In With the Old

Welcome to a new generation of graphic novels: one which creates a new storytelling world with famous characters of our past. The success of the award-winning Fables has far surpassed anything that can be written here; Bill Willingham’s works with characters from folklore to fairy tales have garnered 14 Eisner Awards (the Oscars of the graphic novel world) over its 9-year run. Fables has most recently released its 100^th issue, not to mention the spin-off stories of Jack of Fables, the prequel 1001 Nights of Snowfall, a prose novel entitled Peter and Max, and most recently the release of Cinderella: From Fabletown with Love, the latter being written by Chris Roberson. Instead of retelling the famous tales of Little Red Riding Hood or Pinocchio, Bill Willingham has instead integrated all the fables into our own world. The fables live in the Upper East Side of Manhattan or on a segregated farm in upstate New York, doing their best to hide their magic from the regular people (like us readers) who are not from folklore and have no special powers.

The success of this series has perhaps inspired the latest graphic novel hit, Kill Shakespeare, a series created by two Canadians, Anthony Del Col and Conor McCreery. Kill Shakespeare has a strong parallel with Fables, as this story incorporates all of the characters of the many books of William Shakespeare into one integrated tale. The first arc tells the story of a young Hamlet, who has just lost his father, the King of Denmark. Prince Hamlet must then choose to either fight the evil Richard the III who has teamed up with the voluptuous Lady Macbeth, or to side with King Richard who has promised to resurrect Hamlet’s father from the grave in return for one simple task: kill the wizard William Shakespeare. The story of Kill Shakespeare, too new to have the depth of the likes of Fables, manages to peak our interest based on our fondness and curiosity for the writings of Shakespeare’s stories from over 400 years ago.

The successes of both series are well documented. Fables is currently one of the longest running graphic novels and has no foreseeable end in sight, especially since characters from folklore do not age. Kill Shakespeare is in its early stages, but on the right path. The co-creators claim that their story idea has the potential to be a multi-billion dollar series, amongst the famous movies/books of Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. After releasing the comic version, Kill Shakespeare was recently awarded to top prize of $10,000 for the Toronto International Film Festival contest “Pitch This!”, an annual competition for the best original movie pitch of the year. But where is the line between creativity and drawing from the success of legendary stories?

Both Fables and Kill Shakespeare no doubt draw their interest from the success of legendary stories from centuries ago. As readers, we feel we already know the characters from Shakespeare or our favourite nursery rhymes in a certain light. People have preconceived notions of how the character is and should act, so the storytelling can take centre stage from the very beginning. There’s less need to develop how these characters look or should act because their traits have long since been established. The author, be it Bill Willingham or the team of Del Col/McCreery, must balance a fine line between engaging the past characters with their own interpretations, yet still being faithful to the original characters’ traits for the fable-lover or Shakespeare buff. For example, the story of Fables centres greatly around Bigby, aka. the Big Bad Wolf for the story of The Three Little Pigs. Though Bigby is a reformed ‘man’ (using magic from other Fables to make him able to transform from wolf to human) and a model citizen, he still cannot hide some of his most famous traits, such as his fiery temper or his ability to create tornado like winds with his breath.

The story of Kill Shakespeare is a more sensitive as many English literature academics take offense to the retelling of famous Shakespearean characters. Kimberley Cox, a Shakespearean scholar (though perhaps best known for being the girlfriend of Frank Miller, the famous graphic novelist of The Dark Knight, Sin City, and 300) has been very vocal in her opposition to the storytelling of Del Col and McCreery. She has claimed to want to “bitch slap whoever was involved in creating it” and said that the authors should very well kill their own storytelling from butchering the works of Shakespeare further.

The key component for both Fables and Kill Shakespeare is trying to be true to the original characters, while at the same time creating a new story that is both engaging and gripping for a new medium and audience. In an L.A. Times interview, Willingham has maintained that the crux of his homework for Fables is reading and re-reading fairy tales, nursery rhymes, etc., discovering new characters and achieving a greater understanding of them. In the same way, Kill Shakespeare’s aforementioned critic, Ms. Cox, has claimed that in order to succeed on the topic of Shakespeare “you have to actually do your homework!”

Kill Shakespeare have maintained in the face of their critics, so long as people are talking about Shakespeare in a new light or amongst a new audience, hopefully this will lead some new readers to the works of Shakespeare (or even past readers back to the greatness of Shakespeare). The same could surely be said for the discovery of a new Fable or folktale character, in turn inspiring us to discover them in their original storybook form.

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