A stick-figure Shakespeare comic by Mya Lixian Gosling
It’s “T” day, featuring three comparatively marginal plays starting with “T”! Not a lot of comics here yet. Give me time.
….like, a lot of time. You aren’t going to be seeing a Troilus and Cressida scene-by-scene for a while.
How should we be acting during global pandemic? As with so many things in life, we can look to Shakespeare for guidance.
Consulting pocket dramaturg: Kate Pitt
This is probably the ONLY situation in which I can confidently say… Be like Timon.
(Except for the bit where he pays prostitutes to go spread venereal diseases. Don’t do that bit. Ew.)
HAPPY NEW YEAR! It's time for another round of Shakespearean New Year's Resolutions!
Here are some resolutions from past years:
And I just realized that this is going to be my FIFTH YEAR drawing Good Tickle Brain! I started back in September of 2013. That's crazy. Thanks for sticking with me through another year of Shakespearean silliness. Here's to many more!
It's "Stay Sane September"! That means I'll be sharing some of my "greatest hits" from social media and Patreon to keep you entertained while I take the month off in order to avoid burnout, take some theatre trips, and get caught up on various tasks and projects that I have been neglecting.
Today's installment features some comics I put together during my trip to the Stratford Festival two weeks ago. I deliberately didn't take my computer so that I wouldn't be able to work. However, once I got there I found myself wanting to document my theatre-going, so I downloaded all the official production photos, ran them through a basic comic app, and here they are.
First up was Timon of Athens, which I previously saw 13 years ago, when I was far too immature to appreciate this famously hard-to-appreciate play. Here's how it unfolded:
While I'm still not particularly fond of the play itself, I thought this was a great production - very clear and comprehensible, with excellent acting, especially by Joe Ziegler, who managed to somehow make me not lose all interest in Timon once he slid to the "UNRELENTINGLY BITTER" end of the spectrum.
I then saw Thomas Middleton's The Changeling. This was my first Middleton (not counting his possible collaborations with Shakespeare) and it was a doozy:
This was an intense play. I'm struck by how very different Middleton feels to Shakespeare as far as the language and characterizations are concerned. It all feels much more melodramatic, with the result that I empathize less with the characters involved, but enjoy all the horrible, over-the-top atrocities that occur.
Next up was Romeo and Juliet. We all know how this one goes, right?
Confession: I'm really really really sick of Romeo and Juliet. It's just done ALL the TIME, and it's always pretty much the same, and you can't seem to get away from it. However, this production managed to rekindle my interest in the play, thanks primarily to the ludicrously engaging performances of the two leads, Sara Farb and Antoine Yared.
Finally, I saw The Breathing Hole, a new play commissioned by the Stratford Festival. It goes like this:
I really loved this production, and not just because the bears are ADORABLE and PERFECT and LOVELY. Apart from the bears (who were adorable and perfect and lovely), my favorite scene was one in which two Inuit hunters meet and try to communicate with British explorer Sir John Franklin and his crew. It was perfectly written and acted.
Anyways, that's all for now! Tune in Thursday for another "Stay Sane September" installment!
WHO: Me! And also Conor McCreery of the Kill Shakespeare comic book series.
WHAT: Panel discussion on Shakespeare in pop culture and graphic novels. Part of the Stratford Festival Forum series of events.
WHEN: Wednesday, September 6, 10:45am
WHERE: Chalmers Lounge, Avon Theatre, Stratford, Ontario.
WHY: Because they asked me!
HOW: Buy tickets at the Stratford Festival website.
WHO: Me! Again!
WHAT: Talk followed by Q&A on the development of Good Tickle Brain and approaches to making Shakespeare accessible to new audiences.
WHEN: Thursday, September 28, 7:30pm
WHERE: The University of Cincinnati College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning
WHY: Because they have a cool Shakespeare exhibit going on right now!
HOW: Reserve a FREE ticket at the Cincy Museum website!
Spring is in the air, which means the Stratford Festival's season is getting underway, so it's about time for me to put together a handy guide to the plays that will be appearing on their myriad stages this year. This season the theme is "Questions of Identity".
