A stick-figure Shakespeare comic by Mya Lixian Gosling
There's no situation so dire that it can't be alleviated by a good knock-knock joke, right?
Oh. Maybe I was wrong.
Consider this a sequel to The Wars of the Roses: Knock Knock Joke Edition.
...I'm terrible at knock-knock jokes. This is what I'm trying to tell you.
As you all know, I've summarized all of Shakespeare's plays in three panels each. Well, that's all well and good, but it criminally ignores Shakespeare's narrative poems. I'm going to try and remedy that.
Wild boars are hard to draw. Uderzo makes it look so easy.
In other news, the fourth issue of The Weekly Tickle Brain e-mail newsletter hits inboxes today! If you haven't subscribed yet and want to see what you're missing, check out the past issues archive... and then sign up, so you'll never miss another issue!
Aha! At last, my first truly and totally insignificant Shakespearean Character Spotlight! Let's meet Servant!
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Sometimes I sit down to draw a comic, and my mind goes totally blank, and then you end up getting a comic like this. Sorry.
So, the interwebs have been buzzing with the announcement of George Lucas's upcoming animated film Strange Magic, which is apparently "inspired" by Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. From the scant information that has been released, it seems that the inspiration begins and ends with the concept of there being magical creatures in a woods with a potion of some sort. Still, it's nice to think about what might come from this unlikeliest of mash-ups...
I apologize for the inclusion of Jar-Jar, but really, what Star Wars character better sums up "this is to make an ass of me"?
I started doing these Shakespearean Character Spotlights to cut down my workload. "It'll be easy," I thought. "I'll just randomly pick a character and give people a quick overview of him or her! I won't have to think up jokes or spend a lot of time on it!" I mean, how much time does it really take to profile Third Servant or Soldier?
And then what happens? My random number generator gives me this guy. He's in four plays. Four plays. It's not fair.
The historical Humphrey was a much more troubling person, prone to idiotic warmongering, alienating people and generally being a self-serving prick. But the image that got handed down was of Good Duke Humphrey, and so here we have him.
In other news, I named a papier-mâché spider after Humphrey. He sits on my computer monitor at work and has a tiny top-hat made from a Post-It note. I was going to call him Richard, after the famous bottled spider, but thought that was too obvious, so I cast around for another Duke of Gloucester and settled on Humphrey. It's a very nice name, Humphrey.
Finally... have you signed up for The Weekly Tickle Brain e-mail newsletter yet? It's a super-awesome newsletter that I send out every Monday, and is stuffed with Shakespearean comic goodness, including a digest of weekly comics, a round-up of any extra material I have posted on social media, and an exclusive recommendation section where I rationally inform you about a Shakespearean-related book, film or TV show that I think is worth checking out. Or possibly I just gush about something for a couple paragraphs. In any case, it's SUPER FUN. Well, no one has complained about it yet...
Remember Thaisa, from Pericles? She had that public service announcement on Premature Burial. Well, she's back, along with her oblivious husband.
Aaaaand scene.
Time for the second installment of my Very Tiny Classics series! Today we'll be taking a look not at Shakespeare, but at one of his classical influences: Homer's Iliad.
It's all the fun of the Iliad, but it also doesn't last as long as a yellow traffic light and fits in your pocket! Let's take a look.
If you want to print out and fold your very own Tiny Classics edition of the Iliad, download this pdf, print it out at full scale, and then follow these incomprehensible instructions to fold it into an adorable little mini-comic. To see more of my mini-comics, go here.
To learn more about the extremely fun art of mini-comics, check out these resources. Mini-comics are super-fun to make and distribute.
