Homer The Odyssey

Gr 9 Up—Odysseus, kitted out in Buck Rogers-esque garb, finally leaves Calypso's island to make the long voyage home to reunite with his wife and son, and to prevent his spouse's many suitors from despoiling his estate. Drawn with deliberate primitivism, the artwork has the flat simplicity and awkward panel transitions redolent of comics drawn during fifth-grade social studies, lacking only a blue-lined-paper background for the images. The visuals are a mishmash of imagery, and while the suitors, Odysseus, and Telemachus remain primarily influenced by 1930s pulp sci-fi design, cars, bathing suits, Arthurian wizards, and Hellenic helmets also make appearances. This works quite well, giving the various islands and kingdoms diverse aspects, and providing an accessibly fanciful context. The adaptation loses almost all of the original phraseology, but keeps the sprawling list of characters tertiary to the main action, as well as many of the plot mechanics soothed over by other retellings. The compressed sequence of events and the lack of cultural background makes Odysseus come off rather badly as the hero of his eponymous epic, and a brief epilogue only helps minimally in providing perspective on his literary endurance. This is a complicated, sprawling work with much more complexity of character and event than might be inferred from the faux simplicity of the composition, and it maintains some of the ambiguity, scope, and bawdy content of the original poem. It is difficult to pinpoint an audience best suited for this idiosyncratic effort.—Benjamin Russell, Belmont High School, NH