Creators Conor McCreery and Anthony Del Col with George Zotti at The Silver Snail

In this dark tale, the Bard’s most famous heroes embark upon a journey to discover a long-lost soul. Hamlet, Juliet, Othello, Falstaff, and Romeo search for a reclusive wizard who may have the ability to assist them in their battle against the evil forces led by the villains Richard III, Lady Macbeth and Iago. That reclusive wizard? William Shakespeare.

Any English majors reading that synopsis feel their heads exploding yet?
Those who survive this initial assailment on First Folio canon will want to check out Kill Shakespeare, the planned 12-issue comic book series from IDW Publishing co-created by Anthony Del Col and Conor McCreery. I sat down (okay, leaned against some short book shelves) with them last weekend at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival. They were attending as part of Transmission X’s entourage (Kill Shakespeare artist Andy Belanger is one of TX’s founders).

Jonathan: Can you give us a synopsis of what the comic is about?
Conor McCreery: Kill Shakespeare is an action-adventure series in which we pit all of Shakespeare’s greatest heroes against his most menacing villains. And they’re all on their way to either kill or save a reclusive wizard by the name of William Shakespeare. It’s being published by IDW, and it’s a 12-issue series.

Jonathan: Where did the idea for this story come up?
Conor: The origins are: We came up with it about six years ago. We were just brainstorming ideas for video games, and Kill Bill had just come out. We thought, hey there should be a Kill Bill video game, but instead of tracking down David Carradine, we should be tracking down Bill…Shake…speare? And we thought, ‘Oh my god, this is fantastic.’
Anthony Del Col: At first we thought of it as a massive multiplayer online role playing game, but then as we started to develop it, we just discovered how great the medium of comic books is. Conner had worked at the Silver Snail for a while, and we felt that Kill Shakespeare would be best as a comic series.

Kill Shakespeare #1

Jonathan: Where do you see this going, besides a comic book?
Conor: The first thing we really want to do is make a really good comic book. It’s perfect for Shakespeare because comics are a visual medium, and of course you’re not supposed to read his plays, you’re supposed to see them performed. So one of the neat things is that you get the sense of almost watching a performance. As we’ve gone on, we’ve had some people come to us. So someone’s said to us they want to do a role-playing game, so we’re just in the final stages of launching that product. We’ve been approached by Hollywood about whether we would want to do a film version of this.

We always wanted to do something in the online world, just because it’s a really great way to build a community. I mean, I’m a big comics geek, Anthony’s a huge Shakespeare geek, so it kind of gives us a way take two worlds that we love, and merge them. But it also lets people who are fans of Shakespeare and of comics to get together. Because it’s funny – Shakespeare and comics are still two sort of geeky pastimes. You might say that you’re a Batman fan, but you might not say that you’re a Hamlet fan. There’s something different about that. People talk about how they play video games, but a lot of comic fans are still a little nervous to get on the subway and, on a Wednesday, are they going to pull out and read their comics on the subway ride home? Some comic fans won’t because there’s still that bit of a stigma. We’d love it if we can help break down that stigma.

Jonathan: This is not a typical approach to Shakespeare, or merely an adaptation of an existing play. These characters are coming together in very unusual ways. How do you work with characters from such established roles and different backgrounds?
Conor: The big thing is that we’re not “doing Shakespeare.” We have a new story. Now we’re using Shakespeare characters, and we think we’re being respectful and honourable to what The Bard did with these characters, but we made a decision early on that it would be our own story, and also say something about us. So in a weird way, it’s not intimidating, because we aren’t pressured to use Hamlet the way the Bard did. We want to use him in a way that’s exciting for us, and both being Shakespeare fans, I think the average Shakespeare fan will say “Yeah, that makes total sense.” But yeah, we’ve had scholars come say to us “I don’t know about this. There’s something wrong about this.” What can you do?
Anthony: We want this to appeal to everybody. If you know Shakespeare, that’s great. If you know nothing about him, that’s even better. It’s the kind of thing where if you haven’t read Hamlet or Romeo & Juliet or any of these plays, you still know who these characters are. So we’ve consciously made the decision not to get too caught up in the actual stories, and to let them breathe as characters on their own. Yet you have to be somewhat faithful to these characters as they were originally conceived.

