Recently I read The Adventures of Luther Arkwright by Bryan Talbot. I don’t mind saying that it blew my tiny little mind. I already knew Talbot was a genius (he did create Alice in Sunderland, after all), but I don’t think I’d appreciated just how jaw-droppingly wide his range is. The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, The Tale of One Bad Rat, Alice in Sunderland – these are all extraordinary works, and yet they’re miles apart in terms of both style and subject matter.
(the Valkyrie Press cover for Luther Arkwright: the Treaty of St Petersburg, (c) Bryan Talbot)
A psychedelic and frequently gory SF saga about parallel universes; a simple and deeply moving story about a teenage girl running away from home to escape her abuser; a meandering exploration of the connections between Lewis Carroll and the city of Sunderland: you wouldn’t think, on the face of it, that these three could all be created by the same person, and yet they were. I’m in awe, I really am.
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