Finally getting into Bryan Talbot...
The Adventures of Luther ArkwrightTalbot's first big work, originally serialized in the UK. It's very much of a piece with other 80s British b&w comics in a lot of ways, fitting in neatly with the British Invasion crew who would soon take over American superhero books, though Talbot himself, aside from the occasional art job, never seemed too interested in that whole scene, or maybe he just wasn't as amenable to the contours of American comics as some of his peers. To be sure, though this kind of is a superhero adventure it's a very strange and difficult one. It is remarkably dense, its multi-dimensional narrative deliberately jumbled and scrambled, often with little to orient the reader in quite what's going on. Talbot's pages are dense, dark, often wordy, packed with historical allusions, large blocks of newsprint text, imagery arranged into hallucinatory collages. Typical 80s UK comic preoccupations abound: Cromwell, fascism, sci-fi, sex as a mystical focal point. Eventually the story's shape becomes clearer and the climactic issues are action-packed showcases, primarily, for Talbot's masterful formalist command of time and space. Issue #7 takes place entirely in the moments immediately preceding a series of climaxes, and Talbot stretches time, holding these moments for page after page, elongating the suspense and honing in on the details of these frozen seconds right before everything comes to a head. Great stuff, as is the bloody, slightly melancholy catharsis of the following issue, in which Talbot continues to slow time, focusing almost unbearably on very specific moments of violence and revenge. And then the final issue provides some data dumps, abruptly explaining large chunks of the story in a few text-heavy pages. I feel like there had to be some more middle ground between dizzyingly impenetrable and overly expository, but this remains a fascinating book, even if large parts of it I find way easier to admire than to fully enjoy.
The Tale of One Bad RatBasically as far as it's possible to get from the Arkwright saga. For this rather stripped-down tale of a young woman fleeing years of abuse and setting off on her own path, struggling to heal and find a place for herself, Talbot cleans up his style tremendously. None of the verbal or visual density of Arkwright here, this moves with the directness and poetry of a child's storybook - like the Peter Rabbit books of Beatrix Potter, whose work informs and inspires Talbot's work here a great deal. Talbot's clean, thick-lined art is beautiful, as are the mostly pastoral colors, especially in the second half of the book as Helen, the young runaway, reaches the English countryside that Potter so loved. This is beautifully drawn and constructed, extremely moving, and obviously well-researched, with much sensitivity and compassion around the psychology of dealing with trauma and abuse. It's a quiet masterpiece, its initial melancholy and depression gradually giving way to well-earned recovery, acceptance, and learning.
Heart of EmpireHere's Talbot's sequel to the first Arkwright cycle, but done in a clearer, much less dizzying style. Unlike the first story, which leapt wildly among parallel dimensions and followed several overlapping but distinct narrative threads, this sequel is mainly set in a single reality. It deals with the aftermath of the first book's revolution in one alternate reality, in which a Cromwellian Puritan dictatorship was overthrown in favor of a royalist monarchy. Years later, that government too has descended into corruption and repression, led by a psychic vampire queen who's intent on enslaving the entire world. In addition to being a viscerally thrilling sci-fi/fantasy adventure yarn, the book is Talbot's raw, satirical portrait of Britain's history as an exploitative empire. The book seethes with a savage wit that's bitterly funny as often as it is deeply sad - where the first Arkwright was certainly packed with harrowing depictions of the world's many dysfunctions, here Talbot's satire has curdled, turned even nastier and funnier, served very well by the clarity and precision of the grotesque caricatures he uses to capture his villains. Talbot's art just keeps getting better - this is even more gorgeous than One Bad Rat, with a similar thick-lined style but with much more detail, fully capturing the gaudy excesses of a rotting empire. By turns jaw-droppingly dark and startlingly, grossly funny, this is a really unique and fantastic book. Though it doesn't have the formal pyrotechnics or daring of the original Arkwright, I wound up loving this one in a way I couldn't really do with the much chillier, more cerebral first story.
GrandvilleI don't see much discussion of this, Talbot's 5-volume steampunk alternate history talking animal epic, which on the one hand I understand, because look at how I just described it, but on the other hand these comics are freaking amazing. All the absurdity and vicious satire of the Arkwright books is here, married to an absolutely rock-solid genre foundation of pulpy murder mysteries. Talbot's world-building is phenomenal, crafting this elaborate alternate history in which Britain is only recently independent from a world-spanning French empire, in a world where talking animals of all species proliferate and only humans are considered a lower caste, enslaved and mocked as "doughfaces." The first book sets the template, as a Sherlock Holmes-like badger inspector is called in to solve a murder, accompanied by his Watson-like rat assistant. This mystery, like the ones in later books, winds up leading into much darker and stranger territory than expected, ultimately exposing corruption and wild conspiracy theories at the highest levels of politics and religion. Each book delves into parodies and allegories for real-world conspiracies, both actual and imagined - 9/11 truthers, secretive cults, the capitalist funding of abstract expressionism as an aesthetic weapon against socialists. These books are very satisfying as elaborate, action-packed intrigues, but neither their well-done procedural mechanics nor the cutesy animal characters can obscure the darkness at the core of these stories. Talbot's whimsical animal creations routinely do horrible violence to one another - even the hero, always so convinced of his own rightness, is often shockingly brutal and stumbles into commiting atrocities of his own. But it's the larger violence of society - government oppression, the suppression and genocide of minority groups, the demonization of outsiders, the exploitation of working classes by the super-rich - that's always the real horror behind these mysteries. Though Talbot's determined inspector always takes his fists and his guns right to the highest seats of power in pursuit of answers, and the villains often get a bloody ending, the larger structures never change, and new evils simply step in to fill the gaps.
And bonus non-Talbot content:
Survive 300,000,000 Vol. 1 by Pat Aulisio
I've read a few Aulisio books now and I think I'm just never going to have Wombatz's enthusiasm for him. This is fine, as sketchy post-Fort Thunder, post-apocalyptic wandering stories go, but it's just not very exciting to me. Aulisio's art is fun to look at, with his ragged figures wandering through busy landscapes of rubble and strange machinery, nauseating colors slathered over everything to fully capture the feel of the futuristic wasteland. But at least for me it never rises above that level of "fun," there's not enough there in either art or story to make it really interesting or stand out from the countless other books pretty much exactly like this.