Graphic Shakespeare Competition 2018

A couple of years ago, I entered the inaugural Graphic Shakespeare Competition. While I didn't win, it was a lot of fun to take part in and so I really wanted to enter again this year. The initial deadline of 31 December 2017 came and went, and I hadn't managed to get anything done, but fortunately the deadline was extended to the 15 January 2018, and after the excesses of Christmas and New Years, I sat down to put something together.

Being slighty tight on time, I decided to adapt an earlier Shakespeare-themed comic that I'd put together a few years ago featuring a penguin making a series of unexpected cameos in Shakespeare's Hamlet. I expanded on my initial strips to make a slightly longer work for the competition.

(Click to enlarge)


I'm happy with the end result and have a bunch of other penguin-related Shakespeare strips jotted down in my sketchbook now, which I'd like to do something with someday...

Graphic Shakespeare competition

I've been busy recently, working on a 4-page comic for a Graphic Shakespeare competition, part of the Elsinore Conference 2016 entitled Shakespeare: The Next 400 Years, which is being held in Kronborg Castle, Helsingor, Denmark in April. You could either adapt the scene of your choosing, or select one of five famous scenes designated by the organisers of the conference. One of the selected scenes was Act One, Scene 1 from Macbeth, which is one of my favourtie Shakespeare plays, so I decided to go with this one. I wanted to create a humourous take on the scene with the three witches that opens the play, and had the idea of one of the witches having to bring along her mobile phone obsessed neice: Three Witches And A Little Lady...

"A penguin, a penguin, my Kingdom for a penguin!"

The other night I was chatting to my friend online and she was talking about all the final coursework essays on Shakespeare she had to mark, which slowly digressed into me lamenting the fact that Othello doesn't actually feature a talking parrot like in the Walt Disney version of Aladdin, and then contemplating how much better Shakespeare's plays would have been if he'd included a penguin... It was late!

Anyway, all of which led me to draw a couple of comic strips based around Shakespeare and featuring a penguin. I don't profess to be a Shakespeare buff, but I did read Hamlet when I was studying English Literature for A-level...