Manic Monday--Brevity Is The Soul Of Wit

As we discussed previously, in ye olden days comic books had to have at least two pages of non-advertising text per issue in order to qualify for favorable postal rates.

Superior Stories made an even more half-hearted effort than most, using "Famous Stories In Capsule Form" to fill their space--unlike other comics, they figured, why come up with original material when we can do a Cliff Notes version, of, say, Hamlet?

(from #2 1955--click to embiggen)

Gee, that's what all the hullabaloo was about? The whole thing can be summarized in one page, with room to spare!!

(psst--nobody tell my good friend Siskoid about this--he has a blog dedicated to examining various movie versions of Hamlet, scene by scene...and his shortest post is longer than this presentation of the entire play!! He's been working for 2+ years on a play that can be summed up in 5 paragraphs!! Talk about decompression...)