Shakespeare and Comics: Negotiating Cultural Value

From their inception, ‘low culture’ comics have intersected with the ‘high culture’ of Shakespeare. This is the first book-length collection dedicated entirely to the exploration of this collision. Its chapters illuminate the ways in which different texts, time periods, politics, authors, media, approaches and forms interact. Ranging from Classic Comics to Marvel, from tebeo to manga, from independent to mainstream comics, texts explored include Y: The Last Man, Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess’s 'A Midsummer Night’s Dream' (The Sandman #19), The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, I Am Alfonso Jones, Marvel 1602, Doom 2099, and manga adaptations of The Tempest and Macbeth, among many others. As comic books and their big-screen progeny dominate mainstream popular culture, the association of Shakespeare with comics offers creators and critics tools with which to interrogate the place of Shakespeare within the English and global literary and cultural traditions. Shakespeare and Comics argues that, at a moment when the reassessment and reimagining of literary canons has become more urgent than ever, thinking about Shakespeare through the lens of comics invites us to imagine a literary and cultural landscape in which so-called ‘great works’ exist alongside and in equal conversation with marginalized writers, topics and forms.

Jim Casey is an independent scholar based in the USA. He has retired from teaching but is still active in the field, and has over thirty peer-reviewed publications, including an edition of Shakespeare and Fletcher's The Two Noble Kinsmen and the collection Shakespeare/Not Shakespeare (2017). He is a Fulbright Fellow, National Endowment for the Humanities Grant recipient, and past President of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts.

Brandon Christopher is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Winnipeg, Canada. His publications, teaching, and research focus on Shakespeare and early modern drama and culture, comics, disability studies, popular culture, and on the intersections between these categories.

Mark Thornton Burnett is Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen's University Belfast, UK. His books include Shakespeare and World Cinema (2013), 'Hamlet' and World Cinema (2019), Constructing 'Monsters' in Shakespearean Drama and Early Modern Culture (2002) and Filming Shakespeare in the Global Marketplace (2007; 2nd ed. 2012). He is series editor of the Arden Shakespeare series Shakespeare and Adaptation.