Jonathan: How do you figure out where that line is? How familiar are you guys with Shakespeare, and did you do any research specifically for this project?
Anthony: We’ve both been Shakespeare fans. We’re not English graduates or anything like that; we both went to business school. But Conor was a theatre minor, I was a film minor, and so we were just interested in that sort of thing. I’ve loved Shakespeare since high school; I go every year to the Stratford festival. Conner was moved by a production of The Tempest when he went to Stratford back in…Grade nine?
Conor: I think it was Grade seven, actually.
Anthony: Yeah, we had a really great teacher in high school. I’m from northern Ontario, and our teacher would organize a trip every year. We kind of brushed up on our Shakespeare, to paraphrase a song, but we also made a conscious decision not to read them word-for-word or line-by-line, because we didn’t want to get too caught up in that scene. Again, we wanted to make it fresh and accessible to everybody.
Conor: It was very challenging because I had to read them, every other word.
Anthony: Then it’s not iambic pentameter!

Jonathan: Yes, why did you choose not to work with iambic?
Conor: We didn’t want to write in iambic for a couple of reasons. One, because Shakespeare’s done it better than we ever will. The language is beautiful. But it’s not contemporary, and that’s kind of a problem. The vocabulary is not quite what we use nowadays. And even in Shakespeare’s time it was a little different – it was theatre speech, not common speech.

The other thing is that we wanted to create a new level of accessibility—either for someone who’s never been into Shakespeare, or for someone who’s going to return to it. We don’t want someone to not read Hamlet and read our comic instead. We want them to read them both. If dropping iambic is what gives someone the incentive to dip their first toe into Shakespeare, and then they might say “Okay, I can take on Othello now, because I kind of have a sense of what that guy’s about,” that would be awesome.

The best compliment that we’ve had so far is from a guy who said that it made him want to read other things. It made him want to read Shakespeare; it made him want to read other comics; it just made him want to be creative. If we can get that response out of a bunch of people, that would be a dream.

Jonathan: Tell us about your connection to Transmission X.
Anthony: Transmission X is a webcomic collective, from artists mostly in Toronto. Our connection is to Andy Belanger, he does one called Raising Hell. The great thing about TX is that these are some of the best artists in Toronto. It’s putting Andy into the North American comic book scene, much like how Cameron Stewart has been in the last little while. You know, people talk about Toronto being one of the hotbeds of comic book talent, and TX is really at the forefront of that.

Jonathan: What’s your favourite Shakespeare play?
Anthony: My favourite is Othello. In a lot of his plays, Shakespeare works with the fantasy element, but in Othello he just bypasses that entirely and it’s just about pure human emotion—jealousy, revenge, all the great ones. That really speaks to me.
Conor: For me it’s probably still The Tempest. I love the notion of these creatures on the island. What I really like is the notion of Prospero, who is this god who ultimately chooses to let the people make their own decisions. It was so interesting to see this powerful character decide to just let things go and see how things work out. It kind of informed a lot of my decisions about how people with power should act.

Scott Campbell is the art director at Double Fine Productions, a video game development studio founded by Tim Schafer of Lucasarts adventure game fame. Campbell’s cartoony and light-hearted art style form the canvas of Double Fine’s critically acclaimed games Psychonauts and Brutal Legend. I spoke with Campbell at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, after he spoke on a panel that discussed the convergence of video games and comic books. He has a webcomic of his own on Double Fine’s website, called Double Fine Action Comics.

Jonathan: Tell me about the games you worked on at Double Fine.

Scott Campbell: Psychonauts was the first game we did and I was art director on that, which meant that I helped establish the visual style of the game. I did a lot of designs for it, including the characters, and sort of kept the vision intact. Same thing with Brutal Legend, except by that time we had a bigger production team, so we had a pre-production phase as well.

Jonathan: You mentioned that with a project like Brutal Legend, you went through several stages of concepts, refining and editing. How long was the process?

Scott: Tim Schafer, the head guy at Double Fine, is a total perfectionist. I am a perfectionist too, so we always just want to iterate, iterate, iterate until it’s perfect. With that project it took about five years to make, and it’s pretty ongoing, as far as redesigning things to get them to work.

I would design something, and then I would bring it to Tim, and there are certain reactions you want to get out of him. So if you show him a drawing or a concept for something, and you’re pretty excited about it, but you’re not entirely sure, and Tim’s like “ah, that’s pretty cool,” then you know. You could stop there, but you have to keep on going until he’s like “Ah, heh heh!” laughing out loud and having a good time about it.

