Books like Bravo, Mr. William Shakespeare!

Bravo, Mr. William Shakespeare! takes the reader through seven of Shakespeare's not-so-famous plays in a comic strip, and shows the plays in a child-friendly and comical way that many of us may not have seen before.There were good things and bad things about this book. I'm currently studying a lot of Shakespeare so looked to this to break down the storylines a bit more and basically just give me a simplified version of Shakespeare. Seeing as this is a children's book you'd think it would be quite easy to follow, right? Wrong. I would only recommend this to people who already had some existing knowledge of these plays. There were too many characters to remember who they all were in such a short adaption. This was especially true in The Merchant of Venice and Much Ado About Nothing, which I will have to re-read when I have a more extensive knowledge of those plays, because I didn't follow them at all. I was pleased when reading As You Like It to see that the more minor characters (like Phoebe, Silvius, Touchstone and Audrey) were included, because in so many adaptions (especially those ones for kids) it only focusses on the main two couples (Rosalind and Orlando and Celia and Oliver). There wasn't as much inclusion as there is in the play (for instance Corin was not mentioned at all) but I understand that if the author did include all the details, I'd still be reading this book. I did find it sort of strange how this four page adaption of the play spent way too long demonstrating how sad Rosalind was at the beginning, and didn't even mention how 'Ganymede' pretended to be Rosalind for Orlando, which, I think, is a key part of the story.The illustrations in this book could have been a lot better. I found that even the people who are supposed to be beautiful were portrayed as slightly disfigured characters who were never the same in two drawings. Having said that, I enjoyed seeing the story interpreted in pictures and found the spectators on the outer parts of the pages funny and thought the way the book was displayed as if it was the Globe Theatre was charming.I would recommend this to people looking to learn about Shakespeare, preferably if they already had a basic knowledge of the plays. (P.S. I seemed to have demonstrated my ability to ramble on and on in this review - I wouldn't be surprised if this review was actually longer than the book itself!)