Mary had a little Lamb and I had my Classics Illustrated to introduce us to Shakespeare. I never thought it either vulgar or lowbrow or sacrilegious to be introduced to Shakespeare via the comics or abridged and boiled down versions such as Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. There is nothing wrong with first coming to know Shakespeare through the short prose summaries or versions of Shakespeare’s plays nor  first getting to know Shakespeare through the comics of my boyhood, Classics Illustrated.

Nobody dreamt of looking down on Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare just because the plays had been simplified and sometimes slightly reshaped for the young reader. Indeed, the simplification was the point. The volume introduced successive generations to the great plays of Shakespeare and other classic authors while they were in primary and secondary school, when the early modern language of Shakespeare would have been too remote.

It was not much different with the markedly more lowly Classics Illustrated. For a boy like me, growing up in a not particularly book-crammed home, it was a superb appetizer. They served to arouse an interest in the great books which would have been lost on me without the helpful transitional medium of the comics.

A 21st-century generation is now going to be introduced to Shakespeare through the manga, a form invented by Hokusai, a Japanese artist (1760-1849) who can be said to be the originator of the form. Lately manga has been made popular again by the Japanese comic and film industry, with a reach and influence that has become truly global.

Which brings us to two new volumes of Shakespere's plays, Richard III and The Tempest, rendered in manga  from the United Kingdom, the very home of Shakespeare himself. They are part of a series, 'Manga Shakespere' published by Self Made Hero, which places these scared texts in the hands of skilled manga artists. Manga Shakespere was inaugurated last spring with the publication of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet.

For anyone with doubts about the cultural acceptability of manga, it might be good to remind ourselves that Hokusai is one of the most important Japanese artists of the Edo period, with such instantly recognizable prints as “The Wave off Kanagawa” and “Mount Fuji”. Purists might want to separate Hokusai from the present-day manga but the ancestral fingerprints are clear to anyone who is not a dogmatic art lover.

The form is distinguished by both angularity and curving lines at the same time. Both features combine to give manga the force and sense of movement so typical of the genre. The Tempest  and Richard III  illustrate these qualities well.

The Tempest and Richard III are ably illustrated by Paul Duffield and Patrick Warren respectively. They both begin with a few pages in colour and as the story gets underway black and white take over. The reader is by then drawn into the world of the play and does not stop to question why the story has turned grey. Not everything looks worse in black and white as Paul Simon sings.

The standard sharp angles of the drawings coupled with the curving and sweeping lines propel the story along. The eye is never bored or allowed to be lazy. The reader is totally swept along from one panel to another to another. The words of Shakespeare are presented in the usual speech balloons of the comic form. I wish all school children could be given the chance to sample Shakespeare and the other classics through this manga form.

For my purposes, teaching a course on Shakespeare on Screen at the University of Malaya, it is a wonderful supplement to the storyboarding I tell my students to work through before they shoot their own video or screen assignments of a scene from Shakespeare. From now on, I suspect that the student assignments will have the look of manga Shakespeare!

In 2001, I was invited to speak to the learned German Shakespeare Society in Bremen, Germany on the theme of Shakespeare and Globalization. I said, among other things in my lecture ("Shakespeare in New States and New Accents") that for a generation unfamiliar with academic Shakespeare with its focus on quarto and Folio texts, films and I might now add, comics will be the gentle introduction to the plays of the Bard. There is nothing to lose when a new generation, who might otherwise not know Shakespeare, gets to know Shakespeare through a medium it is comfortable with. If this leads to the reading of the plays in the original, it is worth more the all the highbrow criticism and condemnation of the form put together!

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Award-winning manga artist, Paul Duffield who illustrated The Tempest, and Emma Hayley, the Director of Self Made Hero, were at the Kinokuniya Bookshop at Suria KLCC for a book-talk  and book- signing, organised by the British Council, on 23 January 2008.

Richard III, illustrated by Patrick Warren (London: Selfmade Hero, 2007) & The Tempest, illustrated by Paul Duffield (London: Selfmade Hero, 2007) are available at Kinokuniya and selected MPH stores in Malaysia.

Lim Chee Seng is Professor and Head of the Department of English at the Faculty of Arts in the University of Malaya. He is also an Executive Committee Member of the International Shakespeare Association.