MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

An illustration of an “R&J B-sides Mixtape” cassette frames the foreword to Prince of Cats, writer and artist Ronald Wimberly’s Romeo and Juliet adaptation. There, Wimberly presents himself as a DJ “cutting the B-side” of Shakespeare’s tragedy with gratuitous ninjas, resulting in “postmodern absurdity.” This graphic narrative, largely but not exclusively a prequel to its source, unfolds in an alternate 1980s Brooklyn in which katana-wielding adolescent male Capulets and Montagues jockey for position on the “Duel List.” Wimberly’s text, of course, disrupts hierarchies of genre and canon: Wimberly is, to use his own description in an interview, sampling Shakespeare as well as the Wu-Tang Clan and the 1979 film The Warriors. This hybridity, however, also unsettles dominant constructions and power dynamics regarding race and gender. Prince of Cats’ characters are predominantly Black, refocusing the narrative on underrepresented voices and experiences, yet also highlighting the continuities among, say, Shakespearean wordplay insults, the tradition of playing the Dozens, and hip hop lyrics; or among theater, street art, and comics; and its Juliet and Rosalyn are more active if not entirely empowered, at once jealous of, critical of, and powerless to stop the ostentatiously performative (and thus symbolically artistic) male (self-)destruction occurring around them. Juliet’s appearance at the Capulets’ masked entertainment in a Wonder Woman costume emblematizes several of these complex appropriative threads: she appears in a text in a predominantly pop-culture genre by a Black creator refashioning the work and cultural capital of the ultimate dead white male writer; and she is simultaneously making a claim about the overwhelmingly white and male tradition of the comics genre (while about to fall for a white Romeo). She stands both within and as a subversive commentary upon the intertextual and canonical traditions in which she participates, as does Prince of Cats itself.