That’s what makes that environment so great; creatively everyone wants to make everyone else psyched, and to laugh at each other’s ideas – well, a good laugh – just really to inspire each other, and that environment creates some really interesting stuff. I think we all appreciate how Tim works to create that environment. In crunch time it gets crazy, but it’s still good to have someone making sure that everything is still top quality.

Psychonauts from Double Fine Productions

Jonathan: Any one artistic aspect you can point to in Brutal Legend or Psychonauts that is yours?

Scott: I started at Double Fine because Tim wanted me to establish their style, based kind of on my cartoony style, for Psychonauts. So I guess that entire game has my signature on it. I designed all the characters, and designed and hand-placed all of the figments in the game. There were these collectibles, sort of like hand-drawn memories in the game, and that was the one thing I did beside the concepts.

Brutal Legend was a different style, so it called for a different look. We wanted it to be powerful, to make it feel like it could be on the cover of a heavy metal album, so that a metal fan would like any image from the game. So we wanted to do that, but also give it some of that Double Fine style as well.

Jonathan: Brutal Legend featured characters based on real people, like Jack Black and Ozzy Osbourne. Were there any constraints on how far you were allowed to take their representations?

Scott: Dude, yeah. Those characters were the hardest ones for me to design. We didn’t have any constraints with them specifically; they didn’t tell us, ‘you have to make us look a certain way’ or anything. But just trying to work on the likeness of such recognizable people and have it work with the stylized look of the game, was really difficult. I was doing a lot of noodling to make sure it works. It’s very hard.

Jonathan: So you didn’t have any constraints from the celebrities or their agents/promoters at all?

Scott: No. Our guidelines came from Tim, because these were all his idols. So he had images in his mind that he grew up with and that he loved about him. You know, like having Ozzy with a bat body and a straitjacket. They’re like gods in a fantasy world. The game is basically Tim’s fantasy world. And we were all trying to realize his world, to bring it to life in different ways.

Brutal Legend art by Scott Campbell

Jonathan: Brutal Legend wasn’t as big a commercial success as some may have hoped. Did you get a sense that it didn’t reach its potential, or reach as many people as it could have?

Scott: That’s an area I don’t know much about. I think a lot of us just move on to the next thing. Because after working for five years on a project I rarely want to think about it. (laughs) You know? So it’s hard for me to gauge everyone’s reactions. But it seems good, far as I can tell.

Jonathan: Can you say what you’re working on now?

Scott: With Double Fine? Top secret! But it’s a very exciting place right now. My own stuff is working out. I’m just finishing a kid’s book about zombies. I’m going to be done about in June. It’s with Simon & Schuster. And various art shows and things.

Jonathan: You have a very distinctive art style. Can you tell me where that came from, and how you started drawing?

Scott: After art school, there were a few years where I was working with some others who were trying really hard to keep each other excited with art. All my artist friends had a reason to do it, like “Oh, I have to create art or I will die!” or “I have to paint or I’m going to lose my mind!” and I just didn’t feel like that.

I wanted to figure out what I was trying to say with my art, and that was the one thing I never learned in art school. What am I trying to say? What was my reason for creating? I felt like I always wanted to get that same kind of excitement that you got when you woke up as a kid in the morning; you were so excited to get back to drawing that battle, or that weird thing you were drawing the other day. It was less about drawing and more like you were on an adventure. That’s what I wanted to get, that same childlike excitement.

Once I started using the watercolours, because I was struggling to find a medium too, they were very non-committal for me. It’s not like with washes, or oil, or acrylic; those are very decadent and you can layer and whatever, but you’re very committed to these colours. Watercolours are very subtle and very pleasant. I could put a little bit of colour and then keep adding it, but you can go very slowly with each stroke. You don’t have to really commit to it, and I think it gives a certain kind of light-heartedness to it. It feels more in tune with the themes that I have – which are supposed to be light-hearted, and make you feel really good. I feel like my role is to make things that make others feel gleeful.

Jonathan: Double Fine Action Comics is a little more under the radar, and it has pretty much nothing to do with the major projects the studio is working on. How do you figure out what to do with these comics that have the studio’s name on it?

