Two Canadians Conspire to "Kill Shakespeare"

Through the years, high school and college students typically have viewed William Shakespeare's work as a necessary evil. In order to graduate, they must pass at least one English Literature class, which requires reading and discussing Shakespeare's plays.

Conor McCreery and Anthony Del Col, creators of the new IDW series "Kill Shakespeare," realized, however, that the Bard is more popular than most people realize. "There's a lot of closet Shakespeare fans out there, and the goal of this project is unite them together," Del Col said during a sit-down interview with Associated Content.

"At the same time, we want to redefine Shakespeare for an entire generation. There also are those people who know nothing about Shakespeare, but they heard about Hamlet or Othello. We want to get them excited and realize that Othello is a badass and Juliet is hot," he said.

"Kill Shakespeare" pits Shakespeare's most famous characters against each other

Sitting around a table at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, Del Col, McCreery and artist Andy Belanger were taking a short break from WonderCon to talk about "Kill Shakespeare."I'm a comics guy, Anthony's a Shakespeare guy. We were brainstorming video game ideas," McCreery said. "We were talking online player games and what a neat space that is to tell stories."

At the time they were brainstorming, Quentin Tarantino's epic "Kill Bill" was generating buzz in the theaters. "Anthony said 'What if you had something that, instead of trying to kill David Carradine, you are trying to kill Billy Shakespeare-Shakespeare's characters going after each other?'" McCreery said.

Del Col and McCreery thought there was something cool to that idea. "Over the next 10-15 minutes while we were on the phone, we were going 'This could be like a 'Lord of the Rings' type of thing. You could have Hamlet, Juliet, and Othello. It's got action and adventure, love and romance, drama and comedy, double-crossing and cross-dressing," Del Col said.

Approaching "Kill Shakespeare" as a business

McCreery, who used to work in the comics industry, wanted to approach "Kill Shakespeare" as a bit of business. "We decided that if we were going to come forward not only with a compelling story, we should also be able to say 'Look, we're not going to miss any deadlines," he said. "This is going to get done on time; this is not going to be your standard Indy book. We actually went on the business side and secured a bunch of money so we could really do this as not just a great story, but commit to fans that we are going to get this out consistently and on time."

Artist Andy Belanger said that McCreery and Del Col approached him about 18 months ago about "Kill Shakespeare." "Right off the bat, when I heard the story, I was really was taken by it. You already have Shakespeare fans, so you already have a springboard for your market. You already have a huge group of people that are going to be into those characters already, so you are not coming from scratch, trying to sell people on something they have never heard of. They are already there," he said.

McCreery and Del Col really love the lush look that Belanger is bringing to the series. "Andy is doing stuff that people don't normally do in comics. We wanted to give our artists the time and security to do the best work they could."

Issue #1 of "Kill Shakespeare" is due in comic shops on Wednesday, April 14. For more information, check out the official website: http://www.killshakespeare.com/