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Hamlet (No Fear Shakespeare Graphic Novels) | 
| Author: William Shakespeare
Creator: Neil Babra
Publisher: SparkNotes
Category: Book
List Price: $9.95
Buy New: $5.48
You Save: $4.47 (45%)
New (32) Used (11) from $3.79
Rating:  4 reviews
Sales Rank: 502011
Media: Paperback
Reading Level: Young Adult
Pages: 208
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 6 x 0.7
ISBN: 1411498739
Dewey Decimal Number: 741.5973
EAN: 9781411498730
ASIN: 1411498739
Publication Date: January 25, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
No Fear Shakespeare Graphic Novels is a series based on the translated texts of the plays found in No Fear Shakespeare. The original No Fear series made Shakespeare’s plays much easier to read, but these dynamic visual adaptations are impossible to put down. Each of the titles is illustrated in its own unique style, but all are distinctively offbeat, slightly funky, and appealing to teen readers. Each book will feature: - Illustrated cast of characters
- A helpful plot summary
- Line-by-line translations of the original play
- Illustrations that show the reader exactly what’s happening in each scene—making the plot and characters even clearer than in the original No Fear Shakespeare books
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| Customer Reviews:
 Far exceeded my expectations! September 14, 2008
L. Walton
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Neil Babra's done an outstanding job with this one. His character designs, graytones, page layouts are all superb. The characters' "acting" is strong, the pacing works well, and (most impressively) the script is a hybrid of Shakespeare's original and SparkNotes' dumbed-down "translation," capturing the best features of both (and leaving Shakespeare's best lines undamaged). Note also the fantastic frontispieces drawn by Babra for each act - each one a masterpiece I'd be proud to hang in my house. Hats off to Babra for taking a project that could easily have been phoned in (SparkNotes? Seriously?) and knocking it out of the park. This is a fine graphic novel.
a great "set" September 13, 2008
Petricia A. Parham-Sharp (Phoenix, AZ)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I teach Hamlet. As anyone who teaches Shakespeare to lower ability readers knows, getting students to read Shakespeare for homework is like pulling your own teeth. Well, I have found that if I copy certain "big" scenes out of this novel and assign it for homework. The kids read it and are ready to discuss the next day.
 Neil Babra's best work yet May 29, 2008
C. Ruggia
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I really enjoyed this comic! I am familiar with much of the artist's work, and this piece is both his most ambitious and most successful to date.
I'm not a Shakespeare fanatic though I do enjoy his work both on paper and in performance, and I found the adaptation visually striking and had no complaints about the edits to the text. In fact, I thought Mr. Babra did an excellent job of keeping the story moving while maintaining a sense of the imagery and flow of the original.
If you love independent comics, I recommend this highly.
If you are a Hamlet purist, I recommend reading the play.
 Emo Hamlet? Or just dumbed down Shakeapeare? April 25, 2008
S.D. (L.A., CA)
6 out of 11 found this review helpful
I've read the non-comic versions of "No Fear Shakespeare" and found them quite useless. You'd be better off reading Cliff's Notes because once the language is taken out there's no point to claiming you've read Shakespeare. In fact side by side with an original text they might even come in handy. If it weren't for the fact that other companies already publish side by side texts with better and more accurate adaptations. Your money is better spent elsewhere. But useless as those "No Fear" books were, I never thought they were utter garbage. Until this came along.
I'm no purist when it comes to Shakespeare, but I do love his work. Now that may seem to some people to automatically disqualify me from reviewing this because admittedly it's NOT Shakespeare and some may argue "that's the point." But the writers here are using the free admission that this is "not Shakespeare" as a flimsy shield to hide their shortcomings behind. There are plenty of great books out there for children that use Shakespeare's own words. Not long ago I attended a school play with third graders performing "A Midsummer Night's Dream" - every line uttered by the main characters were the Bard's, with two narrators written into the play to explain the action. Nothing was lost. No one scratched their heads in bewilderment. They must have had a killer adapted script for those kids. This "No Fear" attempt to bring Hamlet to teens fails miserably.
I have nothing against comic books. Love em. Own many. It's a great genre of literature. And I agree that comics are a great way to adapt drama. I can go toe to toe with a lot of "serious" lovers of the form.
But this "No Fear Hamlet" is lazy stuff. I can only assume that they protest too much with their calls of "No Fear" and that overall they do fear Shakespeare more than anyone else. What will you get by buying this book? A comic book with a somewhat similar plot and really bad dialog written by someone who didn't really "get" Shakespeare's characters or their actions. Many times I wondered whether the author had actually read the original play AT ALL. It's fairly well known that Shakespeare frequently adapted his plays from earlier works, but even in attempting to read this tripe as yet a further adaptation - in that tradition it come up short. If you're going to re-adapt his work and still call it "Shakespeare" at least try to get the characters right. Forget even the language and poetry but at least get the friggin characters right! Remember that movie "O"? That "wasn't Shakespeare" but they did understand the characters and Shakepeare's contributions to the characters (it would be a delusion to think that because you're adapting the plot then you're adapting Shakespeare because he didn't write the plot!) and in that regard the movie was a dead-on accurate and brilliant adaptation. The things they do and say in this version just don't seem to match up with anything I can see in the originals even though the setting is the same.
I say "Emo Hamlet" although I know some people may already consider Hamlet overly childish and dramatic, but the writer of this book just took that famously false assumption and rode with it. Please don't buy it. Check it out at your library and roll your eyes and scratch your head in bewilderment (more than Shakespeare's original language could ever cause). Don't insult yourself - you can do better than "Hamlet for near-illiterates"
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