Comics You Should Own – ‘Alice in Sunderland’

Hey, I’m back! I didn’t mean to go this long without posting one of these, but that’s life, sometimes. I hope you enjoy it!

Alice in Sunderland: An Entertainment by Bryan Talbot (writer/artist) (with additional credits in the back).

Published by Dark Horse, cover dated April 2007.

Click the images to embiggen them!

A man walks into the Empire Theatre in Sunderland, where he buys a ticket from a grandmotherly, knitting sheep as a white rabbit hurries by, perpetually late. He enters the empty theater and sits down, waiting only a moment before a man wearing a rabbit mask steps out from behind the curtain and begins reciting the opening chorus of Henry V … which he quickly flubs. The man takes the mask off, and he suspiciously resembles the man in the audience – thinner and more dynamic, with longer hair, but still. Both men are, of course, Bryan Talbot, and so begins his magnum opus, Alice in Sunderland.

Perhaps Luther Arkwright is Talbot’s masterpiece, however. It’s longer, certainly, and actually has a plot, while Alice in Sunderland … doesn’t. If you are a reader who loves adventure and derring-do, Arkwright is the way to go, and it might be best to avoid Alice in Sunderland. That would be a mistake, though, because despite the fact that Talbot doesn’t really have a plot in this book, he does have a story – several stories, in fact – to tell, and Alice in Sunderland is one of the most densely plotted comics you can find. Is that contradictory? Maybe. Talbot’s book itself feels self-contradictory, as he reels from pre-, pre-history (there are trilobites and dinosaurs in this book) to ancient history to modern history, from literature to commerce, from myth to fact (blending the two quite well), from travelogue to political tract, from holistic view of the universe to semi-autobiography to metatextual tome. It’s dazzling and breathtaking. Talbot packs all 318 pages of this epic with information, and it’s almost impossible to believe he was able to hold it all together. But he does. It’s an amazing achievement.

Talbot uses Lewis Carroll and the “Alice” stories as a foundation for his thesis, which is, basically, that Sunderland and the North-East of England is the greatest place on Earth. That assertion is, of course, a bit melodramatic, but Talbot loves his adopted home (he was born in Wigan, between Liverpool and Manchester, but in 2007 he lived in Sunderland) and he discovers that Carroll spent a good deal of time in the North-East, which made him (and others, including historian Michael Bute, who shows up in these pages) wonder if Carroll was inspired by the area to create his two famous books. Talbot goes over the “Oxford myth” of the creation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which was supposedly composed, in toto, on the afternoon of 4 July 1862, when Carroll told it to Alice Liddell and her two sisters as he and his friend rowed them down the Isis (the Thames, really, but the Oxfordians have to be different!). This is fiction, created well over two decades later by Carroll, and Talbot (and Bute, who wrote A Town Like Alice’s in the late 1990s, which sparked Talbot’s imagination) not only debunks it quite easily (the weather on that day, for instance, was not conducive to a boat ride and/or picnic on the river) but also goes over the many, many connections to the North-East that can be found in the stories. He gives us minor biographies of both Carroll and Alice, and ties them firmly to the area. It’s quite well done.

As much as Talbot is concerned with Carroll, he doesn’t begin there. This book is a love poem to the North-East, and he begins with the Empire, which was celebrating its centenary right when Talbot was finishing and publishing the book (the foundation stone was laid in September 1906 and the grand opening was in July 1907). He uses the Empire to not only show how many entertainers came through Sunderland in the past – Henry Irving, Stan Laurel, Charlie Chaplin, Benny Hill, the Beatles, Sid James (who in 1976 died on stage at the Empire, and Talbot has him haunt the theater in as obnoxious a way as possible) – but to show how Sunderland became so important in the context of the British Empire itself. The entertainers were there because of Sunderland’s importance to the coal-driven economy that built the empire, which made it a well-populated spot and therefore an attractive place for entertainment. Talbot links this all, using the Empire Theatre as a locus point. He begins a walk around the area, talking with local artists and historians about Sunderland, walking into the past a few times to engage the locals, and always bringing it back to Carroll and Alice. It’s not all happiness and glory, of course, as many dark things have happened in the North-East (like in any area on Earth), but Talbot is able to show these dark things without becoming too bleak about it. There is, to be sure, a whole lot going on in this book.

