Comic books are something I’ve always appreciated but never really stuck with long enough to enjoy. I’ve started about three different series that seemed promising but I lost interest after the first few issues. Although I respect the art, I wouldn’t exactly consider myself credible to critique it in general. Slap a phenomenal writer’s name onto a gory title with some blood splatters on the cover though, and I’m all for publicly evaluating the experience. Kill Shakespeare is a new series that a friend of mine brought me back from Comic Con, and it’s the first collection of comics I’ve ever really felt this interested in.
Volume One of Kill Shakespeare is a trade paperback containing the first 6 issues (or essentially the first half) of a 12-part mini series. The action begins with a brief introduction to one of Shakespeare’s most iconic characters: Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. After wrongly killing a man who he thought to be his father’s murderer, Hamlet is sent to England on a ship that is quickly attacked. This is where the story shifts from the play’s original plot and begins to mesh with a new world composed of so many references to Shakespeare’s stories that they practically spill off each page. The story continues as Hamlet joins other well known characters such as Juliet and Othello in an ongoing battle against villains Richard III, Iago, and Lady Macbeth. In this story, Hamlet is thought to be a part of a prophecy that gives him the exclusive power of being able to find the one “wizard” who has the ability to defeat evil, this man being William Shakespeare. This prophecy is interpreted in two different ways, which makes it so that Hamlet is initially pulled in separate directions by good and evil. Hamlet is tasked with safely finding and returning Shakespeare to his people (the good guys) to help overthrow the villains, and the villains, in turn, believe that it is Hamlet’s destiny to kill Shakespeare.
William Shakespeare is a figure whose writing and legitimacy have been studied and questioned for 400 years. Whether you enjoy the words that he left behind or not, the influence that Shakespeare had on the development and creation of language is more than I think most people realize. He was a human storyteller, an inventor of thousands of words and phrases still used today, and really just a super clever guy. Shakespeare’s literature continues to serve as a mirror to anyone willing to watch or read, as the reason these stories have remained with us for so long is their eternal ability to allow audience members to discover themselves within the world of the characters.
Shakespeare wrote about real, raw life through a crafty and intelligent lens, and I find it not only refreshing, but comforting to see that works like Kill Shakespeare are able to continue this process of human connectivity. I definitely believe that having some general knowledge of Shakespeare’s plays will add to one’s appreciation of Kill Shakespeare, but being familiar with the complete works is by no means necessary for anyone’s enjoyment of this comic. It is really exciting and action-packed while remaining humble and smart. The pacing of the action moves appropriately, and there is a sense of swift fluidity throughout this entire first volume. My favorite element of the way this story moves is a technique used by the writers that flashes back and forth between two separate but distantly related story lines throughout any given chapter. The panel layout is organized simple, but still offers enough variation to be effective. Artist Andy Belanger draws this world in what seems like a pretty typical comic style to me. The best aspect of this art is Belanger’s ability to make certain colors so bright and shocking while the overall mood of each page still reflects the dark and stormy plot. The cohesiveness that’s present between the art, layout, and writing of this comic makes the already quick read seem even shorter.
This entire book is dripping with illusions to tons of the Bard’s works, both directly reflected in characters and subtly depicted through dialogue choices and easter eggs in the artwork. In addition to this, writers and creators Conor McCreery and Anthony Del Col include a good amount of direct references to the language of Shakespeare’s plays, as characters occasionally speak exact lines from their own stories. As appropriate as they may be, however, the use of thous and thees happens a little too often for my taste at some points in the story. I mostly just mean that replacing the pronoun ‘you’ doesn’t automatically make for a sentence written in Elizabethan English. This is simple and personally picky of me, but I don’t find it at all distracting from the otherwise impressive story line crafted through speech bubbles.
The coolest part about Kill Shakespeare is its seamless combination and continuation of so many familiar story lines, all sewn together to create a new and vivid world. I know way too many people who dislike Shakespeare exclusively because of their high school English teachers, and that’s just a big bummer. Whether you’ve got a gold statue of this man’s torso on your bookshelf (I’m guilty) or you’ve never even opened a single play, this story has the potential to bring enjoyment to a pretty wide variety of readers. Anyone who has ever been at all interested in William Shakespeare’s work would benefit from the satisfaction of the literary references in this series, just as individuals simply interested in comics and graphic novels will enjoy Kill Shakespeare for the quality of work that it displays. Ultimately, Kill Shakespeare is a modern representation of the literary empire of one man tweaked and molded delicately into an entirely new adventure that I really can’t wait to read more of.
5/7
