This article examines the basic parameters of Euripides Trojan Women: A Comic by Rosanna Bruno and Anne Carson, a beautiful and moving new version of Euripides’s classic drama, which combines the profundity oftragedy with the quirkiness of the comics genre. Bruno and Carson’s black-and-white graphic narrative follows the structure of the Trojan Women closely but retells the story by transforming the characters into speaking animals and ob-jects — with the odd ironical exception of figures retaining their human form. Carson’s adaptation of Euripides’s Greek mixes high poetry, paracomedy, and intertextuality with coarse language, North American argot, and ample anach-ronisms. Carson’s text even develops an ‘agonistic’ relationship with the original, directly or indirectly questioning the ‘propriety’ of tragic diction. Bruno and Carson deliberately toe the line between ‘high’ and ‘low’. Even as a ‘comic’, or perhaps thanks to the generally perceived antinomy between medium and content, this newfangled Trojan Women remains overwhelmingly tragic.
