The Fabler

Have you ever felt that Coles Notes versions of classical literature just weren’t quite ‘Coles Notes’ enough?

I mean, sure they managed (using black magic and wizardry) to congest Crime and Punishment down to a palatable 85 pages of overview, and yes, Jane Austen is a lot more sensible when you don’t have to muddle through hours of haughty 19th century prose.

Still, do you ever find yourself thinking that they really could have gotten where they were going a lot faster?

Enter Ontario-based comic artist Eric Kim, who answered a resounding ‘yes’ to the above question. To prove that any classical narrative could effectively be reduced to two-to-four panels of dialogue, Kim set about putting to shame one of literature’s greatest icons; the Bard himself.

“My friends and I were all sitting around, having some drinks and watching movies,” Kim says modestly of the project’s humble beginnings, “At some point in the night, someone mentioned Scott McCloud and the notion of condensing a narrative into two panels. It sounded pretty ridiculous, so I tossed off a two-panel version of Hamlet. Turned out it to be pretty funny, actually. My friends all thought it was pretty hilarious, so I kept it up.”

From there, Eric embarked on an epic two-and-a-half-month quest to translate all of William Shakespeare’s plays into glorious, two panel comic book form. That’s right, Every. Last. One.

The results were collected and published Eric Kim’s new book, The Complete Plays of William Shakespeare. I’m delighted to say that Kim’s friends were right to encourage him – his collection of masterly rendered stick-man drawings and modern takes on Shakespearean dialogue are truly, ridiculously funny.

Any author that describes the first part of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with the dialogue “Holy shit! I’m a donkey!”/”Well shit! Let’s get it on!” has my vote of confidence.

“It’s weird,” says Kim, on the reaction he’s been receiving from Shakespeare fans, “It’s all been pretty positive. I think it’s because I’ve made an adaptation that doesn’t dumb down the material, and in some cases, actually incentivizes (is that a real word?) the reading of the work. I hate Shakespeare. And now I want to go read “A Winter’s Tale” because of how people have responded to it. It’s kind of fascinating.”

Hate, perhaps, is a strong word. As the dedication to the source material would indicate, Kim’s research on Shakespeare’s works alone shows his appreciation for the legendary author.

Says Kim:

“I’ve read Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Macbeth, King Lear, and Romeo and Juliet. Basically anything that was required reading for high school. My appreciation for Shakespeare is pretty superficial.”

Thank goodness for Wikipedia.

Despite Eric’s extensive research, some plays still proved harder than others to Coles-size into accessible versions of Shakespeare.

“The hardest to summarize was the last one in the collection, Cymbeline,” says Kim. ” It’s a lot of plot to compress into two panels, so that mostly became just two people summarizing everything. Well, I guess most of them are about two people summarizing everything.”

If only Will Shakespeare lived to see the Twitter generation. He certainly could have learned a thing or two about getting to the point.

The easiest play to summarize, says Kim, was Hamlet.

“I know that play pretty well, so I was kind of sad when it was over. I think that it has more of the intent of the book at heart: to compress what people already know and put it into a humourous context. The lesser known plays tend to read more like summaries, which is fun too, but sort of aside from the initial intent of the work.”

I also asked Eric about his influences outside of the Elizabethan area in putting together the book. Specifically, I was curious if he was inspired at all by fellow history-reinterpreter Kate Beaton.

“I have a huge admiration for her work, and also for her depth of knowledge about so many figures in history,” he says. “You can see her passion in it, as well as all the little things that bother her in recounting of history, I think. In comparison, I think I tend to care about literature, so history is just to lend context to the work I’m reading. Admittedly, most of my reading is pretty much pop-culture stuff. I’m pretty fascinated by sci-fi in the mid-eighties. But when I need to research, I go into it.”

Eric says his modern inspirations fall more in the camp of xkcd.

“If it were written by Larry the Cable Guy,” he adds. “I think that Kate Beaton’s writing is much more clever and far less profane than mine.”

Kim’s not entirely sure if he would ever extend the two-panel author concept beyond Shakespeare:

“I’d always pictured this to be sort of a one-off thing. Though I’ve really considered making a “safe for work” version. Ultimately, I’d hate to be pigeonholed as someone that just does this one joke over and over again. There are many things that I’d like to pursue, as my editors at Oni Press are well aware.”

Unfortunately, at this time he can’t say much about his current work with Oni Press. Whatever it is, it has been big enough to keep him from updating his Transmission X webcomic, Streta, for several months now.

“I think I’m going to have to let that one go,” Kim says of the sci-fi webcomic, “I’ve been rewriting Streta ever since I went on hiatus, and it’s just not lining up right. I think I’m freaking myself out, thinking that people want more than what is there. But on top of that, all of my fears as a writer, they’re being realized. I have to stop until I can see where I’m going again. I don’t think it’s going to happen by November, ultimately. I’m not sure when it’ll happen.”

Sad news for Streta fans, indeed.

The good news is that whatever Kim’s working on for Oni Press, he reassures us it will be interesting. And until then, there’s always The Complete Plays of William Shakespeare – which you should probably pick up from Kim’s online store as soon as possible, if you haven’t already.

Consider it doing your brain a favour.

For more from Eric Kim, you can check out his various works on his official website, view recent art updates on his blog, and follow him on Twitter.

While you’re at it, here’s a rad illustration that he did for VENT, UDON’s 10 year anniversary anthology:

-Written by Kevin de Vlaming