T. S. Eliot

Martin Rowson’s The Waste Land “Seen” was published in 1999 — a modernist hermeneutic detective story (hard-boiled) in comix form. Now Rowson and Michael Barsanti are bringing it back as an iPad app, which is to say, more simply, an e-version for easy tablet reading. “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.” There's more here and also, naturally, a link to iTunes where you can download the app. The image above gives you a sense of where I am in the “story” as I write this: section II, “A Game of Chess.” “I lost Idaho Ez,” it begins, “so I decided to look up the only other person I knew in these parts. I remembered the first time we'd met. She'd looked like a million dollars....”