Two apartment buildings, both alike in dignity, in fair Brooklyn, where we lay our scene. With a new printing from Image Comics, Ronald Wimberly’s “Prince Of Cats”, a graphic novel written and illustrated by Wimberly in which he explores the lives of the characters of Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet set against the background of 80s New York, returns to store shelves.
Read on for our full review to find out why you should not miss this returning classic.
Written & Illustrated by Ronald Wimberly
PRINCE OF CATS is the B side to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, played at an eighties block party in an NY where underground sword dueling blossomed alongside hip-hop, punk, disco, and no wave. It’s the story of the minor players with Tybalt at the center. The definitive printing of RONALD WIMBERLY’s critically-acclaimed first work, presented as intended for the first time.
It doesn’t come around often, but “Prince Of Cats” is a comic unlike anything you’ve ever read. I honestly feel a little out of my depth even talking about it because I want to just share my favourite panels and pages and tell you all to immediately go buy a copy. Ronald Wimberly has fast cemented himself as a modern master of comic book storytelling and “Prince Of Cats” is assuredly one of his masterpieces. It is story that could not be told in any other format and is suited to the unique sensibilities of the storyteller. I hate to be the one throwing around the word perfect, but “Prince Of Cats” is maybe the closest I’ve ever seen a comic come to being exactly that.
“Prince Of Cats” is described as being the B-sides to Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet. It is a graphic novel structured in six chapters, or acts, that each focus a different character and a different point in time in the play to explore the lives of the characters around the events of the play. Think Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead by way of Rashomon and you have something close to “Prince Of Cats”. It’s a fascinating structure for a story because it allows Wimberly to experiment with non-linearity and shifting perspectives to explore the relationships and inner workings of these characters. Stripping away much of the actual driving conflict of Shakespeare’s writing and playing the larger rivalry between the Montagues and the Capulets in the background and focusing on the actual interpersonal rivalries in the foreground brings a life and passion to “Prince Of Cats”.
This isn’t the first time that Romeo & Juliet has been played against a more modern backdrop, with Baz Luhrmann taking the play to Los Angeles of the 90s, but the style of “Prince Of Cats” is on another level entirely. Blending the hip hop scene of New York in the 80s with a culture obsessed with duelling and samurai swords that illuminates the manga and anime inspirations in Wimberly’s art as well as heaping handful of neon-drenched neo-noir like Blade Runner and even The Warriors, there’s a sense of a fantastical reality that allows the translation to work seamlessly. All of the dialogue of the graphic novel is written in iambic pentameter which Wimberly uses to deftly weave rhyme and rhythm into the story through the emergence of hip hop. For every high school teacher that tried to convince kids that Shakespeare was cooled because he invented rapping, Wimberly was able to take that connection and run with it and explore the dialogue in an effortlessly cool way.
The use of iambic pentameter does make this a pretty dense graphic novel to read, though. Wimberly’s pacing is slow and deliberate with a focus on dialogue and characters over the action of duelling. Many of the actual fight scenes in the graphic novel aren’t even shown, cutting away to explore the ramifications and consequences on the characters. This puts a lot of emphasis on the emotionality of the characters which allows Wimberly to show his expert control over the human form. There’s a fair few pages in “Prince Of Cats” in which Wimberly lays out a series of close ups on a single character to show their changing expressions across a series of moments. The way Wimberly can show how a subtle change can effect so much is at the very heart of “Prince Of Cats”, from the layout of the artwork to the storytelling.
Continued belowAs I mentioned, there’s a major influence from Japan in “Prince Of Cats”. Wimberly has mentioned himself that Akira Kurosawa’s Ran was an influence on him in his youth and there’s a stylistic and storytelling influence from anime and manga in “Prince Of Cats”. From the use of samurai swords to the exaggeration in terms of character proportions during the duels to the interlude panels during emotional scenes focusing on the environment, Wimberly draws as much from Hayao Miyazaki as he does Frank Miller.
And, boy, does this book wear the 80s of Frank Miller on its sleeves. Reading “Prince Of Cats” is like imagining a world where the Montagues and the Caputlets were gangs in The Warriors. From street art to the overground tracks of metro through Brooklyn to the neon pinks, blues and purples of Wimberly’s colours, this book is dripping with style. It immerses itself in the culture of black youth in the 80s while still staying true to the emotional conflict present in Shakespeare’s play. It’s a masterpiece in the deconstruction and reconstruction of a story. Removing the context of the original piece, focusing on the side characters and the antagonists and exploring the emotional states and the consequences that lead to the events of the play while setting it against a backdrop that is at once completely removed and incredibly similar to that of fair Verona.
Ronald Wimberly’s “Prince Of Cats” is a goddamn masterpiece, there’s no other way I can phrase it. There’s so much I want to delve into here from the use of colour to the way Wimberly uses rhyming couplets in the dialogue across characters to bring verse and flow to the story to the way the lettering is presented in rigid, squared off captions to the page where Wimberly ends a rhyme scheme with sound effect. This is a comic that is a perfect example of an artist using the medium to tell the story in such a way that only this medium can present it. “Prince Of Cats” would not work as a film or TV show or even a play. It is built to be told in sequential art and by one of the greatest living artists of our time.
That’s a lot of hyperbole, I know, and I’m toeing the line of objectivity here, but “Prince Of Cats” is a such a revelatory read that I defy anyone not to evangelise about it after reading.
Final Verdict: 9.9 – This is the closest I think I’ve ever come to genuinely giving a comic a 10 out of 10.
