‘Forging All of These Disparate Versions into One Continuous, Coherent Storyline’: Eric Shanower’s Age of Bronze as Archontic Fiction

Abstract Comic book creator Eric Shanower has tackled the challenge of creating an account of the Trojan War, Age of Bronze , that might incorporate and reconcile thousands of years of historic and literary accounts into one coherent narrative. This article reads this series of graphic novels as illustrating the concept of the archontic, that is, literature that builds on and reworks the archives of previous texts. Moreover, Shanower's work on Troy and elsewhere on Oz can also be read as a form of fan fiction, illustrating the value of fan responses to pre-existing works.