Macbeth (illustrated by K. Briggs)

In my notes on the Macbeth graphic novel illustrated by Gareth Hinds I mentioned some of the ways he’d cut and adapted the language of the play, concluding that it wasn’t a full-text Macbeth, nor should it have been.

This Macbeth, illustrated by K. Briggs, is a full-text version of the play, and while I want to give credit to Briggs for her ambition I came away thinking that this sort of thing isn’t well advised. I gave up on the graphic adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? for much the same reason. The text gets to be too much, and if you know the novel or the play that’s being adapted well enough you tend to skim it anyway and just look at the pictures.

I also want to credit Briggs for her striking visuals. She’s got quite an original sense of style, playing a lot with the format of the pages and mixing in various novel bits of imagery, like tarot cards, into a collage. She’ll also flip images upside-down, or present scraps of text or medieval-themed design elements as background. You can spend quite a bit of time on nearly every page, pulling it apart. And there are other creative flourishes I enjoyed too. Macbeth is so often presented, at least today, as a heroic young man that I liked seeing him as a bald, professorial type. At least he looks a lot like professors I had. You could roll your eyes at Malcolm appearing as a Black woman, but given the spirit of the proceedings this barely stood out.

But then there is all the text, which Briggs does try to jazz up as much as she can but which still just feels like it’s getting in the way. To be honest, and not only because I do know the play pretty well and was skimming, I started wondering at one point if the book might have worked better as a strictly graphic presentation, with no text at all. I mean, they made a whole lot of silent films out of Shakespeare’s plays, so, as crazy as it may at first seem, the words really aren’t indispensable.

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Macbeth (illustrated by Gareth Hinds)

Even though Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s shortest plays (I think only The Comedy of Errors has fewer lines), most productions still make a fair number of cuts, and we shouldn’t be surprised that a graphic novel adaptation, coming in at 134 pages, would be any different. Gareth Hinds doesn’t go wrong in getting rid of Hecate’s appearance before the witches in Act III Scene v (which Shakespeare might not have written), as well as the long and (in my opinion, tedious) exchange between Malcolm and Macduff in Act IV Scene iii. This isn’t a full-text Macbeth, nor should it be.

Purists may take fairer exception to places where the language has been simplified or expurgated. Among the foul ingredients going into the witches’ cauldron, for example, there’s a “Finger of birth-strangled babe / Ditch-delivered by a drab.” That second line, identifying the strangled babe as having been birthed by a prostitute in a ditch, is omitted by Hinds. And at another point a notorious crux is done away with in Macbeth’s concern over washing the blood from his hands:

Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.

Should that final line read “Making the green one, red”? As in making the green ocean red? Or should it be read as saying “Making the green, one red”? Meaning making the entire ocean turn red? Hinds avoids the problem by changing the line to “No, this my hand will rather stain the great seas crimson.” Which is at least clearer, if you’re no fan of ambiguity.

As far as Hinds’s visual representation of the play goes, I think there’s good and bad. The good takes the form of a lot of interesting concepts like the witches first appearing as birds perched in a tree, Macbeth’s elongated shadow taking the form of a dagger as he sets off to kill Duncan, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth literally wading in blood after the scene with Banquo’s ghost (where Banquo’s ghost takes several different, monstrous forms), and Lady Macbeth’s obsessive hand-washing represented by multiplying sets of scrubbing hands. The not-so-good is mainly down to Hinds’s figures, which all look stiff and artificial to me. Adding to this effect is the lettering, which is just a regular font that doesn’t go well with the action and adds a layer to the generic feel. I wonder if comic lettering is a dying art now though. Too bad if it is. It’s something we often overlook, but it can make a difference.

