Western Courier

Issue date: 9/14/05 Section: News

The final series was the most expansive and covered the widest range of issues; it focused on the Trojan Horse. "The horse represents a gift, which is of course not a gift at all," Sienkewicz said. The treatments of the horse included variations on the animal, the situation and many other things. There were political themes and a somewhat strange social situation in which the Trojans are reluctant to admit the horse because it would lead to an awkward social debt to the Greeks. This series also is the only one of the set to have advertisements as part of the cartoons.

One of the most notable cartoons is a commentary on the arms race of the Cold War. It features a Trojan soldier going to his king and saying, "But how can we feel secure until we have our own wooden horse?"

There are many treatments which show the Trojan Horse as some kind of policy or political group trying to slip in through the gates of the other party's walls. There are also purely humorous treatments of the horse, two of which are by Far Side cartoonist Gary Larson. There was even a Trojan Horse cartoon from a daily newspaper in which it is not a horse that is offered, but the Trojan Judge. A wooden effigy of Justice John Roberts is wheeled up to Democratic gates while the Democratic soldiers look at each other confusedly.

"Getting all the cartoons into the PowerPoint presentation was definitely the hardest thing," Sienkewicz said when asked how hard compiling the clips was. He commented that he and his wife had been collecting them for some years and that some had been given to him by retiring classics and that a book and CD comprising all the cartoons ever having appeared in The New Yorker Magazine had proved an invaluable asset.

The sheer number and range of the cartoons was both surprising and amusing. The presentation included many well-known cartoon strips, such as Mother Goose and Grimm who did at least two treatments of the Helen legend, and of course The Far Side with its poor soldiers trapped in the horse and having to relieve themselves.

There were many modern translations of the cartoons which assumed the modern populace is familiar with Homer's characters and storylines.

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