Ronald Wimberly’s Prince Of Cats hit bookstore shelves last September, and I picked it up immediately, took it home, and read it that evening. Now, half a year later, I’m still turning it over in my head, constantly revisiting it, picking it up and flipping though it to study passages in more detail. It encapsulates much of what I love about comics, about Hip-Hop, and about how these two cultures can combine to blow my mind.
Most coverage has referred to it as a modernist retelling of Romeo & Juliet, but that’s not really accurate… It takes elements, names, characters, and weaves a whole new story. It’s a variation, a jazz riff on a theme of Shakespeare’s R&J: floating off, dancing between memories, dropping a note here and a line there, nodding to the familiar and filling in places the original never made space for. Think of Coltrane’s take on ‘My Favorite Things’: a piece that takes the song, deconstructs it, pushes in a million different directions, and rebuilds the melody in ways the original composer never imagined. That’s what this book is: a envisioning of what happens around a story, ideas and dialogue and characters sampled, recontextualized, and brought to life for a different place and time. Tybalt and his pals roam through a fully-realized parallel Brooklyn, hopping subways, battling rivals,tagging walls, falling for girls; street gang cultures of the 1980s and the Elizabethan era mashed together and somehow making perfect sense.
It’s a great illustration of how a comics creator can function as an auteur – these words and pictures are all Wimberly’s, the colors, the concepts, the design, the typesetting. This is a one-man show, a single vision. And because of that, everything fits and works in unison. In moments where the text is unclear, images fill in the gaps and fill out the action.
The art is liquid and angular, all at once. Expressions play across faces, limbs pivot on sharp axes and distort as they shift to and fro, bodies foreshorten as they move through space. The figures twist and backflip through the panels, blood and color shooting across the page in carefully measured doses, stark lines and deep splotches of black ink tying elements together and governing the margins. The words pour down in sheets – characters spout iambic pentameter, narrating the strange hyperreal world they inhabit, a world of samurai-styled gangs and Nathan’s Hot Dog stands.
Wimberly has created something unique, weaving harmony with the juxtaposition of disparate notes, layering tones with depth and innate understanding. None of the aspects are expected, yet it all makes sense as it mixes, from the opening graphics of a subway map and an unspooling cassette tape, to the afterword framed by stencils, turntables, and audio cables. He blends cultures and influences and inspirations with impunity, nodding to what’s gone before and making something new: not just a Hip-Hop comic, but an act of Hip-Hop itself.
Prince Of Cats is published by Vertigo/DC Comics, and is available for purchase from Forbidden Planet, Amazon, or your local comic shop.
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Good stuff. I think “Prince of Cats” was the best comic of 2012. Wimberly is on some other shit for real, and this is his best work to date.