Alice In Sunderland
By Bryan Talbot
A truly great story is like pure energy: it can’t be destroyed, only transferred into new and strange forms.
Using this dubious analogy, Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland are nothing but energy. Lewis Carroll’s clever, witty and imaginative tales have shown up in all sorts of versions, always all-new, always all-different, but still the same.
The latest movie adaptation, and there have been literally dozens, sees Tim Burton staple on some of his wonderfully weird action sequences onto Carroll’s world in a fashion that has inevitably upset Alice purists, but still holds fairly true to the original idea, at least in a visual sense.
No matter what they do to the story—adapt it into a silent or animated film, or rip off characters for comic book villainy, or staple it onto other genres with adaptations that link Alice with Jack the Ripper—Alice survives her adventure and remains pure. It emerged from centuries of English tradition, while building up an air of myth and mystery around its own telling.
This is a subject worthy of closer examination.
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Non-fiction comics confuse a lot of people. They can often show up in the fiction section of the local library—piercing journalistic works like the comics of Joe Sacco can sometimes be found sitting next to Dan Simmons’ vast star-sagas.
They’re not graphic novels or fictional sequential narratives but they can be bloody brilliant. Comics that delve into the deep, dark depths of history are often rewarding and illuminating. Comics that tell us something about the world we all live in will always find an appreciative audience.
The Big Book Of.. series, published by DC’s Paradox Press in the 1990s, are some of the best real life comics ever produced. Each book is dense with information and massively entertaining art from idiosyncratic creators, and they all remain great reading, fifteen years after they were published.
Rick Geary has also found rich rewards by doing his own thing, dredging up past murders and mysteries that still resonate; Warren Ellis’ Crecy is arguably the best thing he’s ever written and Harvey Pekar’s comics will be treasured as a snapshot of an ordinary life.
Sacco is a goddamn master at true journalistic comics and, like Pekar, people will be reading his books for centuries—a scholar of harsh lives at the turn of the 21st century who balances humour, righteous fury and an abnormally keen reporter’s eye.
And then there are those that mix up their history and the fictions, and find there isn’t really any difference. Alan Moore got his facts and mysteries all mixed up in From Hell and gave into the chaos, embracing it as a central theme. Further up the coast from the horror of Whitechapel, up in the North–East, Moore’s ridiculously occasional collaborator started digging into the dirt of his latest home town and came up with Alice In Sunderland.
In a professional career of breath-taking quality, Bryan Talbot’s 2007 book might be the best thing he has ever done.
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The comic is built on the framework of Carroll, his young friend and their wonderful little story, As well as talking about their lives, it covers all the weird ephemera that surrounds it, and in a country like England and a place like Sunderland, there is a lot of crap to mention. Even if Talbot manages to cram a lot of it into a cabinet in his house.
At first, Alice in Sunderland looks like a hard read because of all that information, and it can be, with pages and pages of dense and informative text. But there is a lot of ground to cover often literally - and Talbot is there in several different incarnations to hold you by the end and give you a lift when you need it.
In looking at the influences that fed into Alice, it’s necessary to look at the cultural make-up of the country and people who inspired the tale. Talbot goes all the way back to the time when woodlice ruled the world, digresses into the origins of a particularly English brand of bawdy humour and gives brief lessons on the British comic strip that goes back centuries.
Because of these dense info dumps, the artwork often slips into collage comics photos and caricatures and historical artifacts all jumbled around the page, surrounded by the running commentary.
Fortunately, even though Talbot has been doing comics long enough to avoid the dryness that history texts often encounter, it’s still surprising how entertaining his presentation is. There are jokes, changes of pace and mood and a sense of general good humour, making it an immensely likable book, especially with the open sense of design and anything goes attitude that fill the pages.
This means Talbot can cover the big questions of mortality and legacy, but also allows him to have Scott McLoud show up as the Venerable Scott McComics-Expert in a blaze of divine rightness, or indulge in happy pastiches of Baxendale and Herge.