Talbot wants to both reclaim Sunderland as an inspiration for Carroll, as he spent a lot of time in the area, and also to reclaim Carroll himself from the “Oxfordization” of him that happened after his death. Carroll’s family controlled the image we have of him for years after his death, and Oxford had a stake in it as well, wanting to claim Carroll as their own. Talbot, with the help of Bute, shows that the image of Carroll many people have of a meek mathematician who befriended girls because he was terrified of adults and wanted to remain “innocent” is ridiculous, as is the notion that he never left Oxford once he got there. Talbot points out that Carroll had many friends, was a fun guy at parties, and often vacationed in Sunderland, where he knew many of the local notables. This gets into the metatextual aspects of the book – this is a book not only about Carroll and Sunderland, but also about how we perceive things and how things can connect even if they look completely separate. Talbot does speculate quite a bit in the book, but it’s not meant to be a strict history, just a journey through time and space that shows how connected we can be, if we pay attention. So much of the book is about what we think we know and how it might not be the truth, and while Talbot certainly does believe in an objective truth, he knows that too often, people settle on a truth that makes sense to them and which they’re comfortable with and don’t explore further. He’s all about exploring further. When he speaks to the local artists, they discuss how they worked on the art installations that are more democratic than some in the past, but also allow participants to see their own home – Sunderland – in a different light, from different perspectives. Sunderland had to re-invent itself when its shipbuilding – which Talbot says was sacrificed because Margaret Thatcher granted Scottish shipbuilders a subsidy, and as part of the deal, England had to lose one – and coal industries died, and it remains a fishing post, and of course it pivoted to more manufacturing and scientific innovation. This re-invention, Talbot points out, is just another step along the long historical path that all places are on, and the artists who celebrate it blend the area’s past with its future nicely.

Talbot also makes the point that our truth might be incomplete, because people don’t simply disappear when they’re no longer in the public eye. Early in the book, Talbot points out a statue of Jack Crawford, “the hero of Camperdown.” Talbot gives us a “boy’s own story” version of the battle of Camperdown and Crawford’s role in it, as he climbed the mast and kept the admiral’s colors from falling (which would have meant surrender), giving the British time to rally and defeat the Dutch. The actual events of the battle are under some dispute, but it’s a fact that Jack was lauded as a hero when he returned to England. He refused to profit from his deeds, returned to Sunderland, drank too much, and died relatively young from cholera in 1831. Most people stopped paying attention to Crawford after his brief moment of fame, but he still had a life to live. Talbot returns to this theme with Alice Liddell herself, who of course was only 13 when Carroll published his first book. Most people might know the story of Carroll and Alice, but she still had a long time to live, and she had a fairly interesting life, dying in 1934 at the age of 82. Talbot wants to show the immensity of life beyond what people might know about certain individuals. He does it not to overwhelm us, but to link us all in a great network of humanity, one where we never know what influence we might have and what might influence us. Talbot’s connections, as I noted, aren’t necessarily accurate, but the fact that all of these people could be and probably were in some places connected makes this book more comforting than it might seem to be with its vast scope.

Talbot, as I noted, has fun with the metatextual aspects of the book, as well. The man who enters the Empire is an overweight, slovenly version of Talbot. The man on stage is a thinner, more erudite and sophisticated version of Talbot. On page 26, we’re introduced to the “Pilgrim” – the version of Talbot who is drawing the comic and who walks around Sunderland, learning about the area and telling us things about its history. This Talbot is milder and far less theatrical than the one on stage, and obviously more refined than the coarse Talbot in the audience (who does prove that he’s not dull-witted, even if he’s a bit of a slob). We think that’s all the Talbots were going to get, especially when the “Pilgrim” enters “Bryan Talbot’s” actual house and finds out its history, but then, on page 182, another Bryan Talbot wakes suddenly from a dream he’s having and goes downstairs for some tea. This Talbot decides to begin working on Alice in Sunderland at that point, which gets the other Talbots already in the book all worked up. The actor tells the audience that, in the grand tradition of Alice herself, that he’s mad, “otherwise you wouldn’t be here.” The “real” Talbot realizes this is correct and has a brief (and quite funny) existential crisis, during which he speaks directly to the reader, but a visit from (and vision of) Scott McCloud helps him get over it. At the end of the book, the “real” Bryan Talbot wakes up again, and it turns out he’s slept through a performance of Swan Lake and his partner isn’t terribly happy with him. The point of these shenanigans is certainly to inject some levity into the proceedings, but Talbot is also commenting on the notion of identity. Throughout the book, he shows that Carroll was different from what the official record says about him, and that he contained more multitudes than we can comprehend. But, says Talbot, it’s not just Carroll – it’s all of us. Sunderland, England, the entire world – they’re the same: we see it from our perspective, but it’s only our perspective, and others might see it differently, and no one is all right and no one is all wrong. Ultimately, the comic is a plea for tolerance, because we all come from different places and we all have different histories, and you can’t know everything about a place just as you can’t know everything about a person. This is a political piece because all fiction is political, and Talbot points out the foolishness of trying to reclaim a “pure England” when he’s spent almost 300 pages showing us that England was never “pure.” How can you discriminate against a person when you don’t know everything about them, so you might as well celebrate the differences of us all and what brings us together, rather than trying to turn us against each other. It’s a nice dream, more relevant today than it was even in 2007, but we feel further away from it than ever.

