It is true. We’re Dublinbound.

When this website first began in 2009 all of us here at Throwaway Horse tried to envision it as a place where interested people could come to learn about and discuss the work of James Joyce through his novel ULYSSES. We set up a pretty large challenge for ourselves with the initial idea of adapting that novel into a comic with the hope that each page and panel could serve as a window into Joyce’s deeper mysteries and his world of Dublin on June 16th, 1904. As the cartoonist behind that crazy idea, this website, and the people we’ve met through it, have been invaluable to me in understanding and interpreting the novel for a new audience. I couldn’t have done the work without it.

But running a website, a good one, can be a full time job in itself and Josh and Mike and I have never really had the time to manage the regular and recurring content this kind of a forum deserves. With the release of our iPad app and other delivery methods now in full swing we’ll be spending a lot more of our time making the comic. Blogging is all very fun, but I’ve got to concentrate on making the work.

So I’m very pleased and excited to announce that the comic, readers’ guide and blog forum on this website will continue as a part of the James Joyce Centre in Dublin with the reboot of their website next month. We’re all very happy to working more closely with the Joyce Centre in bringing this project to Dublin and the world in an open and free environment. Now we can deliver the kind of regularly updated and ongoing content this kind of a website deserves.

So what does this mean to you, our readers and subscribers?

Well, it means that starting September 24th the comic and reader’s guide pages will move over to the Joyce Centre website. The comments sections will remain intact, but we’ll be starting from page one of “Telemachus” again to give new readers a chance to catch up and add to the conversation. Along the way we’ll be dropping in additional blogposts on the Joyce Centre site about what’s happening in the new chapters we’re working on, “Nestor” and “Lotus Eaters”, and a whole lot of news from Joyceanna around the world. I’ll also be asking fans for help in solving some deeper visual mysteries of the novel like, “what stamp might’ve been on Martha Clifford’s letter?” or, “what, exactly, does a ‘cheeseparing nose’ look like?” (I really couldn’t draw this thing without your support on questions like those…)

It also a chance for this work, and all of you Joyceheads who’ve been such a big part of building it, to interact with the very real Dublin of today; to see ways of sorting the fiction and allegory of Joyce’s view of the city from the very real experience of Dubliners living there now. We are in a fairly interesting time now as this novel is being more openly embraced by the city of it’s origin than it ever has before and my suspicion is that this will make for new and exciting discourse.

But mostly it means that this project gets to live and breathe in the environment of Joyce’s imaginings. It gets to be more about Dublin and about understanding and discussing the city as Joyce saw it.

Exciting times for all of us,

-Rob