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The Life of Bryan

I met Bryan Talbot at the recent Comics 2000 festival in Bristol, UK. I'd like to pretend that this interview took place there, in the wee small hours of the morning as we quaffed pints of ale, pondering deep issues of philosophy and mythology as only the inebriated can.

Sadly this would not be true, because whilst Bryan is a big star, I am just a big wuss. So although I did actually get the courage up to go and speak to him, instead of saying "I wonder if I could interview you for Silver Bullet Comics please?" I actually said "whagh - err - could you sign these three for me please?" as I pushed the three freshly purchased issues of The Adventures of Luther Arkwright I had needed to complete my set across the table. He signed them for me, grinning as I apologised for being a gushing fanboy and watched me scurry off into the crowd.

No, this all came about via the wonder of e-mail, and took about three weeks to put together. Thanks are due to Bryan for his patience, and to his Webmaster, James Robertson for helping set the thing up.

Personally, I've been a fan of Bryan Talbot for years, and I'm sure that he needs no introduction to most of you. But, there may be some people out there who have never picked up any of his books and besides, whether he needs and intro or not, I reckon he's earned one.

Talbot, a tall, distinguished looking bloke with a Byronic taste in shirts, is possibly still best known for the ground breaking tale of alternate realities, fascist dictatorships and rebellion that was The Adventures of Luther Arkwright. He cut his comic creating teeth however, on the British Underground comic Brainstorm for which he created the "psychedelic alchemist" Chester Hackenbush. Alan Moore would later introduce a "tribute" version of this character during his run on DCs Swamp Thing.

As his fame grew, Talbot went on to do work for 2000AD, collaborating with writer Pat Mills on Nemesis and creating what is for me, the definitive look for the character. Talbot has since collaborated with others on Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight, The Dreaming and Sandman for DC, and Shadowdeath for Tekno Comics, but continues to make his biggest impact with projects that are wholly his own.

In the mid nineties he produced what is regarded by many as his finest work to date when he introduced Helen Potter to the world in The Tale of One Bad Rat. This was a finely crafted and meticulously researched story of courage and hope, tackling the difficult issue of child abuse in a sensitive, non-sensational manner. This was followed up in 1999 with The Heart of Empire, the long awaited sequel to Luther Arkwright which again won high acclaim.

Regie Rigby: I'd like to start by getting down to basics. You both write and draw comics, and I was wondering which came first. Do you consider yourself an Artist who writes, a Writer who does art, or is that kind of distinction artificial?

Bryan Talbot: I suppose I think of myself as a "comics creator" rather than an artist or writer. I worked in underground and alternative comics for five years before I went professional, writing and drawing my own stories. That's how I started. Later I worked for 2000AD and DC Comics, drawing to other people's scripts, but the majority of my books have been written by me. I've also written comic series, The DREAMING and Tekno's SHADOWDEATH, that were drawn by other artists, so I've worked on both sides.

When I'm creating stories, the images, story and text develop simultaneously. My first draft of any script is always in the form of rough visuals with notes. It's only after this that I sit at the computer and type out a text script.

RR: So the art and the text are part of the same whole?

BT: Exactly. Text and art should be created and married together at the earliest creative stage.

RR: I saw your talk on The Heart of Empire at Bristol - I never thought I'd see a room full of fanboys transfixed to a lecture on the Golden Section and the composition of renaissance art.

BT: Did you think it worked OK? I was a little worried that it was so unstructured. I like things like that to have an underlying design and a definite purpose (as in the Bad Rat talk). I thought that it was a little too close to a chat with pictures.

RR: I thought the talk worked perfectly. Personally I learned more about art theory in ninety minutes than they managed to teach me in my whole school career.

BT: Good. I'm going to be doing it again in San Diego this July.

RR: I have since re read the Heart of Empire Series, and picked up on a lot of references I missed the first time around. Is that the idea behind the CD ROM - to point out the intricacies we might otherwise miss?

BT: Absolutely. 50,000 words of annotations.

RR: Anyway, still with the basics, I was wondering what drew you to comics in the first place? Most of the "new" wave of comics creators I have spoken to cite the work you did in the seventies and early eighties (along with Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons) as one of the reasons they got into comics.

What were your influences, and what attracted you to comics rather than say, novels or film?

