War goes graphic

Some of the most dramatic sequences in "Betrayal" are carried almost entirely by Shanower's artwork. The climactic scene, in which Paris, Helen and her abandoned husband Menelaus confront one another in the court of Priam, is presented as a series of close-ups of the three characters' faces: Menelaus overcome with longing but trying to present his emotional demands as moral imperatives, Paris cocky and openly mocking him, Helen quietly struggling with her feelings and flinching like a 1920s silent-film idol or a '50s romance-comics heroine. And, after Helen rejects Menelaus, there's a magnificently staged sequence in which Odysseus steps forward to address the Trojans, pauses for a moment to close his eyes and compose himself, and then explodes in calculated rage -- spittle flying from his mouth, shock lines surrounding his head.

Shanower's greatest gift as a cartoonist is his command of his characters' facial expressions and body language; he often lets the way his characters look and move around one another say much more than he puts into their dialogue. Achilles' mother, Thetis, is an imposing presence, but she's also faintly ridiculous, prone to scenery-chewing gestures. Odysseus is squat and bearded, perpetually on the alert and thinking five steps ahead, and happy to keep to himself until it's time for him to do something clever. Many of the Trojan War's legends are about love so intense that it destroys everything around it, and when Shanower draws lovers in each other's presence, the force of their erotic attraction crackles from the page. Achilles and Patroklus, silhouetted by the sun (as Achilles recalls the prophecy that Apollo would bring about his doom), are a classic pain-and-comfort duo; Paris can't keep his hands off Helen for two minutes, and Helen knows perfectly well what bad news he is but can't control her lust for him either.

There's a slightly static quality to some of Shanower's figure drawing, which works in its favor here: Many of his characters' poses are (or might have been) copped from pottery, friezes or half-peeled-away paintings. (Before "Age of Bronze," his biggest body of work was a series of graphic novels set in L. Frank Baum's Land of Oz, which similarly built on the archaisms readers expect from those stories.) Other elements of Shanower's classicism -- especially his sense of design and composition -- are virtues in modern cartooning as much as they were in the pre-comics era. "Betrayal's" cover image of a snake coiled around a sandaled foot refers to the story of Philoktetes and more obliquely to the rest of this volume's plot; it's pure and simple enough that it might have been seen on an urn made a few thousand years ago.

Shanower doesn't try to give the Trojan War more contemporary relevance than the archetypal resonance it's always had, and his visual approach is, perhaps, unfashionably un-radical. At a time when the best-known art-cartoonists are leading with their formal innovations, his most expressive gestures come in the form of distinctly old-school craft: rendering, shading, staging, pacing. But if there's a story that every art-maker in the Western world is entitled to embellish, it's this one, and Shanower's treatment of it is gripping to read and beautiful to look at, a feast of images fit for the gods that he's carved away from it.

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