Talbot, Bryan

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Bryan Talbot

Born February 24, 1952 (Wigan, England)
British author, illustrator

"Writing's the easy bit … it's nothing compared to the sheer volume of work that the artist has to do."

British comics creator Bryan Talbot's The Tale of One Bad Rat is often held up as an example of what can be accomplished by the graphic novel. With carefully drawn characters, a heart-rending storyline, and breathtaking art, Talbot's 1994 story about a homeless young girl haunted by memories of sexual abuse was widely celebrated as one of those rare works—along with Art Spiegelman's (see entry) Maus: A Survivor's Tale—that illustrates the artistic possibilities in a medium often criticized for dealing primarily in superheroes and mechanized robots. Though The Tale of One Bad Rat is Talbot's best-known work, the writer/illustrator has been creating comics since 1978 and is credited with creating the first British graphic novel, The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, in the late 1980s. Many of the most popular British comics creators of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century—including Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, Warren Ellis, and Garth Ennis (see entries)—credit Talbot with inspiring their careers. Talbot has worked in a variety of areas, including authoring mainstream superhero stories, and in the 2000s producing a CD-ROM version of his Hearts of Empire, a sweeping adventure story set in the English past.

Roots in the underground

Bryan Talbot was born on February 24, 1952, in Wigan, a mid-sized town in northern England with a reputation for a grim industrial past. Looking back on his upbringing, Talbot has often commented that it makes perfect sense that he became a comic book artist: "I've always read comics," he told an interviewer for the Pro File Web site, "and always drawn." He recalled making his own comic books while he was in elementary school, carefully folding pages, stapling them together, and creating his own stories. "I never realised I could make a living doing comics," he continued, "though I knew I wanted to work in art somehow."

Best-Known Works

Graphic Novels

The Adventures of Luther Arkwright. 3 vols. (U.K.) 1987–89; 1 vol. (U.S.) (1997).

A Tale of One Bad Rat (1995).

Heart of Empire (1999; on CD-ROM, 2001).

Alice in Sunderland. Forthcoming.

Though Talbot loved comics, he couldn't imagine creating them as a career, so he studied art instead. Talbot passed his college entrance exams (required for admission to higher education in England) and decided to take courses at the local Wigan School of Art. Instead of studying illustration, which would have trained him in the kinds of skills he would need to be a comics creator, he took classes from teachers who emphasized abstract art, or art that shied away from realistic depictions of the world. His abstract works weren't very good, he acknowledged, and his lack of enthusiasm for them contributed to his failure to gain entrance into the other art schools to which he applied. In the end, according to the Pro File Web site, Talbot felt he learned little from his art education.

Dropped out of school, and with a wife and the first of his two children to support, Talbot opened a head shop, a retail store that offered goods to members of the then-thriving counterculture (a sub-culture whose values and practices are different from the mainstream, and typically included drug use). Though discouraged by his art education, Talbot still drew comics. In the early 1970s, he drew one series called the "Chester B. Hackenbush Trilogy" that was published by afriendwho ownedasmallpress, and soon wrote and drew other small comics. It was the beginning of his long apprenticeship in the underground comics scene, a movement of comics artists in the United States and England that focused on publishing experimental comics with adult themes. In an interview on the Cult/BBC Web site, Talbot joked that this involvement with alternative comics in the mid-1970s was the first time drawing comics had made him feel cool: "At the time, to write and draw an underground comic was the next coolest thing to playing bass in a rock band."

Pens first British graphic novel

After writing and illustrating several smaller comics works in the mid-1970s, Talbot began to work on the much longer, more complicated work that would become The Adventures of Luther Arkwright. Part science-fiction, part historical novel, the story told the tale of a man who had the ability to travel between the parallel universes that exist in the novel: the present day and seventeenth-century England. Luther Arkwright, Talbot told Pro File, "was an attempt to do an intelligent adventure story for adults that was every bit as rich as a text novel and was drawn in illustration-quality artwork." Talbot published the first episodes of the story in 1978 in Near Myths magazine, and he continued the work in pssst! magazine until 1982; after a five-year hiatus, Talbot completed the book in two years in comics published by Valkyrie Press. (The story was finally brought together in three volumes in Britain in the late 1980s, and was published in a single volume in the United States by Dark Horse in 1997.)

