Prince of Cats (2012)

While I’ve been acquainting myself with a handful of different comic titles in recent years, it’s been a while since I read a full-fledged graphic novel – probably not since I read Fun Home after the musical came out, or possibly the graphic-novel adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time. However, the news that this one is being made into a movie (starring Atlanta’s Lakeith Stanfield!) put Prince of Cats on my radar and made me want to check it out.

It’s Romeo and Juliet filtered through the lens of a 1980s hood in Brooklyn, one populated by hotheaded young men roaming the city with samurai swords and keeping an ever-watchful eye on the rankings of the dueling list. Tybalt has recently returned to the neighborhood, back from his mostly-white private school, and although his friends rib him about being a sellout, he quickly falls back into the routine of what they know best: Capulets vs. Montagues, steel against steel.

First off, I love the dialogue to pieces. Shakespeare is infused in the language throughout, with plenty of lines either lifted or adapted from the play. But at the same time, those Shakespearean notes are blended with AAE and hip-hop cadences, creating a book filled with clever, creative verse. Like Shakespeare, the lines can be witty, profound, soulful, or vulgar, often more than one at a time.

Retelling Romeo and Juliet from Tybalt’s perspective makes you realize how little Tybalt actually interacts with either Romeo or Juliet in the play, and of course, his ending comes quite a bit before the play’s ending, so in that way, the stories diverge far more than just the setting and the slant of Prince of Cats. The Shakespeare is more recognizable in the dialogue, the supporting players, and the sly references than in the actual plot. I’ll confess to being a little disappointed that the graphic novel spends so much time doing its own thing, but again, reading it makes me recognize how tricky it would be to really tell Romeo and Juliet’s story through Tybalt’s eyes. As such, it makes sense that it takes so many detours from the events of the play.

The edition that I picked up includes an afterword by the writer, Ron Wimberly. In it, he contextualizes the background and experiences that converged to lead him to write Prince of Cats, and I really appreciate what he says about how it “never before seemed strange to [him] that the children of Shakespeare’s Verona were so reckless with their lives.” I enjoy getting different perspectives and spins on things that many people take for granted, and in this case, it’s a cool demonstration of how diverse voices can mine a familiar topic for further richness that the white majority is less likely to see.

Warnings

Violence, sexual content, language, drinking/smoking/drug use, and thematic elements.