In October, 2005 I interviewed Bryan Talbot. It was important research for my dissertation, but also for my practical work as Bryan is best known for his graphic novels. Here is an edited version of the interview. If you have anything to ask or add to this, please leave a comment or contact me.
Sorry it's taken me so long to transcribe this! If you want to find out more about Bryan's work or see what he's up to then check out his website: http://www.bryan-talbot.com/
The Bryan Talbot interview, October 2005
LOM: Many of your comics have started out in serialised form, is that something you have to take into account or do you just do your work as a finished book and worry about how it will be broken down later?
BT: Yes, the latter, because that is one of the things about the graphic novel, it has to be structured as one. It’s different from a story intended for an episodic monthly magazine. That’s why ‘Heart of Empire’came out in nine installments, but if you look at each installment the page count varies, I think between twenty four pages to fifty pages, depending on where the convenient place to cut the story was. So that’s the important thing. I mean, I’d rather they just appeared in a book, as a book, as ‘Alice’ is going to do. You know, all in one thing because that is how they are intended to be. But the way the comic publishers work their finances, they issue it as a series, so they can get some of the money back they paid you in advance to do it before they get the book out. It’s just how they can afford to do it I suppose.
Image: promotional image for 'Alice in Sunderland'
LOM: So it would be better for you if you could just bring them out as books then?
BT: Yeah, that’s the way they are intended, rather than monthly as pamphlets.
LOM: You stated before in some of your interviews that by avoiding things such as think bubbles and sound effects, you are making your work more accessible. How did you come to this conclusion, what elements in comics did you think weren’t going to work for you?
BT: Well, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with thinks balloons and sound effects in their place. They are comics tools, part of comics grammar. But, a lot of people aren’t used to reading comics. They see stuff like that as being clichéd or childish. Especially with something like ‘One bad rat’ which was definitely aimed at a mainstream readership. I just wanted to make it as accessible as possible to people who weren’t used to reading comics.
The ‘One bad rat’ talk which I will be doing at the University, that’s the whole point of it. It’s about how I made it accessible by using a visual style that was very easy to look at, very clear. Sort of clear line technique, using a strong outline, using colour for texture and shading. It gives a very clear image. Also the storytelling is very clear, very straightforward, y’know, how it’s laid out. The way one panel leads on to the next. I did quite a few other things to make it accessible. I didn’t use text boxes at all or thinks balloons. So the only text in the thing is the spoken word. Apart from the Beatrix Potter pastiche at the end. And it does work.
I've lost count of the number of times people have told me about their mother, or wife, or uncle or neighbour who's never read a comic and can't understand what they see in them. But if they show them a superhero comic they can’t make head nor tail of it. But they can read ‘bad rat’ because it’s very clear and accessible.
Whereas something like ‘Arkwright’, which I started in 1978, was, well at the time very self consciously experimental. I was trying to see what I could do with the form and you have to be quite comic literate to be able to follow it. There’s one section where the page is composed of collage and big blocks of text. There’s another section where I spread six seconds over seventy two panels. Stuff like that. There’s one page with six different threads going on. As I say at the time I was trying to push the envelope.
But when I was working on ‘bad rat’ it had only been a year or two since ‘Maus’ and the success of ‘Watchmen’. When there was a larger audience outside comic fans being catered for. It hadn’t been going very long, so as soon as I realised that what I had on my hands was a story that anybody would read,and not a genre piece, I realised that the style had to be very accessible. It would have to be accessible to people who didn’t have that acquired knowledge of comic grammar that we have from reading comics. And it does work, y’know, anyone can read it! (laughs)
LOM: Is the audience important to you when you are writing, are you aware of who might read it?
BT: Not usually. I think I was, especially when I was doing ‘bad rat’. Because of the subject matter really. But, with ‘Alice’, I’ve thrown a lot of that accessibility out of the window again (laughs), because ‘Alice in Sunderland’ is non-genre, it’s for a mainstream readership. But, having said that, some of the images are quite complicated. But the eye can take in images, very easily and the way I’ve laid it out, the way I’ve laid the text out, I think it is quite easy to follow though. I know, my mother’s read half of it and she had no trouble and she’s about Eighty, so I think most people will have no trouble reading it at all. But usually, because I get bored doing the same thing I try to do a comic that I’d enjoy reading myself. Something I’d find interesting. When I finish one project I want to do something that’s different.
LOM: So, is fan feedback important to you? Because you must get a lot of fans telling you what they thought.
BT: Well, it’s usually positive, so it’s nice to hear, but by that point it’s too late! Because you’ve finished the book.
