Prince of Cats

by Ron Wimberly, Ron Wimberly (Artist)

Overview

PRINCE OF CATS is the B side to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, played at an eighties block party in a NY where underground sword dueling blossomed alongside hip-hop, punk, disco, and no wave. It's a deconstruction of Romeo and Juliet's romantic meta narrative focussing on the minor players with Tybalt at the center. RONALD WIMBERLY's critically-acclaimed first work, returns with a new cover.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781534312074
Publisher:	Image Comics
Publication date:	06/25/2019
Pages:	152
Sales rank:	405,873
Product dimensions:	9.30(w) x 12.10(h) x 0.40(d)
Age Range:	13 - 16 Years

About the Author

Ronald Wimberly was the artist on Percy Carey's acclaimed memoir, SENTENCES, published in 2007 by Vertigo. As a young African American artist living in Brooklyn, he brings an authenticity to this project like no one else could. He's done extensive design and commercial work and has worked with Spike Lee on some of his film projects, most notably Miracle at St. Anna.

Editorial Reviews

BOOK RIOT — This book is gorgeous and textural and incredible. Set in the '80s with a neon color palette to match, Wimberly's work, according to Professor John Jennings who wrote the introduction to the collected edition, “...isn't just a mishmash of things he digs. Yes, it's Romeo and Juliet meets Kurosawa meets The Warriors meets Planet Rock. However, what makes Prince of Cats so innovative is the fact that it acts as a reified index of that Hip Hop culture would manifest itself as visually...deals with notions of class, race, and gender through this unlikely courtship of comics, Hip Hop, and the works of Shakespeare...a black speculative space that explores the construction of black masculinity, notions of good and evil, and the nuanced storytelling methods that are totally part of the affordances of the comics medium.”

The characters are almost as kinetic as living actors, with almost impossibly nuanced facial expressions and movement. The language is pure Shakespeare and pure Brooklyn, the connection of past to present, of sonnets to hip-hop flawless.

In case you've ever wondered about the book's title: Tybalt shares a name with the character Tybalt/Tibalt, Prince of Cats, from the medieval Reynard the Fox tales. In them, Tybalt is often outsmarted, and falls prey to, the clever fox. Mercutio uses the sobriquet as an insult when he hurls it at Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet, foretelling Tybalt's rather inglorious end.

From the Publisher

There is a long and rich tradition of re-imagining Shakespeare examples include the Tempest-inspired SF movie Forbidden Planet, the fascist Britain that never was of director Richard Loncraine’s Richard III, and West Side Story’s modern-day Romeo and Juliet. Now former cartoonist Wimberly adds to that body of work with this new version of Romeo and Juliet, set in a Japanese-flavored futuristic New York and focusing on Tybalt, the eponymous Prince of Cats. Proud and as easily affronted as any Renaissance-era Verona aristocrat, Tybalt seeks love and a place in the world, but finds only violence and needless death. The stylized graffiti-inspired art doesn’t shy away from the violence of the story, reflecting the brutal world the protagonist sometimes finds himself in, but the impact is somewhat dulled by overly dark coloring. The setting and recasting of the characters as African-Americans invites a comparison with West Side Story and its racial conflicts, and serves as a similarly worthy recasting of the timeless waste of feuding factions. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

Romeo is only a supporting player in this vibrant hip-hop drama based on Shakespeare and set in 1980s Brooklyn. Now Juliet’s cousin Tybalt holds center stage, with a slashing samurai sword as his claw. Wimberly’s high-saturated color marries inventive writing creating a winning blend of street-talk and hip-hop rhythms of Shakespearean elegance in iambic pentameter. Older teens up due to violence, nudity, implied sex, and street language.

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