neilcomics

About the Book

My graphic novel of Hamlet has been published as a part of the "SparkNotes" line of guides to understanding the classics, as an ancillary to the original text by William Shakespeare. I also intended it to function as a relevant independent adaptation of the play. Fortunately, it seems to be well received in both respects. Here's a really nice review from a teacher's perspective:

"...This version of Hamlet is surprisingly imaginative and smart, as well as emotionally gripping. I studied Hamlet as part of my playwright training in college, and I still learned new stuff! For example, the scene in which Ophelia cracks up and starts handing out flowers... The graphic novel puts little scrolls next to the flowers to let the reader know what they represent...

"I especially love the way the prince himself is portrayed—a slim, trenchcoat-wearing, heavy-lidded youth with pale skin and crazed dark eyes... This is Hamlet as he's always appeared in my own mind's eye: impossibly young and heartbreakingly fragile. When he dies, you feel the tragedy of his wasted life.

"...[It's] a refreshingly accessible resource. And... it's easy on the wallet." [from Adventures of an Urban Reading Teacher]

I'm very giddy about the idea of the book being used in classrooms by open-minded educators such as this one.

Getting the book

You're likely to find it at Barnes and Noble Booksellers (it's published by a subsidiary of Barnes and Noble). In any case, your preferred store should be able to order it—you can conveniently identify it for them with this code:

ISBN: 1411498739

It's also available via most online booksellers; I recommend ordering it on Amazon.com.

The retail price is $9.95 [US].

Something Like a Preface...

I've included the more non-essential information below to make up for my reticence while working on this book. I wanted to record and hopefully share some of the considerations I put into it; please forgive any parts that might seem esoteric.

On Producing Hamlet

I've always liked and appreciated the play and was immediately drawn to the project of adapting it. However, I had some initial hesitation because I know there's a long-standing convention of really terrible comics based on literary classics. Some have argued that this is the inevitable result of even attempting the crossover, but I've realized a better explanation: The classics that have no copyright protection are a prime target for opportunistic publishers. As it's already a complicated process to adapt any story into comics, a cut-rate adaptation of a great book or play (i.e. a story that's been ingeniously adapted for another medium) will generally be awful. I figured that I could avoid that kind of circumstance, because my publisher has a good track record of committing to quality in their prose classics editions (though they hadn't released graphic novels before). Most importantly, they allowed me complete creative freedom within the constraint of the deadline, and the support of an incredibly smart, friendly, and well-qualified editor. Thus, there was a meaningful chance to do it right. I'm glad that that it went well and that I can recommend the book.

That deadline posed a significant challenge though: I had about nine months to complete the principal work, and so I had to find a way to cram a virtually unabridged version of Shakespeare's longest play into little more than two hundred pages (no scenes are cut, so it's more complete than any stage or screen adaptation you're likely to see, with the exception of Brannaugh's director's cut). This definitely limited a lot of the ideas I had in mind, but there was a fortunate side-effect of all that cramming—it's a book that's quickly-paced yet has a comfortable narrative density to it. As a reader, I've been craving meatier graphic novels that allow for more than a single-serving reading experience, and I hope I've created something which meets that standard here. Also, figuring out how to break down that huge creative task and successfully meet the deadline was a great professional learning experience. It was like grad school for comics!

On Researching Hamlet

I had a lot of fun indulging my scholarly bent on this project and drew inspiration from plenty of sources, which I'll quickly acknowledge here: The film adaptations provided some ideas for the tone of various scenes, and I even threw in a little of Sir Laurence Olivier's physical acting. Much of Grigori Kosintsev's cast seemed to resemble my character designs, which was exciting. Harold Bloom's propositions in his book Hamlet: Poem Unlimited—which interpret a much more proactive Hamlet (rather than the conventionally indecisive prince)—directly inspired a page layout as Hamlet decides to face down his death in Act V, and also inspired many other enriching details that probably wouldn't be obvious on a first read. I also found the Shakespeare In Production edition of Hamlet invaluable for its annotations regarding memorable acting and directing choices. It was always interesting to see how my ideas converged or diverged with the creative decisions of notable productions, and I was able to incorporate some cool traditions (for example, the way Hamlet crawls toward Claudius during the play-within-the-play, which made for a particularly funny panel). I tried to absorb those decisions and mix them with my own ideas to create a sort of platonic ideal in my book. I can also credit Prof. Martin Evans' Stanford University lectures for illuminating the deeper mysteries of the play, by explaining both its context within the major "crises" of Western thought, and also the most cogent twentieth-century theories flowing from Maynard Mack's seminal essay "The World of Hamlet". While I hardly integrated every interesting idea I discovered, all of this background provided excellent ballast for coming up with a worthy adaptation.

