Talbot Deconstructs Alice and Lewis

This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on November 21, 2006 Sign up now!

by Heidi MacDonald, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 11/21/2006

British cartoonist Bryan Talbot has forged a career as a true graphic novelist who has shown a rare breadth of subject matter in his work: his Luther Arkwright is an SF epic some have compared to Star Wars, while the award-winning A Tale of One Bad Rat is an intimate and gripping tale of childhood sexual abuse. He'll be back in 2007 with a new graphic novel called Alice in Sunderland, which is sure to be one of the highlights of the year in comics. The book is due in February from Dark Horse. As befits his eclectic career, Alice has a unique perspective on literary history via the British town of Sunderland, home to Lewis Carroll and the "real" Alice and her family.

PWCW: What is Alice in Sunderland about?

Bryan Talbot: Alice in Sunderland is a 320-page graphic novel with the themes of storytelling, history and myth in a form I've been describing as a "dream documentary." It is not one story but literally dozens, short and long, the central spines being the history of Sunderland and the story of Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell (the "real" Alice), both of whom had connections with the city and surrounding area.

The stories are told within the structure of an imaginary performance on the stage of the Sunderland Empire Theater, the shorter ones interwoven within the two main threads and consistently underpinned by the stage setting. As the Empire is an Edwardian music hall, the work is a "variety performance" in that different visual styles are utilized for each story, according to its needs.

The artwork is a mixture of black and white ink line and pencil drawing, watercolor painting in monochrome and color, collage and digitally manipulated photographic artwork. The layouts vary hugely from a conventional nine-panel grid and full-page illustrations to multiple image pages, or metapanels, using original art collaged with old prints, documents and maps, as appropriate to each sequence.

Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass were stories of dreams, and dream is one of the themes of the book. Another theme is the cyclic nature of life. I "play" the three principal characters—the Plebeian, the Performer and the Pilgrim—each one a visually different caricature of myself.

PWCW: Not your typical comics subject matter, certainly. What inspired you to work on this book?

BT: The second comic I ever had published, Brainstorm #2 in 1976, contained the story "From Here to Infinity," which was a partial pastiche of Through the Looking Glass, and since then I've wanted to do something based on Lewis Carroll and Alice. Then I moved here to Sunderland about seven years ago and discovered that both he and the Liddell family had many links to the place. For example: the museum in the park at the end of my street still contains the first walrus (stuffed!) Carroll ever saw. Jabberwocky and other parts of Alice were written here. His Sunderland nephew and godson was his first biographer and so on. That was the starting point.

PWCW: How long did it take you to finish?

BT: About four years! Madness. I know that Dez Skinn calls me the Stanley Kubrick of comics because I spend at least a couple of years on each graphic novel, but this is a record even for me.

PWCW: The structure is so complicated, with all the different styles used for the stories. Was this part of the original conception for the book, and did you ever find it difficult to pull off?

BT: No, I just spent a lot of time working it out until it was rock solid. If there's anything at all clever about this book, it's the structure. [Legendary Beano cartoonist] Leo Baxendale, after reading the script, declared that the structure was "magisterial"! The book is a variety show, its framework a theatrical performance. This was decidedly a part of the original concept.

PWCW: The subject matter of this graphic novel—a multileveled look at history—was a little unusual even a few years ago, but now the graphic novel is considered a very valid form for this. You are, in fact, one of the English pioneers of graphic novels with such work as Luther Arkwright. Did you think that graphic novels would one day have the acceptance that they have now?

BT: Absolutely. I've always seen them as the way forward. I plotted my first graphic novel (though the term hadn't been invented then) in 1970 when I was a teenager. It was a vast Tolkeinesque epic and utterly beyond me to draw at that point. I only did a few sketches, roughs for a page or two and the obligatory fantasy map. In the early 1980s, I did a slide show and talk several times on the history of comics, the point of which was that the graphic novel was the future of the medium. Once I did it at a London university. I found out years later that the young student Dave McKean was in the audience.

PWCW: What was the most difficult section to pull off?

BT: The 18-page section "The Legend of the Lambton Worm" took a long time. I hit it and slowed right down to about a page every three days. The art style was just very time-consuming. I was trying to do the strip in an Arts and Crafts style.

PWCW: How did you research this book? It covers so much territory, it seems like that must have taken almost as long as the actual drawing.

Talbot: It was like doing a bloody Ph.D. I'm serious. There is a list of source books after the story and it's two pages of quite small print. It's one of the reasons the book took four years, even though I started researching it about two years beforehand, while working on other comics.

PWCW: Tell us how this book found a publisher. It's interesting that in England it's coming out from Random House, but in the U.S. from Dark Horse.

BT: What usually happens is that a publisher—Dark Horse in the case of my last graphic novel, Heart of Empire—will pay me a page rate as I work on the book. With Alice I pitched the concept to a few publishers before I started work on it but didn't get any immediate interest. I happened to mention this to [comics journalist] Rich Johnston at the Bristol con, who ran a small news item on it in his Lying in the Gutters column. This resulted in six different publishers approaching me, most of which I'd never heard of.

The best offer came from James Owen, who was offering a commercial page rate and gearing up to publish a monthly comic anthology called Words and Pictures. He had some radical and very exciting ideas, and I was sold on the concept, one that was being encouraged by Will Eisner. Unfortunately, James Owen's Coppervale International ran into severe cash-flow problems resulting in me only being paid sporadically, so the deal fell through. I repaid some of the advance, and James agreed to call the rest a kill fee.

So I had a chunk of the book completed, but no income coming in. I decided to plough on and finish it, rather than looking for other work, which would have pushed the book even further from completion. As I was working on the final 20 pages, I started looking for a publisher again and arranged an appointment with Jonathan Cape [Random House U.K.] in London, taking down Alice in hard copy. Editor Dan Franklin liked what he saw, but needed to read the script before making a decision, so I had a photocopy made of the completed pages and mailed it down. He accepted the book a few weeks later.

For America, I signed with the Kitchen and Hansen Agency to represent it. They had it considered by every mainstream U.S. book publisher who does graphic novels and had exactly the same response from each one of them: "We like it, but it's too British"! Yes, it's as British as Wallace and Grommit. And Alice, of course. Fortunately, Mike Richardson of Dark Horse isn't as convinced that U.S. readers have such narrow limitations.

PWCW: What do you hope readers get out of Alice in Sunderland?

BT: An enjoyable read. The book is subtitled "An Entertainment," and I hope that this is exactly what it is. There is a lot of light and shade in the book, so although some sequences are quite dark or serious, there's also a hell of a lot of humor in there and plenty of cool visuals.