BT: I've always been into comics since before I could read. I started on nursery comics - JACK AND JILL, HAROLD HARE Etc before graduating to the DC Thompson weeklies when I was about 5: THE BEEZER, THE TOPPER, THE BEANO and THE DANDY. Creators like Leo Baxendale and Ken Reid were a big influence, though I only found out their names in the 60s when they started working for Fleetway and others: DC Thompson wouldn't let them sign their work. Leo's now a mate of mine. When I was 8 I discovered Batman, Superman et al and, a couple of years later the Marvel renaissance started. Jack Kirby is a huge influence. I also used to read Creepy and Eerie, the more mature stories making me realise that there was a whole other way to tell comic stories.

When underground comics hit Britain in the late sixties/early seventies, first being reprinted in UG mags such as OZ and IT, they blew me away: Crumb, Shelton, Williams, Sheridan, Veitch and Irons, Corben & Co.

Though I used to draw comics for my own amusement, I still didn't realise I could actually do it for a living and ended up doing a graphic design course, with no illustration taught. It was only after finishing the course, whilst unemployed, I stated drawing the first BRAINSTORM comic. Lee Harris, a shop owner and sometime publisher had seen some of my sketches a couple of years before and said he'd be interested in publishing a comic by me. I ended up working in underground comics for 5 years, inbetween (and during) other jobs for the pleasure of being published - not for the non-existent cash! After this time, I was getting asked more and more to do professional work and this is when I went self-employed as an illustrator and comic creator.

So, you see, I sort of slowly fell into working in comics, rather than making a decision to do so.

RR: So basically, you started where we all start, as a fan?

BT: That's right. Though I was never involved in fandom as such, apart from one or two illos I occasionally did for fanzines.

RR: I'd like to move on to your most recent work now, namely Heart of Empire. It's a stunning piece of work which I felt develops themes begun in Luther Arkwright, but does not follow slavishly on from them.

There was a pretty big gap between the publication of Luther Arkwright and Heart of Empire and I'm interested in the creative process here. Was Heart of Empire always planned, or did you develop the story later having decided to write a sequel?

BT: Whilst working on ARKWRIGHT I never envisaged a sequel until working on the final chapter, when I started wondering what happened next. By then I was ready to do something different - I hate getting stuck on the same thing year in year out - and I started working for DC. This gave me plenty of time to think about what sort of story I wanted to tell, do research and accumulate locations and props. I did research for the story in Rome, Windsor Castle, the Louvre, the British Museum, The New York Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Museum of York among others.

RR: The research seems to pay off - one of the things that always impresses me about your comics is the attention to detail and depth of explanation.

I have to ask an obvious question now, because I have friends who will do me violence if I don't

Will we ever find out what happens next to Victoria as she travels her world? The final scene of Heart of Empire almost cries out for a "To be Continued..." tag. Was this a deliberate device to leave the reader wanting more, or did you feel that this was a logical place to end the saga.

BT: It seemed like a good ending (to the story and to the Empire) and left Victoria flying off the page and into the imagination. I think it would perhaps spoil it to follow her. It had a good sense of closure and of new beginnings - the cliffs of Dover are like a gateway, a departure or arrival point. I would like to do another Arkwright story, but I'll do something different for a while first.

RR: I'm inclined to agree that following Victoria on her travels could well destroy the sense of closure Heart of Empire has at the moment.

That said, I would very much like to see her again some day, so I'll keep my fingers crossed...

I'd like to talk about the research that you put into your work. I find your writing as finely detailed as your art, with all sorts of facts and snippets of information woven into the fabric of the text.

This was particularly striking in The Tale of One Bad Rat where Helen Potter takes every opportunity to explain to the supporting cast, and therefore the reader, the virtues of rats. There is also a good deal of information about the Lake District in general and Beatrix Potter in particular which although not necessary to the plot certainly made the whole thing more real.

I noticed the same sort of thing in Heart of Empire, there were all sorts of little asides and conversations between characters which added interest to them, and perhaps educated the reader but were not strictly necessary to the plot.

I guess what I'm asking, you knew there had to be a question in here somewhere, is whether you go looking for these bits of information so that you can put this dialogue into your character's mouths, or whether you find these things out, like Uranus almost being called Persephone, for example, in the course of researching the main plotlines and decide that they're too interesting to leave out?

BT: A bit of both, I suppose. I like to make the text rich and interesting. As for Persephone, that is indeed what our solar system's "Dark Sister" has been called - there is conjecture that there is another planet, hidden from sight but that can be proved by theoretical physics, that's orbiting the sun way out on the edge.

