Bryan Talbot, a British graphic novelist, will soon be inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Awards Hall of Fame, which is the most prestigious award for comic writers and artists globally. The BBC recently visited the artist and spent some time with him in his studio located in the basement of his Sunderland home. From his childhood comic collection to books on art, anthropology, Victoriana, and zoology, his shelves are lined with well-thumbed books. Furthermore, two bookcases groan under the weight of his own extensive accounting of works created over half a century.
Bryan Talbot’s love for comics began before he could read, with word-free visuals of nursery tales and Rupert the Bear. He later fell deeply for the Anarchic Beano and Dandy, which he describes as comics that were not afraid to be disrespectful and challenging. A talented artist, he began drawing his comics when he was about five, and excelled in English and art in school.
Bryan was supported in his ambitions by his father, who enjoyed watercolouring, and his mother, who would sketch out hairstyles for her customers. He was the first in his family to attend higher education, where he studied fine art and graphic design. He then found work in the underground comics industry burgeoning in the 1960s and 70s, which was a world of counter-culture, anti-establishment comics full of “sex, drugs, rock and roll” as well as “whimsy and surrealism,” according to Bryan.
Since his first nine-part story “The Adventures of Luther Arkwright,” which was published to extensive acclaim, Bryan has collaborated with numerous writers, including Neil Gaiman on the Sandman series, Pat Mills on 2000AD’s Nemesis The Warlock, and Alan Moore. Even though commercial jobs paid the bills, Bryan’s passion was always to write his stories. He always keeps a notebook in his pocket to jot down ideas, and his home is scattered with heaps of paper featuring sketches or hastily scribbled thoughts.
Bryan writes the script first then starts with the artwork from page one. Always mindful of the psychology of a comic reader to ensure that the “reveals” in the plot are not prematurely spoiled, he works on two pages at a time. His fifth book in the Grandville series had even the final pages bound in black plastic so that readers could not inadvertently catch a glimpse of the ending
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