Customer Reviews

Hamlet (No Fear Shakespeare Graphic Novels)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I really enjoyed this comic! I am familiar with much of the artist's work, and this piece is both his most ambitious and most successful to date.

I'm not a Shakespeare fanatic though I do enjoy his work both on paper and in performance, and I found the adaptation visually striking and had no complaints about the edits to the text. In fact, I thought Mr. Babra did an excellent job of keeping the story moving while maintaining a sense of the imagery and flow of the original.

If you love independent comics, I recommend this highly.
If you are a Hamlet purist, I recommend reading the play.

Neil Babra's done an outstanding job with this one. His character designs, graytones, page layouts are all superb. The characters' "acting" is strong, the pacing works well, and (most impressively) the script is a hybrid of Shakespeare's original and SparkNotes' dumbed-down "translation," capturing the best features of both (and leaving Shakespeare's best lines undamaged). Note also the fantastic frontispieces drawn by Babra for each act - each one a masterpiece I'd be proud to hang in my house. Hats off to Babra for taking a project that could easily have been phoned in (SparkNotes? Seriously?) and knocking it out of the park. This is a fine graphic novel.

I teach Hamlet. As anyone who teaches Shakespeare to lower ability readers knows, getting students to read Shakespeare for homework is like pulling your own teeth. Well, I have found that if I copy certain "big" scenes out of this novel and assign it for homework. The kids read it and are ready to discuss the next day.

Babra has done some excellent work here. While I think transposing Shakespeare's language to our run o' the mill idioms loses a lot, it does work. Especially with as well matched as that informal tone is to the line work Babra has used. The images and the word balloons fit well together. And beyond that, the word balloons are fantastic. That may sound like an odd compliment, but so few comics artists use the full range of the medium's conventions. A simply tail from a word balloon pointing to someone's face clarifies who the speaker is; however, the twists and turns that Babra sometimes uses in those tails add to the meaning of the statement. ("I can tell a hawk from a handsaw" definitely deserves a figure-8 knot in its tail.) Similarly, the use of abstract expressionistic backgrounds complements and amplifies the varieties of emotion and madness in the tale. All in all, it's a book that I am completely happy I invested in.

Just buy this from Books-a-Million to make sure you get the graphic novel. Amazon's used book partner sent me a copy of Shakespeare's novel, NOT the graphic novel. I clearly ordered the GN. Total waste of time.

this seller is great! turst me, the item is right. though not in perfect condition. but it is still pretty good.

Sometimes it seems like people forget that Shakespeare's plays were not written to be read, but to be performed on stage. When I first tried to read Shakespeare as an adolescent, I was lost and annoyed by the experience.

However, seeing the same material performed on stage completely blew me away and I was hooked after that.

I think that these books help to add back in the visual aspect of Shakespeare which is lost when you simply read it. Graphic novels can convey some of the emotion are behind the character's lines. This brings out the drama and excitement and makes for a more enjoyable experience.

This book is the best one, of the Shakespeare graphic novels I seen. My kids (ages 13 and 15) read this with relish and now we are watching the 4 hour Ken Branagh version on DVD.

Students are more free to enjoy the lyricism and poetry of the dialogue when they aren't so focused on trying to figure out what the heck is going on.

I do recommend this book as a wonderful introduction into the drama of Shakespeare. Purists, beware, it simplifies the language and this will probably drive you nuts. But I give them kudos for doing a good job of trying to keep the more famous lines intact.

I've read the non-comic versions of "No Fear Shakespeare" and found them quite useless. You'd be better off reading Cliff's Notes because once the language is taken out there's no point to claiming you've read Shakespeare. In fact side by side with an original text they might even come in handy. If it weren't for the fact that other companies already publish side by side texts with better and more accurate adaptations. Your money is better spent elsewhere. But useless as those "No Fear" books were, I never thought they were utter garbage. Until this came along.

I'm no purist when it comes to Shakespeare, but I do love his work. Now that may seem to some people to automatically disqualify me from reviewing this because admittedly it's NOT Shakespeare and some may argue "that's the point." But the writers here are using the free admission that this is "not Shakespeare" as a flimsy shield to hide their shortcomings behind. There are plenty of great books out there for children that use Shakespeare's own words. Not long ago I attended a school play with third graders performing "A Midsummer Night's Dream" - every line uttered by the main characters were the Bard's, with two narrators written into the play to explain the action. Nothing was lost. No one scratched their heads in bewilderment. They must have had a killer adapted script for those kids. This "No Fear" attempt to bring Hamlet to teens fails miserably.

I have nothing against comic books. Love em. Own many. It's a great genre of literature. And I agree that comics are a great way to adapt drama. I can go toe to toe with a lot of "serious" lovers of the form.

But this "No Fear Hamlet" is lazy stuff. I can only assume that they protest too much with their calls of "No Fear" and that overall they do fear Shakespeare more than anyone else. What will you get by buying this book? A comic book with a somewhat similar plot and really bad dialog written by someone who didn't really "get" Shakespeare's characters or their actions. Many times I wondered whether the author had actually read the original play AT ALL. It's fairly well known that Shakespeare frequently adapted his plays from earlier works, but even in attempting to read this tripe as yet a further adaptation - in that tradition it come up short. If you're going to re-adapt his work and still call it "Shakespeare" at least try to get the characters right. Forget even the language and poetry but at least get the friggin characters right! Remember that movie "O"? That "wasn't Shakespeare" but they did understand the characters and Shakepeare's contributions to the characters (it would be a delusion to think that because you're adapting the plot then you're adapting Shakespeare because he didn't write the plot!) and in that regard the movie was a dead-on accurate and brilliant adaptation. The things they do and say in this version just don't seem to match up with anything I can see in the originals even though the setting is the same.

I say "Emo Hamlet" although I know some people may already consider Hamlet overly childish and dramatic, but the writer of this book just took that famously false assumption and rode with it. Please don't buy it. Check it out at your library and roll your eyes and scratch your head in bewilderment (more than Shakespeare's original language could ever cause). Don't insult yourself - you can do better than "Hamlet for near-illiterates"

Remember the character in Slings & Arrows: The Complete Collection, based on Keanu Reeves (you heard right), who played Hamlet and tried to modernize the text because he only wanted to speak how he "feels"? Yeah, picture that for a second. Everyone else is doing Shakespeare and the star is saying things like, "Aw, man, don't you get it, mom? you killed my dad! F**** Me! This is bullsh**!"

That's pretty much this book. Keanu Reeves Shakespeare.