For a very long time I've had ideas for a corporate version of Macbeth, selectively using the original text, in which nobody really dies. It would focus on the cutthroat nature of a business world populated by people who would not starve if they lost their job but still treat every objective of it like life and death. It would be a comic, because I can't make a film. But I have come to realize that as a whole, it is too intractable a puzzle to fill in, and also that pages and pages of old men in business suits would be even more boring to draw than to look at. Instead, I can take a crack at the individual ideas I've had for it as isolated exercises when the mood takes me, which in a way might be better.

The missing footnote here is, of course, a call forward to Macduff's special exemption that allows him to terminate Macbeth. Rather than making up some crude modern version soaked in gender politics, I would have it that it is never spelled out at all.