Manga Shakespeare is a series of graphic novel adaptations of William Shakespeare’s plays. A fusion of classic Shakespeare with manga visuals, these are cutting-edge adaptations that will intrigue and grip readers. Drawing inspiration from trend-setting Japan and using Shakespeare’s original texts, this series brings to life the bard’s words for students, Shakespeare enthusiasts and manga fans.

Manga is a dynamic, emotional and cinematic medium easily absorbed by the eye. Its attractive art and simple storytelling methods enthuse readers to approach Shakespeare’s work in the way he intended – as entertainment.

The first Manga Shakespeare books – Hamlet and Romeo & Juliet – were published in March, to great critical acclaim in the UK. With Romeo and Juliet set in modern-day Tokyo, and Hamlet in a cyberworld, these backdrops make Shakespeare more accessible to today’s reader. Richard III and The Tempest were then released in September 2007 and A Midsummer Night’s Dream was published in February 2008. There are more titles in the series to follow including Macbeth and Julius Caesar in June and As You Like It and Othello due in November.

Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare’s most famous love story, unfurls in a dramatic manga setting, in which Verona becomes a street in the highly fashionable Shibuya district of Tokyo. The star-crossed lovers, touching in their youth and innocence, are caught up in a bitter feud between two Yakuza families (Japan’s ‘mafia’) whose rivalry erupts into violence and killing on the streets. Romeo, a rock star, is a Montague who falls in love with Juliet, a Capulet. They defy their parents and consummate their passion in secret. This is a story of love, revenge, violence and tragedy.

Hamlet is set in a dramatic futuristic world. The year is 2017. Global climate change has devastated the Earth. This is now a cyberworld in constant dread of war. The state of Denmark has grown prosperous and defended itself successfully against neighbouring states. But could it be that its greatest threat comes not from without, but from within the state itself?

It is in this cyberworld that we find the young Hamlet. His grief over his father’s recent death turns to something far darker when the ghost of his father appears to him. Hamlet is very soon to discover that something is rotten in the state of Denmark…

SelfMadeHero, winner of the UK Young Publisher of the Year award for 2008, is an imprint of Metro Media Ltd, a UK-based book publisher specializing in manga and graphic novels.

Self Made Hero

In related news, the publisher introduced the Eye Classics series in October 2007, transforming classic literature into another art form. The books feature acknowledged leaders in the world of graphic novels and bandes dessinées. Titles include The Trial, Nevermore, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Master and Margarita, and Crime and Punishment.

Eye Classics

While you’re surfing, check out another UK publisher of illustrated classics: Classical Comics.

I realize that I have a recurring interest in notions of “belonging”.

The Arrival is a migrant story told as a series of wordless images that might seem to come from a long forgotten time.

A man leaves his wife and child in an impoverished town, seeking better prospects in an unknown country on the other side of a vast ocean.

He eventually finds himself in a bewildering city of foreign customs, peculiar animals, curious floating objects and indecipherable languages. With nothing more than a suitcase and a handful of currency, the immigrant must find a place to live, food to eat and some kind of gainful employment.

He is helped along the way by sympathetic strangers, each carrying their own unspoken history: stories of struggle and survival in a world of incomprehensible violence, upheaval and hope.

According to Shaun Tan, the Australian author and illustrator of the book which was four years in the making: “One of my main sources for visual reference was New York in the early 1900s, a great hub of mass-migration for Europeans.”

“A lot of my ‘inspirational images’ blu-tacked to the walls of my studio were old photographs of immigrant processing at Ellis Island, visual notes that provided underlying concepts, mood and atmosphere behind many scenes that appear in the book. Other images I collected depicted street scenes in European, Asian and Middle-Eastern cities, old-fashioned vehicles, random plants and animals, shopfront signs and posters, apartment interiors, photos of people working, eating, talking and playing, all of them chosen as much for their ordinariness as their possible strangeness.”

“Elements in my drawings evolved gradually from these fairly simple origins. A colossal sculpture in the middle of a city harbour, the first strange sight that greets arriving migrants, suggests some sisterhood with the Statue of Liberty. A scene of a immigrants travelling in a cloud of white balloons was inspired by pictures of migrants boarding trains as well as the night-time spawning of coral polyps, two ideas associated by common underlying themes – dispersal and regeneration.”

‘‘Everything is really fundamentally mysterious. In learning to recognize meaning and familiarize ourselves with our everyday world — to make sense of it all, and manage our lives — we tend to overlook this basic fact. Things become familiar, obvious, self-evident. For me, the practice of drawing and writing is an opportunity to consider what is otherwise, to look at certain objects, qualities, and situations at length and interrogate them to the point where you can appreciate their fundamental strangeness, or uniqueness.”

Shaun Tan is an award-winning artist and writer who lives near Perth, Australia.

Mostly self-taught, Tan was 16 when his SF illustrations first appeared in Australian magazine Aurealis in 1990.

He has received numerous awards for his picture books. He is the illustrator and author of The Red Tree and The Lost Thing; and in 2006, his graphic novel The Arrival won the “Book of the Year” prize as part of the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards.

Shaun Tan’s website

Illustrations from “Arrival” at New York Magazine

Shaun Tan illustrations at Papertigers

Interview excerpts in Locus Magazine

After a lifetime of brutal treatment, including walking on burning embers, Bulgaria’s last three dancing bears will get to rest their paws at a mountain sanctuary, in an apparent end to the centuries-old performance tradition in the Balkans. Activists today purchased the freedom of Mima, 8, Misho, 19, and Svetla, 17.

Bulgaria is believed to have been the last country in the Balkans where dancing bears still performed, even though the practice was outlawed in 1993, when there were 20 to 30 such bears in the country.

The three bears will join another 20 brown bears on Mount Rila at a 12-hectare sanctuary for former dancing bears about 180 kilometres south of Sofia.

“Our aim is to make their life more bearable in their remaining years,” Ioana Tomescu of the Austria-based Four Paws Foundation, which created the sanctuary, told The Associated Press.

Throughout the Balkans, families, mostly among the Roma community, have long earned a living through performing bears. But the techniques to train them led the practice to be banned, and animal rights activists have moved to find the bears new homes.

Because dancing bears are illegal, authorities could simply have taken Mima, Misho and Svetla away from their owners in the eastern village of Getsovo.

Instead, the Four Paws Foundation decided to pay for their freedom by giving their owners small grants to set up new businesses. It did not reveal how much was paid. In return, the owners signed declarations pledging never to take up the bear dancing business again.

The Deliverance of Dancing Bears,
by Elizabeth Stanley

ASPCA Henry Bergh Children’s Book Awards and 1995 Australian Picture Book of the Year winner, this thought-provoking story presents the plight of the dancing bears of Turkey and Greece. The author tells the story of a captive bear whose dreams of freedom sustain her, even while being forced to perform in a Turkish marketplace by a cruel and angry keeper. During the quiet hours when she is confined to her cage, the bear imagines a different life in which she is free to wander through mountain streams and sleep lazily with her cubs. It is a kind-hearted peasant who liberates the bear and who reminds all of those watching of an important moral lesson about dignity and life.

Stanley saw her first “dancing bear” in 1979 in Athens and decided then to write a book to challenge the assumption that men could cruelly use wild animals to make money. In 1992 she took her written text to Turkey to take photos and to make sketches for the artwork. In the same year The World Society for the Protection of Animals effected the release and the return to the wild of all chained bears in Turkey. Today there are no dancing bears in Greece or Turkey. Today, it is the last Bulgarian dancing bears who have been freed.

But a recent WSPA report has revealed that the trade in dancing bears is still alive and well in India.