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Long-time friends and collaborators Conor McCreery and Anthony Del Col have taken Shakespeare's greatest characters and tossed them into a literary food processor.

The result is a comic book thriller called Kill Shakespeare, a 12-part series that combines classic literature and pop culture.

The first six issues have now been collected into a trade paperback called A Sea of Troubles, published this month by Idw. A teaser trailer for the project is included below.

"We know there'll be some controversy, 'How dare we bring Shakespeare to comic books,'" says Del Col. "We think it's a great way to spark interest in the greatest writer of all time, from young people and beyond."

In the story, Hamlet (the hero), banished from his home country for the murder of Polonius, is attacked by pirates at sea. He survives and awakens in the castle of Richard III (the villain) who sends him...

Legendary character actor Peter Ustinov, who won two Oscars for roles in Spartacus and Topkapi, died Sunday night in Switzerland of heart failure; he was 82. Also a prolific writer, Ustinov began his acting career at the age of 17 and sold his first screenplay (for The True Glory) at 24. At age 30, he earned his first Oscar nomination for his turn as Nero in Quo Vadis?, effectively establishing himself as one of the screen's most versatile supporting actors. Though known to most moviegoers as a portly British character actor, Ustinov was a multi-talented entertainer who also wrote, produced, directed, and starred in the acclaimed 1962 film Billy Budd, wrote innumerable novels and plays (including Romanoff and Juliet), and traveled extensively as a humanitarian, raconteur and humorist. Ustinov's biographer, John Miller, once remarked that the actor, who was knighted in 1990, "had enough careers for about six other men." Though confined to a wheelchair later in his life, Ustinov continued to raise money for UNICEF and most recently appeared in the film Luther. Other notable roles include his turns as Agatha Christie detective Hercule Poirot in Death on the Nile, Evil Under the Sun and Appointment with Death as well as films Lorenzo's Oil, Logan's Run, Hot Millions (for which he also received a Screenplay Oscar nomination), The Sundowners and The Egyptian. --Prepared by IMDb staff...