Oh no not again: people can grumble all they like about cinema adaptations of books but they are entirely harmless compared to the time-wasting chasm of ineptitude that is comics adapted from books or plays. I remember the ‘good old days’ before Graphic Novels when the only comic you could find in a bookshop would be a version of Hamlet drawn by an inebriate monkey and heavy on the fight scenes. I also remember the staggeringly boring and static adaptation of The Hobbit that was a ‘hot title’ back in the late 80s and read like someone annotating a Tolkien calendar.

I’m not quite sure exactly why prose-into-comics are generally so dire but something about the storytelling styles doesn’t mesh. Plays-into-comics rubbishosity is more easily explained – the physical action of a play is necessarily smaller scale and that can make for drab storytelling. Anyway now we find good money being thrown after bad by poor old Penguin Books who promise a “manga version of Midsummer Night’s Dream”.