Review: Sacrifice (Age of Bronze #2)
May. 5th, 2010 08:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
charamei"Just come out so we can talk... or sing about it."
Oh, Glee. Where would we be without you?
Meanwhile, in the land of fiction that at least takes a stab at being serious, I've just finished Sacrifice, the second part of Eric Shanower's Age of Bronze series. My review of the first, A Thousand Ships, can be found here.
When last we left the seedlings of the Trojan War, the Greeks had just sailed for Troy - and Paris hadn't even made it home yet.
One of the advantages of the serial format is that it provides a very easy way to skip the 'hobbits walking' sections, so we open with Paris and Aeneas returning to Troy.
They've come the scenic route. Most notably, Shanower slides a reference to Egypt into the list of places they've been, which leads one to wonder...
Paris is a tit, of course: but very importantly, he's now a tit wearing a lionskin! I can finally pick him out of a line-up!
Yes, I'm still having problems telling characters apart here. The extent of the problem was made clear during the sack of Mysia: it's the first big fight scene, and I was completely unable to tell who'd been killed by whom. At one point I'd even half-convinced myself that Achilles had just stabbed Patroklus. Likewise, this volume introduces Telamonian Ajax, yet half the time I couldn't tell who he was because Shanower has a habit of putting him right at the centre-front of the panel. Here's a hint: if your character's most recognisable characteristic is that he's big, don't make it look like a perspective trick.
(Yeah, OK, he also has a tower shield. Doesn't help when he's not holding it.)
All these Greeks (and Trojans) look the same to me. But moving on from that, there's still something delightfully Asterix about this at times, before the drama gets too high - and oh, but the drama gets high here.
This book is basically where the Oresteia begins, you see. Orestes is born in it. Clytemnestra and Agamemnon fight a lot in it. We're introduced to Electra in it (and she's great: not many lines, but every one that she has screams 'Strong, independent seven-year-old'). We're introduced to Iphigenia in it, and then of course she's killed off at the end (or is she...?). There's an amazing full-page panel showing the progress of the curse on the Atreides through time, all the way back to Tantalus.
And while the Oresteia is setting itself up, the Trojans have got wind of the Greek plans and are gathering reinforcements. There's an incessant wind, shown through a single constant sound effect whenever we're in the Greek camp. The soldiers are hungry, bored and close to rioting. And Odysseus, one of the only people holding the war effort together, just wants to go home.
This is where Shanower's skill really comes through. There are four or five separate myths here: he weaves them into the single coherent narrative that they presumably once were, and in doing so restores a sense of context that is often lacking when they're read individually. The pressure is higher, the stakes are higher, because we can see all the variables, not just the ones that are relevant to the current myth - and we can see many of the future variables, too. There's no indication of murderous intent in Clytemnestra's impassioned pleas for her daughter's life, or the way she collapses when Iphigenia is taken away - but there doesn't need to be, because we know it's coming, just as we have a private little giggle whenever Odysseus grouses that he's not been home in three years. Schadenfreude? What's that, some kind of Nazi word?
Speaking of Odysseus, he gets the last soliloquy in this one, and it's an extremely powerful couple of pages right at the end of the book. As far as I'm aware there's no parallel for the speech in myth or tragedy: it's just great writing.
The whole second half of the volume (so, the Oresteia bit) just blew me away. Thinking back, there's an element of Aeschylean drama to it: Iphigenia's sacrifice in particular is almost entirely silent, save for her last words - which were pretty close to making me cry even as I wondered why the hell they bothered to gag her to stop them cursing them if they were going to just let her take the gag off and make a speech.
I hope that the character designs are better differentiated by the time we reach the really big battle scenes, but even if they're not, the character parts of the plot - the majority - are more than worth the irritation of trying to tell Priam's eighty billion identical sons apart. This series just keeps getting better and better.
Oh, Glee. Where would we be without you?
Meanwhile, in the land of fiction that at least takes a stab at being serious, I've just finished Sacrifice, the second part of Eric Shanower's Age of Bronze series. My review of the first, A Thousand Ships, can be found here.
When last we left the seedlings of the Trojan War, the Greeks had just sailed for Troy - and Paris hadn't even made it home yet.
One of the advantages of the serial format is that it provides a very easy way to skip the 'hobbits walking' sections, so we open with Paris and Aeneas returning to Troy.
They've come the scenic route. Most notably, Shanower slides a reference to Egypt into the list of places they've been, which leads one to wonder...
Paris is a tit, of course: but very importantly, he's now a tit wearing a lionskin! I can finally pick him out of a line-up!
Yes, I'm still having problems telling characters apart here. The extent of the problem was made clear during the sack of Mysia: it's the first big fight scene, and I was completely unable to tell who'd been killed by whom. At one point I'd even half-convinced myself that Achilles had just stabbed Patroklus. Likewise, this volume introduces Telamonian Ajax, yet half the time I couldn't tell who he was because Shanower has a habit of putting him right at the centre-front of the panel. Here's a hint: if your character's most recognisable characteristic is that he's big, don't make it look like a perspective trick.
(Yeah, OK, he also has a tower shield. Doesn't help when he's not holding it.)
All these Greeks (and Trojans) look the same to me. But moving on from that, there's still something delightfully Asterix about this at times, before the drama gets too high - and oh, but the drama gets high here.
This book is basically where the Oresteia begins, you see. Orestes is born in it. Clytemnestra and Agamemnon fight a lot in it. We're introduced to Electra in it (and she's great: not many lines, but every one that she has screams 'Strong, independent seven-year-old'). We're introduced to Iphigenia in it, and then of course she's killed off at the end (or is she...?). There's an amazing full-page panel showing the progress of the curse on the Atreides through time, all the way back to Tantalus.
And while the Oresteia is setting itself up, the Trojans have got wind of the Greek plans and are gathering reinforcements. There's an incessant wind, shown through a single constant sound effect whenever we're in the Greek camp. The soldiers are hungry, bored and close to rioting. And Odysseus, one of the only people holding the war effort together, just wants to go home.
This is where Shanower's skill really comes through. There are four or five separate myths here: he weaves them into the single coherent narrative that they presumably once were, and in doing so restores a sense of context that is often lacking when they're read individually. The pressure is higher, the stakes are higher, because we can see all the variables, not just the ones that are relevant to the current myth - and we can see many of the future variables, too. There's no indication of murderous intent in Clytemnestra's impassioned pleas for her daughter's life, or the way she collapses when Iphigenia is taken away - but there doesn't need to be, because we know it's coming, just as we have a private little giggle whenever Odysseus grouses that he's not been home in three years. Schadenfreude? What's that, some kind of Nazi word?
Speaking of Odysseus, he gets the last soliloquy in this one, and it's an extremely powerful couple of pages right at the end of the book. As far as I'm aware there's no parallel for the speech in myth or tragedy: it's just great writing.
The whole second half of the volume (so, the Oresteia bit) just blew me away. Thinking back, there's an element of Aeschylean drama to it: Iphigenia's sacrifice in particular is almost entirely silent, save for her last words - which were pretty close to making me cry even as I wondered why the hell they bothered to gag her to stop them cursing them if they were going to just let her take the gag off and make a speech.
I hope that the character designs are better differentiated by the time we reach the really big battle scenes, but even if they're not, the character parts of the plot - the majority - are more than worth the irritation of trying to tell Priam's eighty billion identical sons apart. This series just keeps getting better and better.