If you're interested in the Bad Rat research, here's a reply I did to the same question in an interview with Tasha Lowe:

I talked to a couple of friends who'd been abused and read about a dozen books on the subject, which included psychoanalysis and transcripts of abuse survivors talking. I read about the same number of books about Beatrix Potter plus all her stories several times and visited her birthplace in London, house in The Lake District, the Potter Gallery in Hawkshead and other sites connected with her. I corresponded with playwright Eric Pringle (author of MEETING BEA, a play about Potter) and Judy Taylor, probably the world's leading expert on her. I joined the Beatrix Potter society for the duration of the book - their newsletters were always full of all sorts of information. Apart from keeping pet rats, I read four books on them (admittedly two were simple "Keeping rats as pets" books, but they did yield a couple of interesting facts) and corresponded with the Fancy Rat Society. There was also a good magazine article on the Temple of Rats in India. I also checked out some of my standard reference books, such as THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF SYMBOLS and some history books for references to rats.

I visited and photographed all the locations in the book, both in London and the Lakes and read four books on the lake District, including the semi-mystical THE SHINING LEVELS, which I refer to in the story. I also had to look up books on wild flowers, birds etc.

RR: Since I first approached you regarding this interview I have been working my way through all the work of yours I have, and have been struck by how sexually charged much of it is. Has eroticism been much of an influence on your work, or am I just suffering a late rush of adolescent hormones?

BT: There's eroticism in text novels and movies - why not comic books? With my personal projects, I'm writing stories that I, and presumably other adults, would enjoy reading. In Arkwright there's lots of areas of interest to adults: politics, religion, history, philosophy and sex. My background is in underground comics, which first introduced these sorts of areas to comic books for the first time and the use of strong sexual images was common currency in these revolutionary books. Also sex happens to be probably the single most enjoyable thing in life. So I think the answer's "yes".

RR: Can't argue with that.

Have you ever experienced any problems with censorship? I'm not just talking about sexual imagery now, although I can imagine that would have made your work a target in some quarters, but I remember you saying that you were worried about the reaction your version of Diana in Heart of Empire might provoke. I also remember The Tale of One Bad Rat being constantly described as "controversial" when it was first published.

Did the subject matter cause problems, or was that just journalistic hyperbolae?

BT: No problems at all with either of those books. The editor, Randy Stradley had a very "hands-off" approach, so I did exactly what I liked.

I only had minor censorship problems when I worked for 2000AD. Erstwhile art editor Robin Smith was constantly whiting out (i.e. painting over) blood from my Nemesis artwork. The panel where Nemesis kills his new wife with a sword thrust was painted over so crudely it looked as if Nemesis' sword had a retractable blade - it just didn't exit the other side of her body. Fortunately I'd taken a photocopy of the artwork and when Titan published the trade paperback collection we reinstated the original panel, complete with emerging sword and splattering blood. The scene in THE GOTHIC EMPIRE where the ABC Warriors blow away an approaching army went through completely untouched because Robin was on holiday the week the artwork came in! He was furious!

The only other instance I can remember was with the HELLBLAZER SPECIAL: THE BLOODY SAINT. In the scene where the aged abbot Constantine strips naked and stands before the waterfall, someone at DC painted out the old man's willy! Isn't censorship pathetic?

RR: Absolutely. It's a particular bugbear of mine, (particularly when done in the ham fisted insensitive way you describe) but I do find that I sometimes censor myself when I'm writing articles - the little voice in my head saying "I can't say that".

Is there anything you've ever withdrawn from your work yourself, or anything you would argue shouldn't be put in the public domain?

BT: There are things I wouldn't put into my own work. I wouldn't represent a notion that I held obnoxious in a positive way. In a negative way, yes. But I don't think anything should be censored. For a start, who decides what gets censored? What secret agendas or ideologies would they be following? Even stuff like Fascist, racist or sexist propaganda should be allowed - you can't believe in the freedom of speech and then ban other people from having it, no matter how disgusting, puerile or pathetically simplistic they may be. That would be pure hypocrisy. Child pornography is a bit more problematic, as the very act of producing photos is illegal (rightfully so as it is physical and psychological abuse and nothing to do with freedom of speech) but this shouldn't apply to the publication of writing or artwork. As I said, you can't say that you believe in freedom of speech and then say "apart from things that I personally would be offended by".

Of course I'm only talking about art and self-expression here. Now if you're talking about the incitement to violence, racial or otherwise, or stuff like libel, that's already illegal anyway, and rightly so. Freedom of speech, like everything else in life, is a grey area and only morons think it's a straightforward issue of being able to say anything you want. For example, do you think anybody should be allowed to go on TV and say "I'll pay the first person to poison their local water supply one million pounds if the death toll is above five thousand?" Do any of the readers think that anybody who managed to snap a photo of them in an embarrassing situation should have the right to billboard it all over their home town? I think not.