Scott: Well Tim’s always wanted an environment like that. So many things can happen, not just games. And we have the site act as a hub for everything. We have it for everyone at the studio to get their own ideas out there. It’s very encouraging to have everyone coming up for ideas for games, and for stories. That’s what he wants Double Fine to be: an exciting place where lots of things are happening. There are comics, and some mini-games as well on the site, some of which are based on the comics.

Also, it’s about putting things out there while in the middle of a five-year project just so people can see – oh, they’re still alive in there! They’re still creating things! Having everyone there working on “extra-curricular” things helps the main projects.

Great Showdowns by Scott Campbell

Jonathan: Do you feel added pressure from publishers, especially closer to release dates when you have to put all that aside and get the game ready in time for that date?

Scott: Oh, there are definitely times when we just don’t output as many comics. Most webcomics are very, very regular, which makes them very effective. You expect to get them every single day, or every week or whatever. And it does slip sometimes at Double Fine, when it gets really busy, which is a bummer. There were a few artists who did them for a while but then stopped, because once it starts feeling like a second part of your job, and then it’s not fun. It’s supposed to be a way to just release some pent-up stuff. Not necessarily releasing frustration, just so that you’re not all working on one thing.

Jonathan: Have you been playing any video game or reading any comics lately?

Scott: I haven’t had much time to play many games recently, which totally bums me out. But for webcomics, I like Kate Beaton’s Hark a Vagrant, and Ryan Pequin’s Three Word Phrase. Kate’s work is amazing. And they have a bent that I really like because they’re historical, the dialogue’s amazing, and the jokes are just so funny. And Ryan’s are just so simple, that every time it’s just a sort of mini-joke, but it’s always just so good. And there’s also Graham Annable’s Dunk at Telltale Games – which is another thing. They [Telltale] have the same thing with games as well as comics on their site.

Jonathan: What’s on your dork shelf?

Scott: I’m kind of addicted to buying books. I have this awesome book about knights that I found. I also got a Brutal Legend action figure on my shelf, it’s of Eddie [Riggs, Jack Black/the game’s main character] jumping down with his axe. It very much sticks out with the rest of the stuff. Oh, and my puppets are next to Eddie, which is an interesting combination. Oh, and an Elisabeth Ito plush cat-dude.

Think Hot Docs is the only festival happening in Toronto this week? The exhibition portion of the Toronto Comic Arts Festival kicked off today, and if you’re looking for a great way to spend this rainy weekend, TCAF is the place to be.

Don’t expect to see any comics from the big two at TCAF though. The fest is not a comic convention in the classic sense, the focus is on independent artists, creators and small publishers of comic books and graphic novels. In addition to the hundreds of guests and exhibitors showcasing their work, TCAF also includes panels and group discussions about the independent comic scene. Guests include Paul Pope (Batman: Year 100, 100%), Jim Woodring (Frank, Jim), Evan Dorkin (Milk & Cheese), Kate Beaton (Hark! A Vagrant), Brandon Bird, the fine folks from Transmission X and many, many more.

Comic books not your thing? Not to worry, the Hand Eye Society has you covered. Hand Eye epresenting Toronto’s indie video game development community. This is a  great chance to check out the latest projects from local developers GetSetGames, Spooky Squid Games, SpyeArt, Untold Entertainment Inc. and many more. You’ll also have an opportunity to try the legendary TORONTRON: a classic arcade machine that has been retrofitted to play indie games by local developers. Local game journalist Matthew Kumar will be moderating a panel called The Spirit of Indie: Where Comics Meet Video Games, exploring the convergence of the two mediums.

Scott Campbell, art director and concept artist for Double Fine (Psychonauts, Brutal Legend) will also be in attendance.

The Toronto Comic Arts Festival takes place May 8th-9th 2010 at the Toronto Reference Library. Admission is free!

For more info check out the official TCAF site or just head down to the Ref.

Comic Book Confidential is a great documentary and I highly recommend it to anyone with a love of comic books.  Hell, even if you don’t like comic books the film provides a very entertaining history of the medium.

Comic Book Confidential, with an introduction by director Ron Mann, is on Saturday, May 2nd, at 11:59 PM at Innis College Town Hall. That’s 2 Sussex Ave., one block south of Bloor and St. George.

via CINSSU – Free Friday Films and TorontoComics.com.