On Visualizing Hamlet

Around the time that I started the book, I serendipitously discovered Paul Karasik's and David Mazzucchelli's graphic novel version of Paul Auster's City of Glass, and I was very inspired by how inventive and clever their adaptation was, pairing Auster's text with a dreamlike stream of visual metaphors. While working on Hamlet, I often found myself wondering, What would Karasik do? For the most part, I reigned in this urge and tried to present a straightforward "performance" of the play that would be engaging and clearly understandable for younger readers. After all, this book wasn't specifically intended to treat the play's deeper themes in great depth. However, I wanted it to at least suggest more of these nuances because I see it as a point of departure for curious newcomers, and not merely an easy version of the text for "reluctant readers" (though it can be used that way as well). So I did have some fun with metaphors and motifs, and tried to develop a nonintrusive visual consciousness that comments on the story as it unfolds.

I don't want to go on critically analyzing my own book, but one example of this spirit of experimentation is the "dumbshow" sequence (which is usually edited out of most adaptations), a sort of pantomimed prologue to the play that Hamlet stages to test Claudius' reaction. I presented it in a suddenly more cartoonish style—complete with dotted-line sight and simplified shading—in the hope that this stylistic change would create the effect of a comic strip-within-a-comic book, recapitulating the feeling of Shakespeare's startling and thematically crucial invention of a play-within-a-play. My editor caught on to some of the other pieces of implied commentary in the book, so I'm optimistic about what perceptive readers will find in it.

Generally, I was inspired by David B.'s Epileptic and many other comics in using illustrations to dramatize the characters' thoughts and inner life. I was able to represent Hamlet in particular in a state of visceral struggle, which was a fun counterpoint to his mockery and cold logical inferences. I think this style also served as a very practical complement to some of the more non-naturalistic passages of Shakespeare—I hope that the parts of the play that tend to hold a modern day audience at arm's length in most versions are actually the more compelling and understandable parts of this book. If nothing else, I think that makes it a worthwhile read.

On Writing and Line Editing

The script for the book is based on the popular "No Fear Shakespeare" plain English "translation" (first published side-by-side with Shakespeare's text), which I revised with my editor Nina.

I was ambivalent about not using all of Shakespeare's original dialogue at first, but I came to agree that this choice is essential to the book's purpose as a complete guide to the play. While a visual component can certainly make a difficult text easier to read, it wouldn't provide a sufficient explanation of the literal meanings of all the archaic and abstruse lines, which is what students of the play really need.

This plain English script I started with was truly laudable for its intended purpose of side-by-side comparison with the original text (it's actually an extensive phrase-by-phrase set of annotations for the entire play!). However, I had misgivings about actually substituting it for the original dialogue in the graphic novel, mainly because it's somewhat dull without Shakespeare's language for comparison. The characters would have spoken with stilted language, cliches, and even some anachronisms. And a lot of these translations weren't totally necessary (e.g. "farewell" is replaced by "goodbye," etc.). That script is great as a study aid, but it would have been inadequate to sustain an interesting independent reading experience—as I stated above, I set out to create a book that was both of these.

So, during the penciling process, I set about redrafting the text on each page—first by finessing the language and reverting the more understandable dialogue and famous lines to their original form. The aforementioned Shakespeare In Production book was helpful in deciding how to translate some lines (since many of them have multiple possible interpretations). My main goal was keeping the Shakespearean text as familiar as possible to someone who had read my book, and vice versa. Furthering that idea, I replaced archaic words with synonyms that have the same root—for example, I translated "replication" to "reply" (instead of "answer"). Another strategy was to add a few words to certain lines to make them clear, rather than to completely change them—for example, I translated "I lack advancement" to "I lack prospects for advancement" (rather than "I have no future"). By using such methods, I tried to preserve the originality and flavor of Shakespeare's diction, if not his poetic structure. In many of the more complicated instances, my editor and copy editor were a great help in polishing the results. (Full disclosure: I didn't edit the final scene at all, for lack of time.) This was a lot of extra work, but it was worth it, not only for the improvement to the book's language but also for the experience of such a close reading of Hamlet, which in turn influenced my overall adaptation. And there were some proud private achievements—like my translation of one of the gravedigger's songs, which still rhymes! I'm also glad that so many untouched lines are made much easier to understand by slightly and decisively changing surrounding lines. I suppose that's hardly noticeable (some lines of the original Shakespeare might even be mistaken for translations!), but the more subtle it is, the more successful.

I also found that the revised script worked to my advantage in that I could use illustrations to "rescue" some of Shakespeare's ideas which had been lost or dulled in the verbal translation. This interdependence of words and images strikes me as ideal for a comics interpretation of Hamlet.

"Exeunt Ghost"

Certainly, there is room for a much, much larger and more intricate adaptation of Hamlet as a graphic novel; I wish I could have included so much more. But I'll be very content with my book if it can help anyone understand or enjoy the play a little better. If you've read it (and/or this overblown essay), I'd be very glad to know what you thought.

—Neil Babra, March 2008

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