RR: Absolutely. So, moving on from what you wouldn't do, to what you'd like to do. Sorry, that's possibly the worst link ever - Michael Parkinson clearly has nothing to worry about - Can I ask what your next project is likely to be?

BT: I've put quite a bit of work into the HEART OF EMPIRE CD-ROM, which will be out later this year. There'll be the whole book in pencil, B &W inks and coloured form plus approximately 50,000 words of annotations (on the influences, references, symbolism, history etc plus anecdotes and stuff. It's not an academic work though - it's meant to be entertaining). There's also a couple of interviews, a new piece of artwork and a full index.

I've never had so many projects fall through as I have since finishing HEART OF EMPIRE. One was an ABC one-off with Alan Moore that we're doing later in the year instead as Alan's too busy right now with all his monthly books. I was going to be adapting Grant Morrison's award-winning play RED KING RISING as a fully painted graphic novel for DC - then Grant and DC fell out and aren't talking to each other! I was supposed to be adapting GORMENGHAST as a graphic novel, then the BBC got cold feet and pulled out.

All very frustrating.

I've also been "developing a concept" for an animated cartoon series - a supernatural comedy adventure. Having been paid for the work, it turned out the Hollywood types wanted a sitcom instead, so I'm going to be taking that to other production companies. Meanwhile, I've redesigned it as a comic series, so hope to be doing that next.

RR: I'll look forward to it! Incidentally, I owe you a vote of thanks. In ten years, I have never managed to persuade my fianc�e to read comics. But as I was researching your work in preparation for this interview, I had your comics spread out all over the place and she caught sight of The Tale of One Bad Rat. She read the whole thing at one sitting!

BT: I've heard that so many times! Readers' girlfriends, wives, mothers, next-door neighbours act. People who usually can't see why people read comics. I did design BAD RAT for a mainstream readership, and this shows it works!

RR: Obviously I'm keen to keep up the momentum. What comics would you recommend to interest non comics readers in the medium, and perhaps to make those of us who do read comics see them a little differently?

BT: One reader told me his wife went straight onto HEART OF EMPIRE and enjoyed it so much she couldn't put it down. There's always MAUS or BONE or GON. Perhaps certain issues of SANDMAN. And there's quite a few comics self published by women writer-artists that she may enjoy. STRANGERS IN PARADISE has a strong female following. She may even like PROMETHEA. Try her on some translated foreign albums, such as Juillard's THE BLUE NOTEBOOK. I'd suggest Al Davison's THE SPIRAL CAGE but I think it's out of print.

RR: You've been around the comics scene a while now, and you've seen it from all sides, as a reader, a cult underground creator, and also from the "mainstream" (which is not a word I really like, but everyone knows more or less what it means).

People often suggest that comics have a lot more freedom now, but how much have things really changed since Brainstorm? And where do you see comics going in the future?

BT: Well, I had total freedom on BRAINSTORM, ARKWRIGHT, BAD RAT and HEART OF EMPIRE, come to that, so no change there, then. But, yes, there is a lot more freedom now. Alan Moore was very instrumental in bringing the underground ethos into mainstream comics. As for the future - fuck knows. As the comic book market continues its collapse, the only ray of hope I can see is the fact that the market is actually slowly growing for graphic novels. I've heard this from a number of sources, including DC. For example, the sales of Jeff Smith's excellent monthly BONE book decrease but the demand for the collections is rising. Suits me, as the graphic novel is the medium I've always preferred to work in.

RR: I was going to finish there, but I find that interesting. Personally, I much prefer monthly comics to graphic novels, to the extent that if I pick up a graphic novel or trade paperback, I'll still hunt out the back issues. I have no rational reasoning for this, it's just something I seem to do.

What is it about graphic novels you prefer? I guess coming up with a logical stopping point every 28 pages must be a bit of a creative strait jacket?

BT: Don't get me wrong. I do enjoy comics in themselves. They can be nice artefacts on their own. I have thousands here in the studio and have collected them since the 60s. I also like books and that's what graphic novels are, with a beginning, middle and end - an encapsulated self-contained whole. The overall structure can be designed in a way not limited to an episodic format. My graphic novels are structured as novels, not as ongoing soap operas - that's why HEART OF EMPIRE had to be serialised with varying chapter lengths - between 25 to 41 pages.

RR: I'd been wondering about that. Unfortunately that's all we have time for, although there are any number of questions I would still like to ask. Bryan Talbot - thank you very much indeed.

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