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The Haunt of Fear Volume 2

This second volume of The Haunt of Fear collects issues #7-12 and I think the first thing you should know about it is that every one of the 30 stories (I’m including the text-only stories that appeared once in every issue) was written by editor Al Feldstein. Plus I’m pretty sure he was writing “The Old Witch’s Niche” which was the mailbag feature. At the same time, even though I’d have to check this, I’d be pretty sure he was writing a lot of the stories for EC’s other titles, like Tales from the Crypt, Vault of Horror, Weird Fantasy, etc. So if there are some duds in the mix here, or the action starts to follow a formula, are you surprised? When EC was operating at its peak in the early 1950s Feldstein was an absolute engine.

But this isn’t to say he was a one-man show. EC’s stable of regular artists were becoming well known to a hungry fan base. Names like “Ghastly” Graham Ingels. Johnny Craig, Jack Davis (probably my favourite, though it’s close), and Jack Kamen. What’s more, Feldstein knew these guys were the real stars, and in the later comics collected here he started a regular feature profiling “The Artist of the Issue.”

The first two stories are representative of EC near its best and then near its worst. “Room for One More!” has a young man who wants to be buried next to his deceased parents in the family mausoleum. But there’s only one spot left in the crypt, so he has to kill off all his relatives and make sure their bodies are never found so he doesn’t lose his spot. As he puts it:

“No! I won’t be cheated out of my rightful place! After the last spot is filled, the rest of us are to be buried in the soil! Well, not me! I’m not going to be stripped of my flesh by crawling worms and rotting grave-mold! After I die, I want to be put in a silk-lined casket . . . and placed in the cool clean air of the Whitman crypt!”

He does a good job carrying out his plan, but of course his murdered relations come back from the grave and tear him to pieces and then take over the last spot for themselves.

It’s silly, but in the crazy EC manner, indulging their penchant for corpses coming back to life and meting out rough justice. The next story, “The Basket!”, is just derivative though. I think even the thickest EC readers will have twigged to the fact that the wicker basket Mr. Cabez always carries on his right shoulder disguises his second head, a wicked Siamese twin. So the big reveal, which so many EC stories build to, is a disappointment.

I’m sure Feldstein knew that story was a loser. He even spends a later story, “Ear Today . . . Gone Tomorrow!”, with the Crypt-Keeper playing a series of gags on the reader’s expectations. Sure you know where the fertilizer company situated right next to a graveyard is going to find a solution to their need for bone-meal, but do you know what’s going to happen next? And after that? I didn’t, even with the groaner of a title. But then I didn’t think a story called “The Irony of Death!” was going to be set in an iron foundry either.

Another thing Feldstein knew, without needing the results of the readers’ polls for their favourite stories presented in the next issue’s “Old Witch’s Niche,” was that people saw the “text” instalments (short stories without any accompanying art) as skippable filler. “Aw . . . go ahead!” the Witch says just before one. “Read it!” She’s begging you! (Unfortunately, that particular story is one of the worst.)

Mostly then this is just a fun mix of silliness and gore, with stories that usually show some greedy person getting their just desserts. Oddly enough, it’s in the story “Poetic Justice!” that this looked-for comeuppance most disappoints. More satisfying is a story where a guide lets his client get captured by headhunters and the shrunken head returns to pay him back in a manner that plays like a version of those stories about disembodied hands doing people in. Only this time the head has to roll around on the floor and trip the guide up before biting him to death. Because it’s only a head, you see. “The Gorilla’s Paw!” is another riff on the theme of being careful what you wish for. It’s all that sort of thing, familiar themes endlessly repeated, and yet it doesn’t get old.

What does wear a bit is the Old Witch, the Crypt-Keeper, and the Vault-Keeper constantly pestering readers to send away to get their copies of 5”x7” autographed photos of the three GhouLunatics “as we actually appear in the inhuman flesh.” Only 10 cents apiece or 25 cents for all three. I always wondered what these pictures actually were, and it was only from reading the EC history Foul Play! that I found out they were photos of artist Johnny Craig made up to look like the three different characters. I imagine if you have any of these original pictures now in decent condition they’re worth a lot of money.

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