Apr. 13, Gaiman's MSDMD

I struggled extraordinarily with this reading. I found it to be the most challenging graphic text that I've read thus far. Ironic, it is, all-in-all that I've read to different adaptations and this is a short story. The story was challenging for me because it appeared to pick up right in the middle of Midsum's and then spin things in its own direction. I was most likely trying to draw the lines to thick between the different modalities that we've seen thus far in our readings of the play. 

I was also confused by some of the character parameters. The dark character gave me great trouble. I couldn't figure out his role in the reading. I see that he works between both dream and fantasy worlds. He's dark because you never see his face, and his word bubbles are always dark. My confusion came in that for a long time I thought he was a dark adaptation of Shakespeare. I couldn't figure it out, until I eventually went back and saw that he referred to his bargaining partner as "Will Shakespeare." Clearly THAT was the character of Shakespeare.

Despite the challenge I found with the plot, Gaiman's adaptation did help me to understand certain portions of the text from a different viewpoint. As I was reading the panels I did understand that the emphasis was more so on the shifting of audience members. I understood more clearly that each character, or set of characters was an audience to a different performance. This may be because of the different adaptation, or it could just be that I understand better after my third time having gone through it. 

A quote from page 71 summarizes this point well. As Hyppolita and "Tommy" are having a heated discussion. An anxious Hyppolita tells Tommy that their audience consists of "things of every manner and kind." Tommy responds, "Aye, and they are also our audience. Calm yourself."