thehefner: (Hamlet: Damn I'm Interesting)
[personal profile] thehefner
Via bleedingcool.com

KILL SHAKESPEARE is a new comic series from IDW by Anthony Del Col, Conor McCreery and Andy Belanger that’s kind of like a cross between FABLES and LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN. And Shakespeare. In which Hamlet, Romeo, Juliet, Othello and Falstaff have to team up to beat Richard III, Iago and Lady Macbeth.

...

Y'know, I'd be wayyyy more behind this if the choices weren't so frickin' obvious. And I love Hamlet, I do, but he'll be terrible on a team. The only character who really intrigues me is Falstaff. I just get the distinct impression this will be written by people with only a casual knowledge of Shakespeare, or that it'll just do like FABLES and make the characters unrecognizable while trying to seem clever (Cinderella's now a lethal spy. Sure, why not?).

If I had my way, I'd have Edgar and Edmund on the respective good/evil sides, Benedick as the dashingly snarky Han Solo type (with Beatrice as his Leia), Sir Toby and Sir Andrew as the drunken "Blue Beetle and Booster Gold" pair always cooking of crazy doomed schemes, Tullus Aulfidius as the badass tactician/warrior, Rosalind and Viola as the spies/masters of disguise, and Aaron the Moor as the resident "Scorpius/Lex Luthor/Benjamin Linus" character.

What about you, Shakespeare fans? If you could choose your own take on this premise, which characters would you include?

Date: 2009-10-30 06:42 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] thehefner.livejournal.com
hahaha

Of course, if we keep this up, we risk ending up with SHAKESPEARE BABIES. Then again, I know I'd pay to see Li'l Titus Andronicus.

Date: 2009-10-30 07:00 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] box-in-the-box.livejournal.com
Actually, my idea was inspired by the fact that a) I loved Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead and b) I had a sophomore English teacher, Leonard DeSimone, who explained Hamlet in a way that always stuck with me.

When one of the kids commented on the perhaps less-than-realistic degree to which Hamlet was losing his shit (yes, even when you discounted his "playing at madness" deal), Mr. DeSimone said, "The mistake you're mistaking is the same that a lot of people make who present this play. You can't judge him by ADULT standards. Remember, life expectancies were a lot shorter in those days, so when it's said that Hamlet is going to 'university,' that's probably a lot closer to high school than college now. Hamlet was probably not that far off from your age. Imagine that YOU just came home from school, and your mom is married to your uncle, whom you're pretty sure killed your dad. How well would YOU handle it?"

Thus, my conception of Hamlet as an emo teen was born.

September 2012

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