LOM: Is it something you might take on board for future work, if they have comments about how you’ve written something?
BT: Not that I can think of. I probably do, but it’s not a conscious thing. I often take a work in progress to comic conventions and show it to people to get feedback, but it’s only if someone says something negative that I think I take account of it. I mean, if they say ‘oh, this isn’t very clear, I don’t know what’s going on here’, then I always take note of that, because if they find it unclear, other people will find it unclear. And even if it’s just a few people, the important thing about a comic, well anything I suppose, is to get what you want across as clearly as possible. So I mean if I show someone a work in progress and they say, ‘That arm’s too short’ I think, I’d best rework that arm when I get back.
LOM: There has been quite a resurgence of Small Press publishing in the UK over the last few years, have you had any interest in it?
BT: Yes. I mean, some people send me stuff that they do. I’ve been to Caption twice, you know the small press convention in Oxford. That’s quite nice. I know a lot of the people doing small press comics. So I do keep an eye on it, I don’t see everything because I don’t tend to order stuff through fanzines or anything, which I think is the main place they’re advertised, isn’t it? Because I don’t get fanzines apart from C.I., and that’s only because Dez Skinn sends me a copy once a month. So I probably don’t see as much small press comics as I should do, because it’s always worth keeping an eye on them. Good things come out of small press. It’s a shame Terry Wiley’s not been doing anything recently. He lives near Sunderland, y’know him and Dave McKinnon split their creative partnership.
They’ve been doing ‘Sleaze Castle’ for years, and I thought Terry would continue doing them on his own or with somebody else, but he hasn’t.
LOM: At the moment, well, last time I talked to him, I think he was interested in lettering, he’s looking at lettering other peoples work too, which is an interesting departure…
BT: Yeah, but I’d prefer to see him writing and drawing his own comics, because that’s when a comic is, I find, more interesting. When there’s someone who’s written and drawn it and done everything. I’m not too interested in the, um, superhero sort of comics that are done by a team, like a factory production line and it’s a lot more like a work of art, self expression I suppose, when one person’s writing and drawing it.
LOM: With regards to your way of working, you always seem to do quite a bit of research. Do you think it’s essential to use realistic reference in your work?
BT: Well, it depends, if you’re doing something very cartoony then I don’t suppose it is. It all depends on the style. For example, Hunt Emerson has a very cartoony surrealist style and he can simply make things up. It doesn’t matter if he draws a train with the pistons in the wrong place, y’know, it doesn’t really matter. It suits that style of artwork. But, if I’m doing something in a realistic style, then it is important to get it accurate otherwise it will look wrong.
I always do a lot of research, I’ve been trying to get away from it for ages, but this ‘Alice’ thing I’m doing at the moment has been the most research heavy thing I’ve done! I do have a story I’ve been thinking about for about ten years that I really want to do, and I keep putting off doing it for some reason. It’s a low tech fantasy story that would be drawn very cartoony and it won’t require any research whatsoever, I’ll just be able to make things up, which will be great. Everything I do seems to take more and more research. With ‘bad rat’ obviously I had to read a lot of books on child abuse, I read over a dozen books on Beatrix Potter, I even read books on rats and the lake district, y’know. Because you want to make sure you get it right, for a start, but they also add depth and they also throw up things that you wouldn’t think of yourself.
Cover image: 'The Tale of One Bad Rat'
And visual reference is very useful. I used a lot of photo reference on ‘bad rat’, because that’s the sort of look I wanted, to really ground it in reality. I did Helen’s walk from the embankment to Kensington and I walked down Kings Road and came across a pub called The water rat, and as rats are one of the themes of the book that could go right in. There’s another sequence where she’s walking down a school corridor. I phoned up the local Secondary school in Preston, where I was living at the time and asked to speak to the art teacher. I explained what I was doing and he invited me in and I spent an hour just going around the school taking photographs and although the corridor in the book isn’t actually the corridor from that school, it has things in it from the photo reference such as a little fire alarm, right up the wall. The wire going down to it from the ceiling is in this plastic sheathing. If I was just making it up, I wouldn’t have thought of the fire alarm for a start, never mind the plastic sheath. It just gives a touch of realism to the image. There’s also a notice board there that has sort of little dividing strips pinned up to make different sections, I wouldn’t have thought of them if I was just making it up.
So things like ‘Heart of Empire’ has a lot of sort of retro-historical stuff and that needed a lot of research for the costumes and such like. Even though I took the Elizabethan stuff and exaggerated it and made it into a fantasy Elizabethan style, I still had to base it on original Elizabethan fashions.
