KILL SHAKESPEARE
John Barber
From Saturday's Globe and Mail Published on Saturday, Apr. 17, 2010 

Left - A full page view from the Kill Shakespeare comic series. Art by Andy Belanger.

William Shakespeare has been called many things over the past 400 years, from god to fraud. Conor McCreery and Anthony Del Col have an entirely new label. To the co-creators of Kill Shakespeare, a new fantasy-adventure comic-book series they are launching in Toronto this week, the Bard is “one of the greatest aggregators in entertainment history.”
Just 400 years ahead of his time.

“If Shakespeare were alive today, he’d be in comic books,” says Del Col, a clean-cut young businessman who has attended the Stratford Shakespeare Festival religiously every year of his adult life. “He’d be in films, he’d be in TV, he’d be in mobile content, he’d be in video games. He’d be James Cameron, basically.”
“Better writing, perhaps,” McCreery says, before adding his own thought. “He’d be Steven Spielberg at the absolute height of his power.” The biggest “transmedia” player of the 21st century.
But comic books first – and not the usual adaptations that have been around since the mid-century heyday of Classics Illustrated. Kill Shakespeare, as audacious as its title suggests, is a mash-up of heroes and villains from a dozen plays flung together in a new, supernatural adventure. The Toronto pair are following the example of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a comic-book series about Victorian literary heroes that became a Hollywood film. But they’re hoping for even greater success.

To that end, they recruited a group of investors to provide start-up capital of $350,000, which they are using to pay themselves and their collaborators, as well as to subsidize printing and distribution. But mainly they used the cash to retain creative control over the project as it grows to colonize other media.
Read the rest at the Globe & Mail.