Mini post inspired by a day trip to Oxford last year!
No day out in Oxford would be complete without a visit to Blackwell’s bookshop. Down in the vast Norrington Room, I was delighted to find a set of Manga Shakespeare books sitting side by side with the serious study guides in the Shakespeare section.
These manga adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays came out when I was a teenager just getting into manga and anime for the first time, and I was a huge fan. My friends and I even cosplayed as the manga versions of Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern one year at MCM Expo – now MCM Comic Con – in London. (I was Rosencrantz, incidentally.)
I still have a full set of Manga Shakespeare on my shelves, including a few signed by the artists.
I was the type of nerdy teenager who already enjoyed Shakespeare, but I think manga is a great tool for making the Bard’s work more accessible and interesting to those who might not otherwise want to engage with it. Several of the manga adaptations take the plays to new settings and contexts (e.g. Romeo and Juliet in 21st-century Tokyo, cyberpunk Hamlet), but the text is all taken directly from the originals.
In addition to the Manga Shakespeare line, it turns out SelfMadeHero has published a whole range of graphic novel adaptations of classic literature. I might have to add a few of them to my collection.
As a bonus, across the street from the iconic big Blackwell’s is the specialised branch Blackwell’s Sci-Fi, Manga & Games (where the Art & Poster Shop used to be). Downstairs in the manga section, I spotted several series that I translated for Yen Press! It’s still exciting to see my translations ‘out in the wild’.
