Graphic Tale:Bryan Talbot, a distinguished comics creator incapable of drawing an ugly image, who displayed his ingenuity with The Adventures of Luther Arkwrightand his humanity with The Tale of One Bad Rat, here raises both to a new pitch and produces a stunning multilayered work of art that defies description.
Alice in Sunderland: An Entertainment By Bryan Talbot Jonathan Cape, 324pp. £16.99.
How do you tell the story of a city? You can take the advice of the King of Hearts: begin at the beginning, go on until you reach the end, then stop - but the story of a living city doesn't have an end, and who's to say where it begins? Talbot takes an altogether more intoxicating approach, using the life of Lewis Carroll as a springboard for a dizzying tour through the history of Sunderland - leaping back and forth through the centuries, every story told in the present tense, so that all sense of events being separated by time is lost, and everything happens at once: now it's 3 million BC and there are dinosaurs roaming through the swamps, now it's 1991 and sculptor Colin Wilbourn is beginning his 10-year residency in the city, now it's 1797 and John Crawford is nailing Admiral Duncan's colours to the mast of the HMS Venerable, now it's 735 AD and the Venerable Bede translates the last line of the Gospel of John and dies; now, now, always now, the past reaching forward into the present, the present backward into the past.
At first the logic of Talbot's leaps from era to era is less than obvious, but as the work progresses a structure begins to emerge: Talbot's non-linear approach highlights the intense connectedness of human life, how each life appears transient and incomplete in isolation, but leaves echoes throughout the centuries in the least likely places. Talbot has chosen Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell - the original "Alice" of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland- as the connecting thread for his stories, but I get the feeling he could have started just about anywhere and still found the same richness of reference. Talbot has a passion for his subject matter that shines through, no matter what it is: whether he's treading the boards of the Sunderland Empire with the ghost of Sid James, taking a walk through the Beamish heritage museum, or analysing the Hogarth prints Gin Laneand Beer Street, he gives his whole attention to the subject at hand - and then flits away to look at something else he finds equally fascinating.
Talbot's art is always assured and graceful, blending photographs with reproduced etchings with his own drawings seamlessly, altering his style as the story shifts: so for the medieval tale of the Lambton Worm (perhaps the inspiration for Carroll's Jabberwocky), he uses a densely cross-hatched style narrated in Gothic type, while a trip to Fez sees him imitating the clear lines and bright colours of Hergé (creator of Tintin). John Crawford's story is told in the style of a 1950s boys' comic, complete with yellowing paper. Just as he shifts styles, he shifts between personae: the lecturing Performer, the travelling Pilgrim, and the heckling Plebeian all take their turns telling the story of Sunderland, while a fourth alter ego appears from time to time to represent the "real" Bryan Talbot, the Bryan Talbot who writes and draws Alice in Sunderland.
Woven through the entire work is an acute awareness of the transience of life, drawn from Carroll himself: "We are but older children dear, who fret to find our bedtime near." Two quotations sum up the heart of Alice in Sunderland: "The impermanence of youth. The transience of life. The inevitability of death. Still . . . makes you think though! And ain't that what art's all about?" and "In words and pictures, the alchemy of the comic medium shall conjure a vision of Sunderland in the crucible of your imagination". Alchemy is the right word. Alice in Sunderlandis magical.
Katherine Farmar is a freelance writer. Her comics blog,Whereof One Can Speak , is at http://puritybrown.blogspot.com .