LOM: Do you have much say in the format of your work? Do you think that the format and presentation will effect what audience it reaches as well. Like, American format as opposed to European format.
BT: Yeah, I love the European format. As you can see I have lots of European albums back here and I’m actually doing ‘Alice’ A4 like an English, well European format- but I’m hearing that even big American book publishers want to do it in American comic format. Which is a pain, so I’m hoping that Denis Kitchen, who is acting as the agent for ‘Alice’ can find a publisher that he can persuade to do a larger format.
Before the end of the year, there’s a Czechoslovakian edition of ‘Arkwright’ coming out and the publisher is very keen to get it just right, so he’s actually issuing it, in its intended A4 size for the first time since the original UK edition. In hardback, on nice paper, you know.
I sent him all the original pages and good quality bromides of the ones that are sold which he’s rescanned. He’s basically digitally remastered the whole book. This’ll be the best edition of ‘Arkwright’ ever. Unfortunately, it’ll be in Czechoslovakian, but it should look pretty good. Now I have it all on disc, so any future editions will be in this remastered format. Look at the new scans and look at the printed pages that have appeared before and you’ll see that they’re very different. A lot of the tone pages have filled in, the blacks have filled in, the whites have bleached out in the past and all this detail has been lost. Some of them are almost unrecognisable, when you look at the new version.
Cover image: Czech version of 'The adventures of Luther Awkright'
So I’m very happy about that, but I suspect that when Dark Horse do the next edition they’ll use the new files, but they’ll probably do it American format, which is a shame. The European format gives it space to breathe. Do you like that?
LOM: Yeah, it’s kind of what I’ve been thinking of, but it’s not something you see much over here, which makes you think if publishers are not so keen…
BT: Yeah, well when ‘Arkwright’ first came out it came out in, as you can see, in A4 editions.
LOM: Yeah
BT: Which is how it was originally intended. I’m actually working on a graphic novel in my part time! (laughs) A little one in a different format that I have a go at now and again. I haven’t done anything for a month or two now, but I have slowly been working on it when I can. That's as much as I want to say about it at the moment.
LOM: Do you find it, like, a nice break to go and do a page of that and then come back?
BT: Yeah, I just wish I had time to do more. These ‘Alice’ pages are so time consuming, that, rather than spend an hour or two on this other one, I try to get on with ‘Alice’ and get it finished.
LOM: You said before in an interview with Popimage that ‘writing’s the easy bit, the fun bit’. Do you think you might do more writing in the future, maybe for other artists or just something text based like a novel?
BT: Well, I have written a couple of strips for other people before. I have written a four issue ‘Dreaming’ and a six issue ‘Technophage’ story arc. But, both times I was pretty disappointed with either the artwork or storytelling. Having said that, I’ve been working on a mini-series called ‘Cherubs’, I originally came up with the concept for a web animation company that went bust. But I’ve reworked it as a comic script and it’s being drawn at the moment by Mark Stafford, who you may know, as he’s appeared in the small press.
LOM: Yeah
BT: Actually quite a bit, he self publishes and he’s a brilliant cartoonist. So I’m hoping…actually I’ve got his pencils somewhere for the first issue. And as for text books, I do have an idea for a novel. I get ideas and some of them are suitable for something other than a comic and this would be more suitable for a text novel because it’s a crime novel, set in a northern town. It would be more suitable for either a TV movie or a text novel.
So I may have a go at that. But I’ve actually started writing something called, well the tentative title at the moment is ‘Comic book legends’. When you’re at a convention, you’re at the pro bar, with all the pros, there’s all these stories that are told, some true, some apocryphal. Some are bawdy, some are silly, y’know about other comic creators, it occurred to me that I know quite a few of these and one day I sat down and started listing them. I filled an A4 page with them, listed in two columns, all these different stories. And I thought, I bet people, I bet comic fans would be interested in reading some of these. So that’s the concept. I’ve written about a dozen so far. If I get a minute I write one of these little pieces. When I’ve finished ‘Alice’ I’m going to sit down and do that first. Just write them all up and organise them into some kind of structure and group them together in different types I suppose and see if Top Shelf or somebody wants to publish it. Sounds like a good idea, doesn’t it?
LOM: Yeah
BT: Because there’s some really silly things that have happened, at signings and stuff. Y’know, many outrageous Simon Bisley stories and so forth.
LOM: Y’know fans will buy it to see if they’ve been mentioned, if they feature in any stories.
BT: Oh yeah, there are some fan stories. There’s my mad fan story for a start and stories about what happened with comic artists and the fans at comic conventions and things. Some bloody strange things have happened!
