Bryan Talbot

Bryan Talbot is probably the most important English language writer and artist of comics and graphic novels of our time.

Bryan was born in Wigan in Lancashire on the 24th of February 1952. At the age of seventeen he was having illustrations published in Mallorn, the Journal of the British Tolkien Society, and in 1971 he drew the cover to the first issue of Dark Horizons, the magazine of the British Fantasy Society. A few years later he the character of Chester P. Hackenbush, who appeared in the first three issues of Alchemy Press‘s Brainstorm Comix. Hackenbush would go on to be the model for Chester Williams in Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing.

In 1978 Bryan started work on The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, which originally appeared in Near Myths and pssst! before being collected into what would be the first of three volumes by Proutt/Never Ltd in 1982. This was the same year that Hamish Hamilton published Raymond Briggs’s When the Wind Blows, and the two of these books are the bedrock of the British graphic novel tradition. Two more volumes of Luther Arkwright appeared, in 1987 and 1989, after the whole story had appeared in nine individual comics published by Valkyrie Press. The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, as well as being an excellent story with gorgeous artwork, is a seminal work in the history of the comics form, and was a sign of things to come from Talbot. Many comics creators, including the likes of Garth Ennis, Warren Ellis, Grant Morrison, Neil Gaiman, and Rick Veitch have all acknowledged its influence on their own work. There have been fanzines and role-playing games dedicated to it, and in 2005 a three-hour audio drama adaptation by Big Finish was released, with David Tennant in the starring role.

In the meantime Bryan was working on various strips for UK comic 2000 AD, notably Nemesis the Warlock and Judge Dredd, and later on various titles for DC Comics in the USA, including Hellblazer, Sandman, The Dreaming, various Batman titles, and The Nazz, a 200-page prestige format creator-owned four-part series that the world is still waiting for a nice collected edition of! He has done lots of other comic work, as well as comic covers, book covers, illustration for magazines of all kinds, art prints, posters, badges and logos, as well as cards for the Magic: The Gathering collectible card game. He seems to be astonishingly prolific, yet always produces work of the highest standard. Trying to list all of his work would make this biographical piece several times longer that it is, so go look at this bibliography instead.

There are a few other works by Bryan that need to be singled out, though. In 1995 he produced The Tale of One Bad Rat, which deals with the issue of childhood sexual abuse, and the book is now used in several child abuse centres in Britain, America, Germany and Finland. It has won a huge number of awards, including – but not limited to – an Eisner Award, a Comic Creators’ Guild Award, two UK Comic Art Awards, and a Parent’s Choice Award. It was also nominated for several others. In 1999 he wrote and illustrated Heart of Empire, the sequel to The Adventures of Luther Arkwright. Big Finish are currently in the middle of producing an audio version of this, with David Tennant reprising his role as Arkwright. His Alice in Sunderland, published by Jonathan Cape, is a breathtaking investigation into the story of Alice, but also lots of other things as well, including a meditation on the very nature of stories. Like pretty much everything else he’s produced, this comes very highly recommended. He has also written a book of prose anecdotes about the comic industry, The Naked Artist, illustrated by Hunt Emerson, which was published in 2007 by Moonstone. Also in 2007, NBM published The Art of Bryan Talbot, a collection of some of the many magazine and book illustrations produced over the past thirty years. More recently he has been working on the steampunk detective thriller graphic novel series that starts with Grandville, published by Jonathan Cape in 2009, followed by Grandville Mon Amour in 2010, with a third volume, Grandville Bête Noire, due soon.

February 2012 will see the publication of Dotter Of Her Father’s Eyes. His website says, Bryan is currently drawing a graphic novel written by his wife, Mary Talbot, to be published by Jonathan Cape in the UK and Dark Horse in the US, hopefully later this year. Dotter of her Father’s Eyes is partly autobiographical, charting the relationship between Mary and her father, the Joycean scholar James S Atherton and partly biographical, dealing with the life of James Joyce’s daughter Lucia. Mary has written several academic textbooks but this is her first piece of creative writing.”

Bryan has won numerous awards for his work in comics, including Eagles and Eisners. In July 2009 he was given an Honorary Doctorate of Arts by the University of Sunderland, the first time this has been done for a comic book artist. It is hard to think of a man more deserving of it.

Besides all of the above, Bryan Talbot is entertaining, lively, extraordinarily smart, and genuinely open and likeable. We are absolutely delighted to have him at P-CON.

For more information about Him, you should visit his website, or read really-almost-too-long interview with Pádraig Ó Méalóid.

Bio by Anne M Kletcha