With Luther Arkwright, Talbot became the first British comics creator to produce a graphic novel—a sustained narrative in comics form. He won immediate acclaim among the British comics community. Comics creator Warren Ellis (1968–), who reviewed the book on the artbomb Web site, later wrote that "Luther Arkwright is probably the single most influential graphic novel to have come out of Britain to date" and "will always be one of the most explosive creative experiences comics have yet undergone." The book's explicit treatment of drug use and sexuality meant that it would never be appropriate for a mainstream audience but, on the strength of the recognition he earned for the book, Talbot began to get a variety of other work that allowed him to give up his job managing the head shop in order to become a full-time comic book artist.

Through the 1980s and early 1990s, Talbot published a wide variety of comic books, both as writer and writer/artist. He co-created several stories for the British comics magazine 2000AD, including stories for Nemesis the Warlock and Judge Dredd, two popular ongoing British series. He also broke into the American market, writing and illustrating works in the Hellblazer and Sandman series. His biggest successes came when providing the art for Tom Veitch's The Nazz and, in 1992, when he authored a two-part Batman story called Mask for the Legends of the Dark Knight series published by DC Comics. During these years, Talbot grew more adept at both his storytelling and his art.

Stumbles onto a bad rat

Ever since he had traveled to the Lake District in northern England as a child, Talbot had had a great affection for this famous region of lakes, valleys, and mountains, crisscrossed by trails. He had always wanted to set a story there, and in the early 1990s he began to write the tale of a runaway teenage girl from London who escapes with her pet rat to a new life in the Lake District. Then, he had an inspiration: the girl's motive for fleeing the city was the sexual abuse she had endured at the hands of her father. Talbot thus embarked on a tale that would become one of the most arresting graphic novels ever written. The story begins with Helen, the young girl, wandering through London, suffering the indignities and dangers of the homeless, including being hassled by the police and solicited by prostitutes. Longing to escape the city and her memories of being abused, she heads north to the Lake District, once home to the author of her favorite childhood stories, Beatrix Potter. In the Lake District, she finds peace working and boarding at a small inn. She eventually comes to terms with the abuse she has suffered, resolves to quit hating herself and blaming herself, and confronts her father. By the book's end, Helen has a smile on her face as she paints the lovely scenery of the Lake District.

The Tale of One Bad Rat is a striking example of what can be accomplished in a graphic novel. At the heart of the book's success is the heart-rending story, which Talbot tells without flinching from the bare emotions of a tortured girl struggling with a terrible past. The story is complicated and multilayered, with numerous references to elements from Beatrix Potter's work. Talbot uses the visual elements of the comic book to enhance the story: Helen's memories of her past are cast in dark, angry tones, and Talbot masterfully draws a father who can look benign one moment and evil the next. The darkness and violence of the early scenes is contrasted with the pastoral beauty of the Lake District scenes, which Talbot renders with loving care. The result is a masterful combination of images and words. The Tale of One Bad Rat, published by Dark Horse in 1994, was widely reviewed and praised in the comics community. It won multiple awards around the world, including an Eisner Award, and is frequently named to lists of top graphic novels. Perhaps most telling, the book is frequently used by counselors to help young people who have suffered abuse see that they are not to blame for the things that were done to them.

In 1999, Talbot returned to producing comics for adults with his Heart of Empire. Though Heart of Empire is a sequel to the Adventures of Luther Arkwright, set twenty-three years after the events in that story, it is a very different work. Talbot told Mars Import Web site interviewer John Anderson that, unlike the experimental and complicated earlier story, with his new Arkwright comic, "I just wanted to create an exciting adventure story for adults that was an enjoyable ride for the reader. Its plot is totally linear and the storytelling clear and straightforward." Heart of Empire is presented in full color, unlike the earlier Arkwright story. The work continues the historical science fiction approach, as it follows Arkwright's daughter, Victoria, who comes to oppose the evil dictatorship of Queen Anne and brings about the downfall of the British Empire. True fans of Talbot's were thrilled when the author/artist released a full CD-ROM version of Heart of Empire that contained all of his sketches for the work, along with detailed commentary about the extensive historical research used to write the story. Perhaps most interesting to comics fans is the ability to see the unfolding creative process in penciled, inked, and colored versions of every page.

In the 2000s, Talbot has alternated between authoring or drawing single stories for other comics and working on his next full-length project. That work, Alice in Sunderland, is described on the Official Bryan Talbot Fanpage as an "approximately 300 page long graphic novel with the themes of storytelling, history and myth" centered around the history of the English town of Sunderland and its most famous inhabitant, Lewis Carroll (1832–1898), author of the story Alice in Wonderland. A perfectionist in creating his artwork, Talbot carefully labored over the work; it was described as nearly complete in late 2005.