Kill Shakespeare

I love lit-comics. Fables is one of my all time favorites and I pan it off on others as much as possible. In general I quite enjoy the idea of playing with established worlds and characters - we've seen it a lot these days, it's almost a genre unto itself. And here we have it being done to Shakespeare. It's a brilliant idea, the kind that most people are probably scratching their head and saying "Why didn't I think of that?"

As a rule I don't think it's fair to compare things when reviewing them, however in the case of this comic they've specifically written on the back:

What Fables does for fairy tales, Kill Shakespeare does with the greatest writer of all time.

This isn't a quote from a review, this is what the creators and/or publishers themselves are saying about the book - and therefore, in my opinion, it's completely fair game to compare. Fables succeeds in a large way because of it's scope. It encompasses ALL fairy tales in all cultures, and it does so under the guise that the stories that we've all grown up hearing are just versions of their stories - therefore Willingham (the creator of Fables) gives himself proper license to do, more or less, whatever he damn well pleases. He follows a set of rules and it makes sense. This is just the beginning of where this book fails. Seemingly we're in an alternate universe where all of Shakespeare's plays take place. Awesome! I can SO buy into that. The book starts off at the ending of Hamlet. Sweet - I'm in. Instead of Hamlet going back to Denmark he's sidetracked and grabbed by Richard III, okay... I'm with you. But then... we continue... and we start to be surrounded by other characters from other works... Juliet is among them... but she's not a teenager which means... what exactly? She's alive? WTF?! And now, I'm officialy confused, lost, and... out. What's the logic of the world? What are the rules? Where are we in these stories? This is just the beginnings of the problem with this book.

The writers claim to have done their research, what that consists of, I don't know. Shakespeare is known to be boring as a cliche, and they don't seem to do a lot to help that. I've seen and read enough Shakespeare to know that he's a funny guy, he's entertaining, and then man knows how to spin a story. I've seen productions of Hamlet and Romeo & Juliet that are downright hysterical, but this is played dry as bones. And the writing in this is pretty bland and obvious. Iago appears on the villains side, and then is later seen switching to the good guys side, and then the big twist on the final page is... he's double crossing the good guys! What a surprise given that he's Iago! Come on! Do something original, make it Othello that's playing the sides this time. Maybe the next volume will show that Iago isn't actually double crossing, but it doesn't matter 'cause I can't imagine I'll continue on with this series.

When Darwyn Cooke spends the majority of his introduction writing about how difficult it is to create comics, as opposed to how exciting and interesting the story we're about to read is, you know that you're in trouble. I'm sorry, but I just can't recommend this.