This chapter deals with two long-form narratives that can be considered forerunners of the graphic novel: Milt Gross’s He Done Her Wrong (1930) and Drake Waller, Matt Baker, and Ray Osrin’s It Rhymes with Lust (1950). It stresses the originality of these proto-graphic novels and offers a close reading of both works, while reexamining their connections with other visual forms, namely, slapstick comedy, the woodcut novel, and film noir. To propel his dynamic story forward, Gross developed new ways of experimenting with the shape of panels, their size (as defined by the frames that delimit them), and their site (their particular placement within the space of the page). The chapter also addresses issues of gender and studies the critical treatment of male and female stereotypes. Finally, it studies the representation of graphic violence, reading It Rhymes with Lust as an example of “soft noir.”

The chapter considers tropes of violence in Coriolanus and The Taming of the Shrew. It examines some of the ways these have been shaped by cross-pollination among stage, cinema, and television. For Coriolanus this includes cinema’s increase in realistic cinematic violence and the profitable rise of action hero films. The screen makes highly visible the play’s physical violence marked by signifiers of masculinity: bleeding wounds (received or given in battle) and the scars they leave.Screen versions discussed include: televised Coriolanus broadcasts, one in Italy on RAI television (1965) and the other seen internationally through the BBC Shakespeare Series (1984); stage productions by France’sNational Populaire Villeurbanne (2006), and England’s Royal Shakespeare Company (2018); and Ralph Fiennes’s film (2011). The major films of The Taming of the Shrew include two mass-market movies starring celebrity couples, Mary Pickford/Douglas Fairbanks, directed by Sam Taylor (1927) and Elizabeth Taylor/Richard Burton directed by Franco Zeffirelli (1966), the BBC Shakespeare Series’ Shrew directed by Jonathan Miller (1980) and the Shakespeare Globe’s stage production (2012).