Anything goes.
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For a while there, it looked like Talbot was having trouble finding a publisher for his book. The fact that they can publish 150 issues of Robin without any real need for it, but Bryan Talbot has trouble finding somebody to print his work, is a sad and troubling one.
It’s staggering to think Talbot’s brilliantly overcooked masterpiece ran into that obstacle. How could anyone doubt that Talbot would produce another intelligent, thoughtful and gorgeous piece of work that would find an audience hungry for some meat on their comic?
This creator did the best existential Batman story ever in two issues of Legends of the Dark Knight, gossiped like a Sunday tabloid in the Naked Artist and produced an intelligent and genuinely emotional story about a poor girl hiding from abuse in the fantasies of Beatrix Potter.
Alan Moore and Grant Morrison and Garth Ennis all read Luther Arkwright when they were young and impressionable, and the influence is there to see. Last year’s Granville was a sharp and entertaining badger-fuelled slice of Victorian ultra-violence that confirms to Talbot’s English whimsy, infused with a flair for the grotesque.
And Talbot can draw some excellent monsters: if you ever get a chance to read Talbot and Pat Mills’ Torquemada story in Diceman #3, take the opportunity—it’s an extraordinary choose-your-own-adventure in the Hell of Bosch’s garden of earthy delights that is still a worryingly enjoyable experience.
Beyond that, Talbot has been doing extraordinary things with light and timing since his early years and tackled worthy subjects within that experimentation. His work is always, always good.
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Personal interjection: the first time I saw anything from Alice in Sunderland, it was the original pages hanging on the wall of the Cartoon Museum in London, just around the corner from the British Museum. This was a spectacular introduction to the work and I bought my copy from that museum two months later. It remains one of my favourite souvenirs from a trip right around the world.
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Alice in Sunderland is such a dense read, and so full of stuff, that there is something new every time the reader goes back to it.
It’s a free-wheeling wonder ride. It’s a deep love for British pulp culture, stretching back decades, stretching back centuries – a straight line between the dirty jokes in the dance hall and the deep mining of myth seen in modern issues of 2000AD. Alice in Sunderland isn’t just An Entertainment, it’s an entertainment at the end of the pier, in the drunken singing in the dark, the shits and giggles on stage.
And it’s also the mediation on mortality inherent in any thoughtful look at history. When it comes to our mysterious ancestors, all we have to go on are the things they leave behind to tell the world; “they were here, they did something.” In the grand span of history, death ends all the stories, and there has been so much of that.
And that’s the thing about life. It’s all so fleeting. Talbot is certainly getting older and the creeping dread of the end is getting louder, when time has gone by so fast. There is the universal truth that life goes on—Talbot is the same age his grandmother was when he was born, and he can see the next generation coming through, and there is joy to be found there.
But there is always that fear of being forgotten. So we leave our mark in the places we live, in the correspondence of architecture and the street names that get left behind.
It’s there in the stories that live between fact and fiction, the ones that get blurred in the whispers that pass between generations. Talbot’s unique geographical study of the Sunderland area is heavy with unlikely myth and tall tales that get passed down as fact, until it’s hard to tell the difference between the Lambton Worm and Jack Crawford and Alice in Wonderland.
It doesn’t matter if these stories happened or not, or how they happened. It can be fun retelling them all over again, but the truth is overrated in this topsy-turvy world of wonders.
* * *
Down the rabbit hole we all go. It’s a bit scary, but we always come back with wonderful tales of nonsense and humour.
This is a subject worthy of closer examination.
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Bob Temuka lives in New Zealand, where comics cost a lot, but that just means he gets even more obsessive over it all. He is meant to post about comics every three days or so at the Tearoom of Despair, but has taken the month off to recharge, read and masturbate. He will come back. The name of his blog is supposed to be ironic, cos he is just full of love.
