I almost flunked my third-year Shakespeare course in university. It wasn't that I didn't understand the material, it's that I didn't care. In other words, I wasn't in class all that often. Turns out picking up on what was said in class and, you know, reading the plays were rather important parts of the course. I've never read Julius Caesar or seen a performance. The closest I've come is watching snippets of William Shatner's fictional rap version of the play in Free Enterprise (great flick). So I was coming into this graphic novel cold, my knowledge of the original Shakespearean source material limited to a few noteworthy quotes and broad strokes concerning the plot.
I was pleased to find that I could follow along with Johnston's reinterpretation of this tale of classic Roman tale of murder and betrayal quite easily. The re-imagined plot isn't what drew me into this unusual graphic novel, though. No, it was the script, the dialogue. Johnston blends modern British street vernacular with the flowery meter of Shakespeare, and it makes for a curious result.
Julius, a gangster beloved by the regular people around him and respected by his criminal peers, returns to his neighborhood and is met with much fanfare. He is hailed as a wise leader and the one man who can unite various gangs under one banner. He is offered just such a position, but he declines, feeling that the criminal organization as a whole is served better by multiple factions. Others conspire against him, though. Cassidy prods his brother, Brett, to lead a revolt. Julius gets plenty of warning of the coming crisis, but his overconfidence blinds him to the signs.
Weldele's work here is the strongest I've seen from the artist, I believe. His gritty but simple linework suits the harsh, urban tone of the plot and circumstances nicely. His art here reminds me of the styles of such artists as Tedd Kristiansen, Marc Hempel and Charlie Adlard. He also differentiates among the key players in this drama with distinct designs that make it easy to identify the characters.
There are times when this story stands up well on its own, when one doesn't even consider its origins. Then there are others in which the small incompatibilities between the source material and this crime setting are apparent. But those blips don't take the reader out of the story, don't deter from the experience. Instead, they add to it in an unusual way, and the same can be said of the shifts in tone in the dialogue. The more poetic overtones of key speeches bring depth to these characters. I found the shifts -- some subtle, some far from it -- invited the reader to examine an unusual creative process that somehow didn't jar the reader.
Perhaps this volume's greatest strength is as a potential asset to the medium as a whole. A modern reinterpretation of a Shakespearean classic is the sort of thing that could get audiences outside of the comics market to pay attention to what's going on in the industry creatively and how the medium isn't all about entertaining kids with stories of super-powers and spandex.
