WHEEL ME OUT issue three

Started as an indie comic experiment in the ’70s, Luther Arkwright has gone on to be considered one of the most important British graphic novels ever. Arkwright’s creator, celebrated writer and artist Bryan Talbot, also produced the award-winning graphic novels The Tale Of One Bad Rat and Alice In Sunderland. We talked to him about how Arkwright got adapted for the audio landscape, the fight to get some respect for comics and his status as a father of the Steampunk fiction subgenre.

Interview by Alex Fitch

When you started off in the underground comic scene in the 1970s, did you think you’d be able to make a career of it? No, I didn’t. All the time growing up I read and drew comics for my own amusement but it never occurred to me that I might be able to make a living doing it. When I finished college I was unemployed and I thought I might as well do this idea for a comic I had. This was at a time when underground comics were quite popular and after I’d done two or three I thought, “maybe I can make a living doing this.” Thirty years later, I’m still doing it!

That said, after thirty years you’d think it would be easier to get a publisher for certain work, that you’d snap your fingers and they’d roll up, but no, it’s like pulling teeth trying to find a publisher.

You’ve done two volumes of Luther Arkwright so far. It’s an immense, time-travelling and parallel universe story, but am I right in thinking you started drawing him when you were doing indie comics in the ’70s? That’s exactly what happened. I worked for five years in underground comics and one of the issues of Brainstorm comics was an anthology for which I did an eight page Luther Arkwright strip as an example of inked lines and watercolour wash. I based the character very strongly on Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius — Moorcock had created Cornelius as a template that other writers could use—and after I’d finished that, I started thinking I could take Arkwright further, giving him his own character away from the Cornelius template. I started getting ideas for this big, long adventure story.

I was born in Wigan in Lancashire which has a lot of local histories to do with the Civil War, so that inspired me to set Luther Arkwright in a parallel world where it’s still going on and there’s a descendant of Oliver Cromwell who is the dictator of Britain, which over the years has become a fascist, puritan dictatorship. The royalists in the story are terrorists.

It’s the first comic strip that Big Finish Productions adapted as an audio version. Presumably they had to change the story to a certain extent since it’s only voice and there aren’t any pictures! What did you think of it? If anything I think they stuck too closely to the book! They could have adapted it a bit more to fit the audio-only format but on the whole I thought it was great. David Tennant was great as Luther Arkwright. They’re supposed to be making the sequel, Heart of Empire.

Funnily, David Tennant made it before accepting a certain iconic role on BBC One where, as in Luther Awkright, he’s also playing a time traveller alongside a companion called Rose. I hadn’t thought of that!

You’ve also been serialising Arkwright as a comic strip on the Internet. Do you feel that comics should be more available in the digital domain? Is the day coming when all comics will be on PDAs and mobile phones? I don’t know. I still prefer comics as artefacts that you can hold. Have you seen Alice In Sunderland? I think that’s a nice tome. It weighs nearly two kilos, it’s got gold lettering on the front — it’s a nice book to hold and you don’t really get that with computers. But yeah, I think the Internet is going to be used more and more and that’s why we’ve got Arkwright up there as a webcomic.

At the other end of the scale, to go along with the release of Alice In Sunderland you had an exhibition at The Cartoon Museum in London. Over the last year there has also been exhibitions of David Lloyd’s, Dave McKean’s and Jim Mahfood’s work. How important is it for comic book artists to be included in a gallery environment? To a large extent comics are still perceived by a lot of people as the bottom of the artistic barrel, so any public exposure like that, any hint of respectability is always welcome! It says a lot that Jonathan Cape published Alice In Sunderland and it’s been covered extensively by a lot of the mainstream newspapers. That wouldn’t have happened if it had been a regular comics publisher.

People have been combining text with images for centuries. Yet it’s taken the mainstream media and educational establishments so long to treat the form as legitimate. Well the first comics were aimed at an adult audience — in Victorian political cartoons and newspapers — but it quickly became assumed by publishers this was a medium children could enjoy so they started producing comics for children and now a lot of people still have this perception that comics are only a children’s medium. You could say the same about animation. Until the 1960s it was still perceived as a medium for children, but now it’s more or less accepted that anyone can enjoy a good animated movie — I’ve seen feminist animated films, adult animated films and so on.

Graphic novel sales have been described as the fastest growing area of the book market in the last hundred years. Ten years ago you hardly had any graphic novel sections in libraries and bookstores and now you do; they’re becoming more and more accepted as a legitimate medium.

Are there any other epic tales you feel you have in you like Alice or Arkwright? I won’t do something as research-heavy as Alice again. Grandville is the next Steampunk novel I’m doing. It’s set in a retro, sci-fi version of La Belle Époque/fin de siècle Paris. I’m also working on another Arkwright sequel that I want to do at some point.

As he’s loosely based on Moorcock’s The Eternal Champion you don’t ever have to kill him off, you can keep going! There’s only one Luther, though. He may well die at the end of the next one, I don’t know!

Victorian Sci-Fi / Steampunk seems to be a subgenre with which you’re associated. As well as Nemesis and Arkwright, you were involved with Neil Gaiman’s Teknophage. What was it like working on that? Rick Veitch wrote that and did quite an outrageous, fast-moving story. All I did was the pencils — it was inked by Angus McKie—so it was a quick job but fun to do.

Apparently, I’m one of the fathers of Steampunk!** If you look at the Wikipedia definition there’s a list of people who helped create the genre and I’m one of them!

How do you feel when you take on characters that have been depicted by illustrators before you? When you started drawing Nemesis the Warlock, you were following Kevin O’Neill and Jesus Redondo. I think it’s important not to copy what’s gone before, to just go ahead and do it in your own style. Make it your own.

The kind of projects you’ve worked on have varied immensely. Are you happiest working in a variety of genres or is there a type of storytelling that appeals to you in particular? By the time I get to the end of one graphic novel—it normally takes me two or three years, Alice In Sunderland took four or five—I want to do something completely different with the next one, otherwise I just get bored! WMO

Listen to an extended version of this interview

http://panelborders.wordpress.com/2007/05/24/
podcast-the-worlds-of-bryan-talbot/

The official fanpage for all your Bryan Talbot news

www.bryan-talbot.com

**Steampunk? Still confused? Let Wikipedia help

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steampunk