We start with one of my all-time favorite musicals:
Then we have one of my all-time favorite piratical swashbucklers:
And then this play. I guess it's a classic of some sort, I dunno...
From Shakespearean classic to Gilbert and Sullivan classic:
I've written a theme song for this next play. It goes like this: "Who lives in a hole and acts quite beastly? SPONGETIMON ATHENSPANTS! Embittered and dirty and misanthropic is he. SPONGETIMON ATHENSPANTS!"
Then, for all your gender-bending needs, we have what is probably my favorite Shakespearean comedy:
It may seem like writing a three-panel summary of a play is a fairly straightforward endeavor. Unfortunately, this is only true when the play itself is relatively straightforward, unlike our next offering:
"After many confusions" is code for "too much stupid stuff happened for me to adequately distill in this format."
Then it's time for a play by one of Shakespeare's contemporaries, Thomas Middleton:
There's a whole complicated subplot that I haven't even bothered to address here. Anyways. Keeping with the "bodies everywhere" theme, we have this classical offering:
Up next are a couple of new plays, so I may not be 100% accurate with these summaries. First is a follow-up to The Last Wife, Kate Hennig's play about the life of Katherine Parr. This one revolves around a young Elizabeth I and her highly-problematic relationship with Thomas Seymour:
The Breathing Hole is another new play by Colleen Murphy. I may not have all the details right, but the important thing to remember here is that it stars a polar bear.
These two new Canadian plays are followed by a pair of French plays, one classic:
...and one a bit more contemporary:
The final play of Stratford's season is The Komagata Maru Incident. It's framed in a very metatheatrical way, which I'm going to totally skip over here and just tell you what is being metatheatrically portrayed.
(Stick figures don't do "metatheatrical" very well....)
And that's the Stratford Festival's 2017 season! Speaking of which, I will be participating in the Festival's Forum this season as part of a panel entitled "Willy Shakes: Fanboy". Here are the details:
WHO: Me and the Kill Shakespeare guys (Anthony Del Col and Conor McCreery)
WHAT: A panel discussion on Shakespeare, comics, graphic novels, and whatever else.
WHEN: Tuesday, September 6, 10:45am
WHERE: The Chalmers Lounge at the Avon Theatre, Stratford, ON
WHY: Because they asked me to and it sounded really cool.
HOW: You can check out the details and buy tickets online!
If you're in the Stratford area, I hope to see you there!
Happy holidays to all of you! I will be taking next week off to spend time with my family, but I look forward to seeing you here again in the new year!
2016 has definitely had its full share of heartbreak, but it was also a year of adventure and excitement (and stress and euphoria and terror and learning) as I started working full-time on Good Tickle Brain. Thanks again to all of you for reading and supporting and laughing and generally being a fantastic audience. I look forward to another year of sharing Shakespearean silliness with you.
I'm still on vacation this week at the Stratford Festival, so here's another low-body-count death clock from everybody's favorite Shakespeare play about misanthropy!
I don't know what exactly Timon dies of. It's not a broken heart. Overdose of bitterness? Toxic accumulation of spite? In any event, if my death clocks only counted onstage deaths, this would be the emptiest of all the tragedy death clocks.
It would be empty, basically.
If you want more Good Tickle Brain action this week, take a peek at my Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram, where I'm posting updates on my adventures in Stratford, Ontario.
I was looking through my archives and I noticed that one play in particular never seems to feature in my comics.
If pressed, I'd probably say that my least favorite Shakespeare play is Timon of Athens. It's not a really fair judgement, as I've only seen it once, a number of years ago, and haven't revisited it since. At the time I remember thinking it was a miserable play. Of course... that's kind of the point. It's like complaining about Romeo and Juliet being "a bit of a downer".
Nowadays it seems like Timon is the hipster of the Shakespearean canon. "I liked Timon of Athens before it was cool", I can almost hear people say. "Duuuuude, Timon is, like, a brilliant critique of our corrupt, emotionally-bankrupt and overly-materialistic society, man. It's deep." That may very well be the case. It's also not much fun.
I probably need to give Timon another chance. Have an opinion on Timon? Leave a note for me in the comments!
