Manga Hub III: What Your Responses Told Me About Shakespeare and Manga

This is the third part of the Manga hub, or series of posts that gather key information on my research. My thesis is that manga is a sound media to express Shakespearean plays. In class yesterday, I took a poll to see if the class could identify the scene and characters from a page out of the British made manga version of Romeo and Juliet when placed next to another random page out of the manga Basalisk, issue number 34, a totally random choice on my part. The page below is from Basalisk.

This one is from Romeo and Juliet:

The young man in a suit is Tybalt, the one that gets stabbed with a boot is Mercutio, and Romeo is the only one that is not armed. Benvolio's face is in the corner of the first box, as well. Therefore, most of the class was right, though Bryan was fashionably wrong, since he gave a good reason for choosing the Basalisk option in the comment he left on the poll page.

What Does this Mean?

From what I gathered, the class recognized the youth of the characters, the fighting, the hatred in Tybalt's humongous eyes, and the depicted actions of the characters. Despite the possible foreign territory the class members might have encountered when analyzing the art style of these pages, they were still able to recognize a few universal themes that Romeo and Juliet portrays using only the illustrations. The text remained Shakespearean, therefore the only difference between the play and the manga addition is the setting, or the visuals. I wanted to perform this experiment in order to see if the class could still recognize the presence of the play with a manga format. I reasoned that the majority of the class would be able to do this, and I hypothesized correctly. Therefore, this proves that manga can at the very least communicate the same message as a staged version. Though seeing living bodies perform the play on stage or in a video might draw a cathartic experience more easily for a good portion of society, I believe that seeing an artistic interpretation on paper allows a reader to take the time necessary for such an experience to fully blossom, while an audience member is rushed into and through the experience when it is acted out. Only memory serves to recreate the experience for a given time, while a visual media would allow the process to be engaged again and again within a few minutes. While I am not scorning the theatrical performance, I do argue that this experiment proves that manga can have just as valid as an effect on its readers as a play does on its audience.