The Art of Bryan Talbot

The Art of Bryan Talbot is a roughly chronological look at the career of one of Britain's finest comics artists. Bryan Talbot has been in the business for over thirty-five years and has earned a huge amount of respect in that time.

The milestones have been many: early highlights include Brainstorm Comix and contributions to other underground publications; the quality and confidence his work showed soon earned him a shot at something far more ambitious and the result was The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, a Moorcockian, multiverse-spanning tale of a war taking place across parallel worlds. Complexly plotted and intricately designed, Arkwright was years in the making and, twenty-five years after it was first collected together, it's still one of the best graphic novels ever published.

Talbot went on to work for 2000AD (Nemesis, Judge Dredd) and as an illustrator, drew episodes of Sandman, wrote and drew The Tale of One Bad Rat, Arkwright sequel Heart of Empire and, most recently, has produced the best-selling Alice in Sunderland.

The Art of Bryan Talbot covers these and a lot more, from portraits of Adam Ant to SF posters, magazine covers to book illustrations, all with a running commentary from Bryan. Along the way we also get to see a few unpublished pieces, pencil sketches from life drawing classes, and plenty of illustrations that you've probably not seen (contributions to the Radio Times, for instance).

It's a big, glossy book, mostly in colour, the repro is good and there's a bibliography of Bryan's work at the end so you know where to find more. That's my only criticism: I did want more. At 96 pages it's a substantial book (and reasonably priced at $19.95 which translates to about a tenner these days) but I would have liked to have seen a little more about Bryan's techniques and a few examples of some of his comic strips. He mentions, for instance, a 72-panel sequence that encompasses only a six-second time frame which highlights one of the problems with art books dedicated to comic strip artists: art for comics isn't just about drawing, it's also about storytelling, something Bryan is very good at but which doesn't come across in the book.

For the newcomer it's a fine introduction to Bryan's work. For anyone who already has a substantial collection of Bryan's work, you'll find plenty of new things here and, like me, by the time you get to the end you'll have his other books teetering in a pile nearby begging to be re-read.

Further reading: Bryan Talbot books available at Amazon; Official Bryan Talbot Fanpage; Wikipedia.