Sequential Philly talked to K. Briggs about her adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth, published by Avery Hill and launched at Partners and Son on 7-28.
🗣️Why did you choose Macbeth? Was it the Scottish connection?
👑Yes, the Scottish connection was definitely a factor—I miss Scotland every day, so this book was sort of a love letter to the landscape, history, and culture. But what first inspired me to pick up this play was the fact that I never got to perform it! I'd always wanted to play Lady Macbeth as a teen, so why not fulfill a long-held dream and cast myself in the role?
🗣️When adapting a play you have less visual description to work from. Does this make it especially challenging? Or freeing?
👑Freeing, definitely freeing. I thrive with as much creative space as possible; the only real limit in adapting a play is how much visual information and text you can squeeze onto a single page. And since a lot of Macbeth is supernatural or psychological, I was free to get abstract with the art and not be worried about things like physics or gravity or practical special effects, like a stage production would have to take into consideration.
🗣️The book seems like a cool mix of historical and abstract and symbolic imagery. How did you decide when to work more or less representationally, and when to create a less-literal image?
👑I treated each page like it was its own individual work of art. I'd sit with the script for a page, and let the images grow from that. I set the story in 1040 AD, the year the real King Macbeth acceded to the throne of Scotland, so I wanted to include as much early medieval art as possible. Shakespeare is full of metaphor, so often times I'd be trying to incorporate his imagery into the background or use it instead of images of the characters themselves. And then there was the very Macbeth-specific question of "How connected to reality is this character in this moment?" Sometimes the answer is "not at all", so I wanted the art to reflect that in its abstraction.
🗣️How do you construct the collages in your comics?
👑With a very few exceptions, all the collages were assembled on paper. I'd start with a general design idea, include what sort of images I'd like in the collage—saints, historic artifacts, vintage anatomical drawings, actual feathers or leaves—but then let the page come together and come into a life of its own. I think that's what I enjoy about working analog, it becomes a collaboration with the materials; mistakes and unexpected things would happen and I couldn't have recreated that creative chaos digitally.
🗣️What appeals to you about a collage approach?
👑Part of it has to do with the creative chaos mentioned above. The other appealing thing is the way collage can help me express what the character might REALLY be thinking, saying, or experiencing, in contrast to what they're actually saying. Their dialogue is there, and their internal state is all around them in the collage. The collage can also express the context all around the characters, what's happening around them or "off-stage".
🗣️Did the project reveal anything new to you about Macbeth?
👑Yes! I got to see Macbeth as a piece of propaganda for the newly crowned King James I of England and IV of Scotland. He was the Scottish King brought down to take the throne after Elizabeth I died and united England and Scotland in a personal union. The play was performed at his court and there's lots of references to how Banquo is James' ancestor. English people were wary of their new Scottish king, the whole fighting-each-other-for-centuries thing being a factor. Macbeth can be read as "I'm not like other Scots" when it comes to James.
🗣️Are comics a part of the teaching you do?
👑Yes, I regularly teach comics to teens in basic courses about what the comics-creating process is like, from writing to printing. We don't get too far into theory about whether or not comics are art (they are), but I mostly notice how easily my students use comics as a storytelling medium. My main goal is to affirm that they have stories worth telling, so that's always wonderful to see.