Art of Bryan Talbot - Softcover

Burne Hogarth (Author) :

Talbot first gained comics fans’ notice in the early 1980s as writer and artist of the fantasy epic The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, one of the first British series to be reprinted on these shores. Such subsequent works as the childhood sexual-abuse saga The Tale of One Bad Rat (1995) and the literary-historical Alice in Sunderland (2007) appealed to readers beyond the comics scene. This large-format survey samples Talbot’s art from homemade comics he created at age 12 and teenage drawings for sf fanzines to college newspaper work to 1970s underground comics, in which his imagination freely flourished. He came into his own with the monumental Arkwright but continued to illustrate scripts by Alan Moore and other British comics authors. Commercial art assignments, many involving rock music; book illustrations; and exercises from his life-drawing classes also appear. Although the single drawings presented here necessarily slight the panel-by-panel storytelling skills that make Talbot’s comics so effective, not to mention his considerable writing ability, they highlight the detailed clarity and exuberant inventiveness of his acclaimed illustrations. --Gordon Flagg