Required Reading is DoomRocket’s love chest, opened once a month to champion a book that we adore and you should read. The latest: K Briggs’ adaptation of Macbeth, available now from Avery Hill Publishing.
by Arpad Okay. From a circle of blood, a ghostly face tells Macbeth what he wants to hear. An ill omen uncovered by warriors seeking reward, ones who were to rest in honor come the dawn instead are kept restless by delusions. What a terrible night for a curse! Shakespeare’s tragedy of power and betrayal is the account of a noble couple, blind to what they have, maddened by an unquenchable thirst for greatness. And so everyone in their path, from partners to kings, must fall. One brother betrays another, unable to recognize the paradise of the present when phantom visions dance on the horizon. A kingdom won in blood and kept in blood ends the same.
K Briggs’ graphic novel adaptation understands blood. It plays the role of an elemental force in the artwork. Red is given power as primal to the page as white. The white of the blank page endures with art on top of it as negative space; Briggs lets the blood flow without interruption. The intention behind the script informs the visuals, and the reader is treated to psychedelic kaleidoscopics interpreting the subtext in addition to actors performing the lines. Macbeth draws upon the text, but its imagery is just as filled with the history and iconography of legend.
It’s a super-adaptation, reminiscent of Colleen Doran’s heavily researched work adapting Neil Gaiman, incorporating proto-comic aesthetics from historic illustrated storytelling. The blend of illustration (as opposed to sequential art) and collage recalls David Mack without the repetition of imagery. Like these other cartoonists, Briggs’ movement in and out of comics conventions rests on a formal understanding of the medium. I don’t have words that can do justice to the blend of familiar and oblique in the artwork. A swirl of old and new, historical and implied, images that have come before and depictions of Macbeth that are utterly unique. Art, as we know it, is the diving board that Briggs springs forth.
Macbeth takes Shakespeare’s lack of stage directions and runs with it. It’s a magnificent, abstract emotional interpretation where the set dressing is all the effigies Shakespeare evokes. A great joy in the Bard’s work is the text itself, the wordplay you only really get when reading. Sewing together the raw wit of the bare play with massively expressive visuals derived from what’s between the lines is a breathtaking display of comics as an adaptive medium. A very subtle touch on how the stage ultimately doesn’t matter; it could be Broadway, or it could be a field. It could be dreams.
What you’ve got in Briggs’ Macbeth is this luscious, freewheeling display of illustrative and intellectual prowess, able to take the ideas and go anywhere with them that will fit on a page. Panels and preconceptions be damned; Macbeth can look like anything. On the other hand, the story must absolutely adhere to a script. But then the script is nothing but who’s talking and what they’re saying. Everything else is implied. Those implications are the heat with which Briggs cooks. Artistic constraint is the unlikely friction that sparks adaptation fire.
A visceral story with visceral artwork. Bold color choices slash out. Snow white ghost emerges from a crimson portal, couched in the green entropic rot when bronze is forgotten. Panels are there for contrast. The soliloquy splash pages tell a visual story that winds back and forth, grows and changes, the full run of the moon’s phases. Panels isolate opposites to play against each other. Panels separate dialog, rivals, lovers. They divide the living and the dead.
Macbeth is set in a shuffling tarot deck of grimoire imagery more than a setting. The reader floats through the pages anchored by rhythms of dialog. The abstract art everywhere suits the madness in the story. The argument between Macbeth and wife is more concrete for them than the land they wish to dominate. The castles and kingdoms they possess never satisfy, and so Macbeth is acted out against a backdrop of unfiltered desire and carnage.
A shimmering interpretation. Briggs speaks to every aspect the play has — and more, making interpretations concrete, bringing together endless variations, bottomless innovation, contradiction and truth. Macbeth is madness. K Briggs’ adaptation is, like Shakespeare’s play, a challenge that rewards deep reading.
Macbeth is available now. For purchasing information, click this.
Avery Hill Publishing / $22.95
Written and illustrated by K Briggs.
From Macbeth, by William Shakespeare.
Lettered by K Briggs.
Check out this 4-page preview of K Briggs’ Macbeth, courtesy of Avery Hill Publishing:
More Required Reading:
Griz Grobus is doodle-powered post-apocalypse from Simon Roy
Iggy Craig’s Sad Girl Space Lizard is honest-to-goodness porno-mech comics
Nicole Goux crafts captivating tales about clutter and clamor in Rituals
