The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

I’m delighted to announce that the Edinburgh Forbidden Planet on South Bridge will be hosting Martin Conaghan and Will Pickering, who are coming through to celebrate the release of their fascinating new graphic novel detailing the grisly, true-life crimes of Messrs Burke and Hare, the infamous serial killers who saw the easy money to be made in old Edinburgh by Resurrection Men who dug up fresh bodies from cemeteries to sell to the university’s famous medical school for dissection and decided it was even easier to miss out the digging up corpses part and simply murder people and sell the bodies. Its a story that has resonated down across the last couple of centuries, told and retold and re-interpreted in pretty much every medium, with Will and Martin deciding to tell the proper history.

It seems highly appropriate they should be here as William Burke himself still hangs in the city to this day; his skeleton is in the medical school’s anatomy museum only five minutes walk from here, in the Old Town where they once plied their macabre trade along misty, cobbled streets and wynds. Martin and Will are in our Edinburgh store on January 28th from 4.30 to 5.30pm, so please do come along and lend some support to them and fine indy publisher Insomnia and also soak up a bit of our city’s darker history at the same time. You can read a Q&A with Will and Martin and a talk through of some of the pages from Burke and Hare here on the blog. The boys will also be giving a talk in Edinburgh Central Library on George IV Bridge a few minutes from FP on the same evening; more details will follow on the Insomnia site.