What have we been doing with all that spare time in-between chapters? Good question!
As some of you may know, adapting Joyce is just the inaugural project for Throwaway Horse LLC and just the tip of slow-moving iceberg of ideas we’ve had for interfacing great works of literature with comics on a digital page. Sure, adapting ULYSSES is enough to keep my poor cartoonist hands busy for a decade or so, but what’s Mike to do with his time? Sit around and wait for me to draw faster?
Fortunately there are other great pieces of comix lit out there to keep his nimble brain active. It’s been awhile in the making, but we’re proud to announce the release of Martin Rowson’s THE WASTE LAND “Seen” for the iPad with commentary by Mike Barsanti.
From the introduction:
“It takes a lot of detective work to decipher modernist literature. Trying to figure how grail legends, the Upanishads, and vegetation myths all link up has left scholars chasing their tails for nearly a century, and has left us ordinary palookas in the dust. Lucky for us we have private eye Chris Marlowe, cartoonist Martin Rowson, and scholar Michael Barsanti to help shake out some of the clues and make some hasty repairs to a heap of otherwise broken images.
Throwaway Horse LLC is proud to present Martin Rowson’s THE WASTE LAND “Seen,” a re-launching of Rowson’s acclaimed The Waste Land comic first published in 1999. The comic itself tells a story of betrayal, murder and intrigue in the best film noir tradition, haunted by various allusions conjured by T.S. Eliot’s most notoriously difficult poem. The comic has been reformatted for the iPad, presented on Throwaway Horse’s Behind the Seen Reader so that it can be examined in relation to Eliot’s poetry, the development of modernist literature, the filmography of film noir, and the sweep of art history itself.
Rowson’s The Waste Land “Seen” is the second offering from Throwaway Horse, creators of theUlysses “Seen” website and iPad app. As with Ulysses “Seen”, Throwaway Horse hopes that this project will help preserve interest in this challenging but essential work of art using the best functionality of tablet readers. The app was coded by Bunsen Tech LLC, and is available now in the Apple App Store at the introductory rate of $9.99.”
A really great comic in a really great platform and, perhaps best of all, you won’t have to wait a few years to get the whole story. It’s all there now with Mike’s own unique guide to using Martin’s wonderful comic as a roadmap for understanding one literature’s most enigmatic poems. Comics like you always thought they could be.
-Rob