Comics & Theatre Unite

Has anyone else noticed that a lot of comics people are also theater people? It seems like everywhere you turn there's a reference to dramatic literature in comics these days. Being both a comics reader and theater nerd, I think this is a pretty great trend.

Take, for instance Dark Horse's Star Wars: Tag and Bink Were Here. It collects the adventures of minor Star Wars characters Tag and Bink as they bumble their way through the original trilogy from their point of view. This setup is taken from the Tom Stoppard play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, in which minor characters from Hamlet narrate a story with less blasters, but considerably more existential crisis. Hey, fun fact: Tom Stoppard apparently worked on the script for Episode 3, too.

Then there's Y the Last Man, which is chock-full of theater fun. I mean, the main character Yorick and his sister Hero were named for lesser-known Shakespeare characters, for Pete's sake. And in the two-part "Comedy & Tragedy" (issues 16 and 17), we're introduced to a post-plague theater troop.

As has been previously mentioned in this blog, Steven T Seagle is a playwright as well as a fantastic comics writer (check out American Virgin vol. 1 if you haven't yet). His play NWC is touring around the country, and I'm sure he has more great work to come.

Hey, and maybe someday I'll tell you about the one-act play I was in a few years ago about what happens when superheroes age. Or you can read about it through the link. Watch out for the name Jason Lauderdale, who wrote that play. He's going to be famous one of these days.

-Elizabeth