Written, drawn and performed by Bryan Talbot.
Publisher: Dark Horse (US), Jonathan Cape (UK)
"Well, there's this guy, right... and he goes to the theatre..."
Oh frabjous day! From the very beginning, past the theatrical poster laced with mischief, this remarkable accomplishment of rare imagination explores every conceivable possibility of presentation, harnessing the medium's unique properties to their individual and often multiple tasks.
It is extraordinary, and as I said it starts immediately: the first page is a sketch, the second full pencils, the third tightly rendered in inks, so that the audience arrives at the fully formed entertainment the very way its creator does. On two different levels, as well, for the protagonist approaching the Empire Theatre in Sunderland on those self-same, rabbit-hole pages is Bryan Talbot himself! A more apposite entry to this fantastical reality inspired by and investigating the strange logics of Lewis Carroll's works you could never imagine, and if for the moment you know little of Carroll, nothing of Sunderland, and haven't a clue what I meant by "rabbit hole," then over the course of this mesmerising journey you, like Bryan Talbot the Plebeian, will be introduced by Bryan Talbot the Performer and Bryan Talbot the Pilgrim to the richest tapestry of history, location and invention with a wealth of wit and breadth of accessible composition that will leave you breathless.
It begins in Sunderland's Empire Theatre, a palace of varieties on its 100th anniversary, where Bryan the boorish Plebeian, as tough as the region's past audiences and now armed with that most intrusive of modern beasts, the mobile phone, is startled by the traditionally tardy White Rabbit, takes a ticket from Tenniels's shop sheep ("Through The Looking Glass"), then sits unimpressed as a man in rabbit mask - Bryan The Performer - conjures up the living ghosts of those entertainers who have gone before him (George Formby, Sid James...), bringing them back to the stage to perform once more as if they had never stopped. Indeed, Sid James, it seems, has haunted the likes of Les Dawson there, for it's where he died mid-performance in 1976. (Rather touchingly, "The audience is offered a refund. Nobody claims their money back.") The Performer pauses for the moment on the story of the sole original work to be commissioned for the Empire, based on the two Alice books, "Why," he asks, "the choice of subject matter? What has Alice to do with Sunderland?" At which point, in one of many such tricks perfectly reflecting the morphing aspects of "Through The Looking Glass" in particular, we pull back to discover that Bryan The Pilgrim has been drawing the Performer all along!
It's the Pilgrim aspect of Bryan who takes us out the front door of his Victorian terraced house, and begins to answer the question, as he shows and tells of the twin threads of Alice and Sunderland, which snake over and around each other, wrapping themselves up in a helix of history to provide all the evidence in the world that it is not Oxford that holds the keys to the two Alice books, but the North East. Strikingly, throughout the magical mystery tour along the streets both past and present (and bumping into the Mad Hatter in a perfectly pitched Carrollian exchange of warped logic and punnage), out into the neighbouring countryside, then back in a boat down the River Wear, Bryan constantly uses the present tense, bringing history and mythology alive in order to emphasise how closely they're connected. Take, for example, the local legends of the Lampton Worm or the Sockburn Wyvern, probable inspirations for The Jabberwocky nonsense poem which the area's constant perambulator, Lewis Carroll, incorporated into "Through The Looking Glass". The second serpent-creature there was slain in legend by Lord Beamish, an ancestor of Alice Liddell, the girl Carroll based his books on and originally wrote them for, and you might recognise the word "beamish" from The Jabberwocky itself ("Come to my arms, my beamish boy!") - Beamish is a town just down the road.
Some of these stories are brought alive in comics within the comic, each in a different style dictated by its content. Others are built up in a house of cards, delivered in art lectures, or even presented as a stroll down the Wear's north bank with Chaz and Colin, the real-life creators of its extensive trail of stunning art installations. "It's all about tying the past and present together," one of them concurs, "linking what's new with what was here before," thereby making the distinction between projects forced on a community, and those orchestrated and forged in its heart, with its input, and from its rich history. That sequence had me booking my ticket to Sunderland to make a pilgrimage of my own. Just wait until you see their three-dimensional comic strip - their sequential metal sculpture - of a cormorant "Taking Flight"!
If you've already visited the link above, you'll have seen some of multitude of media and devices Bryan has used - photography, line, memorabilia, William Hogarth and Sir John Tenniel drawings ("well out of copyright"!) all blended in a seamless collage - but until you read the book you can't (or at least I couldn't) begin to grasp how meticulously it's composed, how cleverly it's delivered and how all-encompassing is its source material. I am, I confess, a fan of Simon Schama, the BBC's most entertaining historian, but Talbot's chosen medium offers him infinitely more flexibility than any television programme would allow, and he's used it to make this remarkable book an adventure rather than an education. Oh, you'll learn surprising stuff here - Sunderland isn't in the Doomsday Book; it was represented by accident in the American section of The Grand Exhibition at Crystal Palace; Carroll is the most quoted English writer after Shakespeare (although surely the Monty Python team give them both a run for their money); and the Bayeux Tapestry is neither French nor a tapestry - as well as some not-so-surprising stuff to those who read anything other than the Daily Mail (immigrants to our shores are nothing new - and they used to wield axes!!), but most of the time you'll be too busy swooning over the beautiful images to notice you're being educated, and it climaxes in one of the most affecting passages in any graphic novel, a profoundly felt and rousing rallying cry against racism.
This is a work of bravura. With so many slights of hands, it's the act of a skilled magician - for which you need creativity, craft, charisma and conviction - forging links between ancient myth, ageless history and artistic accomplishment to form a chain of connections previously invisible and turn them into a performance of varieties so extraordinary that you never know what Talbot will pull out of his top hat next.
The local Arts Council, of course, turned Bryan down flat because this is a comic, but I tell you, this book will do more for Sunderland's tourist trade than anything in the last fifty years. So, as the great man says, "Let's go for a walk...."
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