Friday, August 25, 2023

Shakespeare in FoxTrot's Say Hello to Cactus Flats

Amend, Bill. Say Hello to Cactus Flats. Kansas City: Andrews and McMeel, 1993.

I may have hit a bit of a jackpot with this volume of Bill Amend's tremendous comic strip FoxTrot.

We're on the sixth published volume. The characters are pretty firmly established and fairly fleshed out.

Thus, we're ready to run with the Shakespeare tropes.

First, it's Peter who is working on Shakespeare. He has a Macbeth essay due, and here's how it goes:


I don't know that I would be able to call myself a Shakespeare scholar if I didn't point out that there are actually only four "prithees" in Macbeth, 75% of them spoken by the title character and the remaining 25% spoken by Banquo.

And now . . . well . . . something a bit more tangential. If you've dipped into Bardfilm's "Shakespeare and Star Trek Complete" (for which, q.v.), you may have noted that Bardfilm can get carried away, finding Shakespeare allusions where none was (probably) intended. But humor me, please:


Tell me that's not a sideways allusion to Othello with the gender roles reversed.

Oh.  Okay.  I hear you.

We can all agree that the next strip is clearly deliberately related to Shakespeare, though the specifics are left vague:


And, last but not least, we have one that I actually covered back in 2012 (for which, q.v.).


That felt very satisfying. Thanks, Bill Amend, once again for years of great Fox Trot strips (though, please, more Shakespeare is always appreciated).

Click below to purchase the book from amazon.com
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).

No comments:

Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
All material original to this blog is copyrighted: Copyright 2008-2039 (and into perpetuity thereafter) by Keith Jones.

The very instant that I saw you did / My heart fly to your service; there resides, / To make me slave to it; and, for your sake, / Am I this patient [b]log-man.

—The Tempest