As I noted, I’m not sure if this is Talbot’s writing masterpiece, but artistically, I think it might be. Talbot is an excellent artist – he knows what he’s doing with regard to laying out a page, and his line work is always strong. Luther Arkwright is a gorgeous comic because Talbot uses the entire page wonderfully, and his imagination runs wild in that book. His Grandville books are marvelously realized steampunk worlds, populated by amazing anthropomorphic animals that Talbot draws with meticulous detail. But Alice in Sunderland is astonishingly good, artistically, mainly because Talbot does so much on each page. I still have no idea what he does when the “Pilgrim” walks and boats around the area or when the ultimate, “real” Talbot shows up – I imagine that he used photographs and Photoshopped them before, perhaps, hand-painting them (or digitally painting them), but the effect is brilliant. The backgrounds are often just a bit fuzzy, looking more like Impressionistic paintings rather than drawings, so I imagine they’re manipulated digitally somehow. His line work is as solid as always, and it has to be so it doesn’t get lost in the mixed media he packs onto the pages, from posters showing who’s playing at the Empire to reproductions of the books that Carroll wrote, the architecture of Sunderland, and the many documents he highlights in the course of his journey. The “Talbots” are distinctive, which is nice – the guy in the audience is overweight, with long-ish, relatively unkempt hair and a scruffy face. The actor is svelte, a bit older-looking, with hair above his ears that often flairs out like wings or rabbit’s ears (as he’s wearing a White Rabbit mask when we first see him, and Talbot always has that connection in mind). The “Pilgrim” is also svelte, but his hair is styled a bit more like the audience member’s, linking them together, and he also looks a bit younger than the “Actor.” Talbot does a superb job blending his solid lines with the more “ethereal” aspects of the art, lending it a dream-like quality, which is fitting given the nature of the comic.

What Talbot also does really well is change his style at certain points in the book to fit whatever he’s writing about at the time. We see this early on when he does a dramatic rendition of Henry V’s speech from Act III, Scene 1 of his eponymous Shakespeare play (after flubbing the first speech he tries, back at the beginning of the book). The speech is rousing, of course (“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more!”), but Talbot makes it comedic, taking Shakespeare’s metaphors (“Then imitate the actions of a tiger!”) and making the art show it literally, which makes it goofy. His line stretches and bends, turning these few pages into Mad magazine, almost, and showing that Talbot isn’t taking himself so seriously. I mentioned the Jack Crawford section above, in which Talbot yellows the pages so they look a bit older and uses a bit more hatching to “roughen” the art a bit. When the audience member dozes off and dreams of the Looking-Glass World, Talbot loosens the pencils a bit to make the art resemble John Tenniel’s just a bit. When he illustrates “Jabberwocky,” he does the same thing, except he eschews border panels and uses a lot of hatching to make the scene a bit darker. In a fun two-page spread, the audience member Talbot sees the actual comic book with himself inside it, reading selections from Alice’s adventures in the Looking-Glass World, which of course becomes a recursive loop. It’s a wonderful blending of Talbot’s pencils with reproductions of Tenniel’s drawings. He draws a few pages in the style of Hergé drawing Tintin (there’s a good reason, I promise), and he draws a ghost story in a rough style, making it look like an EC comic from the 1950s. He uses slightly more delicate lines and sumptuous details to illustrate the story of the Lambton Worm, giving it a nice “Hal Foster-drawing-Prince Valiant” feel, and he draws one page in the style of Leo Baxendale (a page that was scripted by Baxendale but drawn by Talbot, adding another metatextual layer to the book). The chameleon-like nature of the art fits the tone of it, as Talbot constantly points out the convergence of “high” and “low” art at the Empire, implying that there’s no difference between them. His art, from the silly to the serious, helps drive that home. Who would say Baxendale doesn’t have as much to say about culture and politics as the most refined painter or dancer? Certainly not Talbot.

As I noted, there’s a lot going on in this book, and I haven’t touched on most of it. It’s a history book in many ways, sure, but it’s illustrated beautifully, and Talbot keeps things lively by zipping all over the place but never letting it overwhelm us. He does a stupendous job of showing how connected we all are and why that matters, and the book is ultimately a call for kindness and understanding in a world that often lacks both. You can get it in any format here, if you’re so inclined. It’s a wonderful comic.

Hey, it’s the archives! How fun!