics published in the 80’s like Grimjack and Jon Sable. Why don’t you see if they want to do the Oz books?” My initial reaction was that IDW does mostly horror. Why would they want to do a comic book that’s for children? But Ed mentioned my Oz books to IDW too and they contacted me and I said “I’ll just go in and see what they have to say.” But it turned out very well, I’m very happy with the book so I have nothing but praise for IDW Publishing.

Yes. A few of the interior illustrations and the spot illustrations are either new or they weren’t very widely published.

On the copyright page, that picture has never been published before. Also that picture on the table of contents page was never published before. I did do some minor revisions in the actual stories themselves. In the second story, The Secret Island of Oz, my drawings of Dorothy were almost uniformly ugly. So I removed a few lines from her faces to try to make her look a little better. Some words in various stories I changed here and there. But mostly I tried to keep my hands off and just leave the work as it was, because I would have been spending too much time on it. So there are little things here and there but nothing that anyone will recognize as a casual reader.

Yeah.

Yes, Oz is in public domain. Anybody can do anything with Oz if they want.

I’ve met several of his great grandchildren but I’ve never dealt with them legally on anything, since Oz is in public domain. I’ve met them in social situations. I knew his eldest granddaughter, the last living member of his family who actually met him, but she died about seven years ago.

Yes, David Maxine is the publisher of Hungry Tiger Press, which specializes in new Oz books and bringing old Oz books back into print.

Yeah, we met at an Oz convention in 1983.

Yeah. I don’t go as much as I used to, but there was one in Princeton last month I went to.

They used to be bigger, maybe 150 people. But now they have trouble getting over 50 people these days. I think the Internet has cut into conventions because in the past you could only find other people who read Oz three days a year when you were at a convention. But now you can find them anytime on the Internet in the chat rooms and message boards.

I’ve been an Oz fan since I was six years old. I saw The Wizard of Oz on TV and found the book in a bookstore. My parents would read me a chapter every night and then I had to have the whole series. When I was a kid, I decided I wanted to grow up and draw my own Oz books. So that’s what these graphic novels are. Just that my Oz books turned out to be comics rather than prose. I’d say that all of the Oz books were an influence on my stories.

When I was a child, Oz was my favorite movie. Then while I was writing and drawing the Oz graphic novels back in the late 80’s and early 90’s I could not watch it, because it was so different from what my vision of Oz should be, which was based on the books. Last year I was interviewed for one of the documentaries on the latest DVD release. Then when the DVD was released, they had a premiere for it up in Los Angeles and they showed it on a big screen. It was the first time I had seen it in about 17 years.
I thought it was a great movie. It was a really good experience to see it in a packed theatre with a bunch of people. I was so impressed by the cyclone scene. I thought it was really scary. I thought the effects were amazing. I didn’t remember it being so powerful. I was also really impressed by how funny Glinda’s lines are. I never thought she was funny when I was a kid. But as an adult I think she’s hilarious and the rest of the audience thought so too. So even though the MGM movie with Judy Garland is an alternate view of Oz, as an adult I’ve come to be able to accept alternate views of Oz. When I was doing the Oz graphic novel, I had to really keep my focus pretty narrow, because I was using characters and concepts of my own and it had to be real concrete single vision for me. But since I’m not doing that much Oz work, I’ve been able to accept or reaccept other alternate versions of Oz. The Wizard of Oz book was illustrated by many different people all over the world so there are so many different versions of it. I like seeing alternate takes from other illustrators on what Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman look like, stuff like that. Though my view of Oz is still that of the books by L. Frank Baum and the illustrations by John R. Neill.

I feel differently about each of them. I think the second one; The Secret Island of Oz is actually a very weak story. I think the fourth one, The Forgotten Forest of Oz, is a very strong story and the artwork in that one is very good too. It is still one of my favorite projects I’ve ever done. With the fifth one, The Blue Witch of Oz, I can really see that straining to get-out-of-the-Oz sandbox. I don’t know if that’s really evident to a casual reader, but I can tell when I’m looking at it or reading it that I’m pretty much done with the series and want to move on to other things.

It was varied. A lot of people really loved them. A lot of people who initially pooh-poohed the idea of Oz in comic books reversed their opinion when they saw them. Some people thought the idea of paying $6.95, or whatever it cost back then, for a comic book was a preposterous idea. I don’t know what decade those people were living in. Mostly it was good reactions and people thought they were worthy successors to the Oz books.

Actually Age of Bronze was a project that I came up with as an adult. I did not have a burning desire as a child to do the Trojan War although I’d read children’s versions of Greek mythology as a kid. While I was working on Blue Witch in 1991, I listened to a book on tape called The March of Folly from Troy to Vietnam by Barbara Tuchman. Her chapter in that book about the Trojan War made me realize there were many different versions of the story that have been told over the centuries. Some of them have contradictions and some have different focuses. I just thought that taking every single version of the Trojan War that’s ever been created and melding them all together to one long coherent storyline and reconciling all the differences and setting the story in the correct time period, which is the late Bronze Age, about the 13th century would be a great comic book story. At the time I also realized that it’d be an immense project and I’d have to be crazy to sink my teeth into it. So I just wrote a note down and put it in the file of ideas and I thought someday in the future I’ll do something with it. But the idea wouldn’t let me go, so in 1992 I started realizing it had enough hold on me. I started doing research collecting different versions of the Trojan War and doing some of the archaeological research. Soon after that I realized I did have enough enthusiasm to see this project through to the end. Image Comics began publishing it in 1998 and it’s still going. I’ll be working on it for years to come yet.

Longer.

I’m about a third of the way through the stories, it’s probably going to be another 15 years.

I don’t even try not to think about it. It’s really overwhelming if I try to think about the whole thing. I just do the next issue. It’s serialized in comic books first and periodically the comics are collected into graphic novels. I have outlines of the whole story so I know where I’m going and I have everything well in hand. But for day to day things, I can’t think about the whole process. I just have to think about what’s in front of me.

I do other comics projects and some illustration here and there. The next project I think is coming out is the final issue of Harlan Ellison’s Dream Corridor from Dark Horse Comics. This is a series that began in the 90’s and for the last ten years the final issue has been sitting in the inventory waiting for Harlan to write the introduction. I illustrate Harlan’s introductions to his stories adapted into comics by other writers and artists.

Oh, it’s fine. He’s always been really nice to me. When I draw him I try to be a little bit flattering and I guess he appreciates that. He’s always liked my artwork. He actually wrote the introduction the first graphic Oz novel back in 1986, although that wasn’t included in this collection. When Harlan Ellison’s Dream Corridor began he requested me to illustrate the introductions, so I was very flattered by that and was very glad to be associated with it. The final issue is coming out this November, ten years after the previous issue.

I still illustrate things once in a while for Hungry Tiger Press. I’ve illustrated about four full-length children’s novels for Hungry Tiger Press in the last seven or eight years. But I probably will not be doing any full-length Oz comics. It’s been there, done that.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck