"Odysseus" by Massimo Fecchi: 
This is a comic book version of the Odyssey from the Itailian artist Massimo Fecchi which I read when I was in elementary school. It is beautifully drawn and fun to read especially for younger children since it tells the whole story in a simplified and humorous way. I loved the way that the characters were presented although it alters the original story slightly.

Penelope, for instance is a -let's say corpulent- lady who wants Odysseus to come home whereas Odysseus is a trickster who doesn't really want to come home to his wife for she is bossing him around all the time. So Odysseus has the time of his life while he is on his journey. He isn't very sad about not being able to come home because he has a blast. He goes on adventures and meets pretty ladies while Penelope and Telemachus are waiting at home. There is this one picture which I absolutely love: Penelope is standing at the coast of Ithaca, seeing Odysseus' ship sailing away again, and she raises her fist and threatens him because he refuses to come home to her. It is very funny.

The whole story actually starts out in a hilarious  way. Hermes is telling the whole plot and he begins by introducing the reader to Homer who is in trouble because his wife is sick and tired of him writing his epic all the time. He supposedly hasn't left his room for five years. However, he doesn't care about her yelling and being upset. So she leaves and his last words to her are "close the door". Now that his annoying wife is gone, he can devote himself to his work even more.

Years later, he is already an old man, Homer finally finishes his Odyssey and it is almost lost because he wrote it all on loose sheets of paper. 

As you can see, this interpretation of the epic is very entertaining probably because the characters appear to be even more human and have everyday problems (such as a bossy wife).

About the artist: http://lambiek.net/artists/f/fecchi_massimo.htm

The Adventures of Ulysses: http://fecchi-odysseus.blogspot.com/ (also available in English and Italian)

Troy (2004)

The movie "Troy" appeared in 2004 and tells the story of the Iliad. Helen of Sparta is taken away by the Trojan prince Paris after they had fallen in love. Her husband Menelaus, however, is more than upset and wants his wife back. Consequently the Greeks sail to Troy and besiege the city for years. To set an end to this sheer endless war, clever Odysseus (the hero of the Odyssey) comes up with a plan: the Greeks build a huge horse and give it as a gift to the Trojans. In the inside of the wooden horse, however, they hide soldiers who come out at night in order to attack the city.

Wolfgang Petersen's version of the Iliad looks very impressive. Yet, there are some important flaws in the plot that interfere with the plot of the Odyssey. King Menelaus, for instance as well as his brother Agamemnon, are slain in Troy. Therefore, they could not appear in the Odyssey where they play important roles. Menelaus is the one who gives advice to Telemachus about how to find out about the whereabouts of his father. On top of that, Helen escapes together with Paris to an unknown destination. Thus, she remains an adultress. In the Odyssey, she is back together with her husband Menelaus and regrets her "life as a whore". These plot changes are apparently problematic for the Odyssey. However, the movie is very interesting to watch since the setting looks very beautiful and the actors embody the heroic characters such as Achilles (Brad Pitt) or Odysseus (Sean Bean) very well. 

"O Brother, Where Art Thou" (2000)

This movie is a very interesting version of the Odyssey made by the Coen Brothers. It is set in the US of the 30s. Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney) and his two friends escape from a chain gang and set out to retrieve the $1.2 million in treasure that Everett claims to have stolen from an armored car and buried before his incarceration. They have only four days to find it before the valley in which it is hidden will be flooded to create a lake. This Odyssey is, therefore, quite different. The protagonists make a journey through Mississippi after the Great Depression. A number of blind people appear in the movie who are references the Homer, the blind poet, the cyclops and also the blind prophet. The soundtrack is also very catchy, especially the song of the Sirens. Altogether, the plot of the Odyssey as well as the characters of the Odyssey are recognizable in this modern version, too.

"We're the Mesopotamians" by They Might be Giants (2007)

This song is actually pretty funny. It is a reference to "Hey, Hey We're the Monkees" by The Monkees.The song is very catchy and it revolves around a band that consists of four kings of ancient Mesopotamia, one of which is of course the main character of our award winning epic "The Epic of Gilgamesh". So this band is driving around but nobody has ever heard about them which slightly upsets them. I find it very interesting that the most famous rulers of the ancient world are portrayed as an unknown group of musicians. 

The four kings that are mentioned: Ashurbanipal was an Assyrian king, famed for sponsoring and building a giant library of tablets from all over the region, a radical undertaking for the time. He was the last great king of Assyria. Sargon the Great was a Semitic Akkadian emperor famous for his conquest of the Sumerian city-states in the 23rd and 22nd centuries BC. Sargon's vast empire is thought to have included large parts of Mesopotamia. Hammurabi was a Babylonian king, famous for being one of the first rulers to codify civil and criminal law. Instead of allowing escalating vengence, Hammurabi's Code worked on the "eye for an eye" premise, such that destruction to balance out wrong-doing must be demonstrably in like kind and measure. Gilgamesh, as is mentioned below, is semi-mythical, but might have been an actual king of Sumer, since he is in the list of kings from the Ashurbanipal library at Nineveh. There is an epic poem about him and his adventures, The Epic of Gilgamesh - his mother was a goddess, and he was reputed to have super-human strength. 

Apparently, all of these kings have achieved outstanding things. Yet, they have been forgotten in our time or aren't important enough anymore. They Might Be Giants critize that in a humorous way in my opinion.

 

"It's only epic if we slay something" 

Apparently, they didn't have dragons in ancient Mesopotamia. Therefore, Gilgamesh and Enkidu had to slay something else in order to become famous. In their case it was a giant monster named Humbaba who was the guardian of the Cedar Forest. He looks pretty horrific and intimidating. He has the head of a lion and he breathes fire, which is admittedly, really scary. The gods have put him in the forest to terrify men. So he actually has a purpose. But a hero wouldn't be a hero in the epic sense if he would give a damn about divine laws. I mean, laws are there to be broken. That's how you become famous in ancient times. But it's also how you create yourself an archenemy. Odysseus knows exactly how that's like since he and Poseidon are not exactly best friends either. He didn't slay the cyclops Poseidon but hurt him enough to make his father Poseidon REALLY angry. In the course of the Odyssey, however, Odysseus' crew slaughters the cattle of the sun which also can be seen as slaying something that was placed somewhere by a god or a goddess. Similarly, Gilgamesh didn't stop by killing Humbaba. He was bold enough to slay the "Bull of Heaven". (It's quite interesting that gods everywhere seem to have bulls and cattle!) This eventually leads to severe punishment by the gods. In the medieval epic the beasts that are slain suddenly transform into dragons or in the Cid's case: moors. The epic hero needs something to kill in order to become famous and to prove his masculinity it seems.It doesn't matter what it is. It only has to attract attention.