These are the only things in ODY-C that are not wonderful her essays on classical themes are rife with basic factual errors and vague, unsupported assertions. The collection finishes with a series of essays by the self-described "reformed classicist" Dani Colman. Each page of ODY-C could almost be framed, it is so electric and lush. The last line appears alone on a magnificent portrait of Clytemnestra, robes flying, eyes flashing, blood flowing around her as she places the gory crown on her own head. This meeting of beauty and butchery is typical of Homer, who compares deadly warriors to flowers or cranes in magnificent similes. The massacre takes place in a hothouse full of flowers, and, in Ward's panels, butchered limbs are interspersed with orchids, brains with tulips. In a tale inspired by Scheherazade, two brothers murder their cheating spouses. The opening of one book shows bearded Hera overseeing a battlefield wet with blood: "Achaean blood runs riot, the thick smell of wet coins, hot and heavy, hangs in the stifling air," Fraction writes he draws not only from Homer but also from Aeschylus, the Thousand and One Nights, and various other myth traditions. ODY-C has the excess, grandeur, violence, and strangeness of the original, rendered in saturated, flowing colors by Ward. But the moral, this time, is different: "You reap what you sow, motherf-." Spectacular, powerful, muscled warriors with flowing hair, they are flawed and they are merciless. The gods and heroes are warrior women, not the disposable sylph-shapes with impossible waists familiar from classic comic books. In the world of ODY-C, most of the men are dead, killed by Hera so children aren't born to threaten her rule. Aeolus is a planet ruler who tosses women who don't bear him sons into space. The Lotus-eaters are wraith women who smoke the plant and sink into sinister stoned passivity. The Cyclops is rendered with a massive eye and cascading breasts like the famous many-breasted Ephesian Artemis. But the gods - here, goddesses - keep her circling the galaxy instead, fighting strange beasts and strange women. Battered but victorious, Odyssia now turns homewards in her C-shaped ship, to Ithicaa. The war against Troiia lasted a century Paris stole the man He from Ene, and, in return, the heroes Odyssia, Ene, and Gamem conquered Troiia with a trick. Odyssia is warlike, merciless, "witchjack and wanderer," "starminded," '"wolfclever," "lightspeed," a "wolfwitch." Written by Matt Fraction and illustrated by Christian Ward, ODY-C is a beautifully colored space Odyssey, both graphic and novel, which makes Homer new. And among the many minds of Odysseus, there's room for a space queen. Odysseus was the man of many minds and many ways, according to his Homeric epithets.
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