BITE-SIZED BARD

I’m not sure which sacrilege is greater: reducing Shakespeare’s plays to two-panel cartoons or doing them as cartoons to begin with. But I’m eager to see how cartoonist Eric Kim has done it. Mark Medley at Canada’s National Post describes Kim’s “Hamlet” like this: “In the first panel, a dejected young prince is consoled by his father's ghost; in the next, Fortinbras stands amidst a pile of corpses, wondering what the $&?! just happened.”

Kim admits that he might have left something out, but he plunged ahead anyhow: “Let’s see if I can do it with all of them.” And he did. All 36 of Shakespeares plays now appear in this disastrously abbreviated form in Kim’s The Complete Plays of William Shakespeare (Inkskratch Publishing, $9.99), in stores now. To order a copy, visit inkskratch. com.

Kim’s desecration doesn’t end (or, rather, begin) with abbreviating the Bard. Kim didn’t even read all of Shakespeare: "I wanted to avoid doing as much actual reading of the material as possible," he says. So he consulted just Wikipedia. And a few librarian friends.

It’s doubtful, Medley says, that Kim’s “resources” will approve of what he’s done. In the book's (admittedly tongue-in-cheek) introduction, Kim's friend Andrew Wheeler accuses the cartoonist of "merrily [taking] his scrivening tools to the Bard's great works like a sugar-crazed child attacking a pinata.".

But for Medley, Kim's book is an interesting exploration of Shakespeare's work: by stripping away all but the essentials — and even those are often missing — one sees the plays in a new, sometimes unexpected, light. As Kim notes, "All the characterization, the themes, are stripped out—it's nothing there. It's essentially just distilled plot. And reading those plots, it's fascinating to see how Shakespeare constructs his works."

The “nothing” that Kim leaves in the works of Shakespeare is not, of course, Shakespeare. It’s not even Shakespearean. It’s a joke. And Kim is well aware of it: asked if he could reduce the plays to one panel, not two, he thinks about it for a second before laughing. "Absolutely not,” he said. “It was hard enough getting them into two."