Tuesday, 15 August 2017
Full version of the interview by Natasha Sutton-Williams
Bryan also asked me to publish the full version here before it was edited down, and so here it is!
Natasha: Your career covers the spectrum of little known underground comics to widely read projects like Neil Gaiman's Sandman. Do you have any personal favourites?
Bryan: In general, the books that I write and draw myself. It's very satisfying to be in control of all aspects of a creative project. In particular, I'm still very fond of The Tale of One Bad Rat, not only because it was my first non-genre graphic novel and I think the storytelling's very good, but also because of the response I've had from readers. It's well over twenty years since it was first published, but I still get letters and emails from people who were and are deeply affected by it. It's still in print, in several countries, and is still used in some child abuse survivor centres as reading therapy.
Natasha: You work in a range of different art styles. How do you determine the best visual approach for a project?
Bryan: It's mostly intuitive, I think. I always try to illustrate a story in the style that I feel is most appropriate, as the actual drawing style, as well as the style of page and panel composition, is a major part of the storytelling in comics. A highly-polished, dramatic adventure style, such as I used for the Grandville books, would give totally the wrong atmosphere to a book such as, for example, The Red Virgin and the Vision of Utopia, a biography of the anarchist revolutionary Louise Michel, which needed a gritty, sombre and subtler style.
Natasha: You recently provided an illustration for Catastrophe a translated poem about mass migration by Weedhsame, a leading Somali poet. What attracted you to this project?
Bryan: I do enjoy making artwork for different sorts of projects, but I rarely get asked to draw for something other than comics, though I've recently designed and done the illustrations for a 230-metre long strip of granite pavement, and may be illustrating a stage set next year. Also, this commission seemed to me to be a very worthwhile publication, bringing the experiences and feelings of refugees to, I hope, the general public.
Natasha: How did you go about distilling Catastrophe, a 168 line poem, deeply rooted in the Somali experience of mass migration into a single striking image?
Bryan: This is a very easy question to answer, as I drew exactly what the publishers suggested – a boat filled with refugees capsizing in the mediterranean. I did send them a rough sketch of an alternative concept, but they went with the original idea. I also drew and painted the front cover, which is a simple picture of a Somalian refugee mother and her two children, and a couple of other pictures that the Poetry Translation Centre are using on their Kickstarter page as incentives to contributors
Natasha: Sometimes you work as an artist in collaboration with a writer, sometimes you work as both artist and writer. Do you find yourself easy to work with?
Bryan: No! As a writer, I'm very demanding with myself as artist, a total bastard in fact. I'm always scripting hard-to-draw, very detailed images, such as crowd scenes, which I hate drawing. Still, I know exactly what the writer is picturing in his mind, so there are never any misunderstandings!
Natasha: You have worked closely with your wife Mary M. Talbot on critically acclaimed projects like the Costa Award winning Dotter of Her Fathers Eyes. What is your collaborative process like?
Bryan: We get asked this a lot and people always seem very surprised when we say that it's very smooth and natural. We've been together for over forty years and it's just like a continuation of everyday life. After working in two different worlds for most of that time, it's great, ever since Mary took early retirement from academia, to be able to work on projects together. In the comic industry, a writer/artist collaboration usually means that someone writes the story, which then gets sent to an artist, who draws it.
As you can imagine, by living in the same house, our collaborations have been extremely close, with both of us having input into all aspects of the process. We'll discuss the stories over the months that Mary writes them, I'll act as script editor, suggesting changes when I think fit, and Mary has a good look at the artwork several times a day while it's being drawn, gives feedback and suggests improvements.
Natasha: Your Luther Arkwright series has been cited as an early example of the steam punk aesthetic. What inspired the retro futuristic look of these stories?
Bryan: I think it's because I was a young teenager during the 60s when, for several years, all things Victorian were considered extremely cool. Movies, such as The Charge of the Light Brigade and The Wrong Box, were fashionable, Douglas Wilmer's Sherlock Holmes and Adam Adamant, the Victorian adventurer in swinging London, were on TV, songs like "I was Kaiser Bill's Batman" were in the hit parade and Jimi Hendrix, The Who and Mick Jagger sported hussar's jackets, sold by boutiques such as "Lord Kitchener's Valet". Then, in the early 70s, I read Michael Moorcock's Captain Oswald Bastable stories, which blended Victoriana with science fiction. Although there had been earlier forms of retro-science fiction stories in the SF pulp magazines, it's Mike who created what we now call the steampunk genre.
Natasha: The Grandville story features anthropomorphic animals living in the Socialist Republic of Britain. This world and its alternative history are richly detailed. What was your research process for this work?
Bryan: On the steampunk side, I visited quite a few museums of technology, such as the ones in Manchester and Birmingham, that have many examples of steam-powered machines, the transport museum in Munich, the Railway Museum in York and the Victorian water-pumping station in Sunderland, taking hundreds of photographs.
I've snapped many photos in different areas of Paris, the setting for most of the stories, and visited the police museums in Paris and Manchester. Plus, I've accumulated a small collection of second-hand books with old photos or illustrations of Belle Epoch Paris.
As for animal references, I've been to the natural history museums in Dublin, Milan and Helsinki, and Kendal Museum, all of which have large collections of stuffed animals, and I have a box full of realistic toy animal figurines that I can pose.
Natasha: Force Majeure, the fifth Volume of the Grandville series, is coming out in October. Can you reveal anything about the story?
Bryan: It's the final story, and certainly the longest. Although I structured the individual books as stand-alone stories, there has been a story arc slowly building in the background, and it all comes to fruition in this volume. It's also the darkest, with many plot twists, and is a huge homage to the dectective-thriller genre. Basically, Detective Inspector LeBrock is wanted for murder, alone and on the run from both the police and the vicious gangster overlord Tiberius Koenig, who is hell-bent on the destruction of LeBrock and anyone he holds dear.
Natasha: You and Mary helped set up the Lakes International Comic Art Festival. Now in its fifth year the festival will be held in Kendal this October 13-15. What are this year's highlights?
Bryan: LICAF is always special, with it being the only European-style comics festival in the U.K., something that I'd dreamt of for years, so it was amazing when festival-organiser Julie Tait first approached me to ask whether I though a comic festival would be a good idea. Kendal is small enough for us to take over the centre, with events in the town hall, arts centre, library, shopping mall, bars and other buildings.
There are banners in the streets and comic exhibitions in the town's shop windows. There's even the bat sign flying from the clock tower, though all kinds of comics are celebrated there, from children's comics to serious graphic novels. There are exhibitions, an academic conference and a comic-themed film season. There's even a festival beer. Apart from being a town "en fête", the big difference with the usual fan-oriented comic or media cons is that we are non-profit-making and welcome many members of the public each year who wouldn't usually attend a comic event.
Sorry – got a bit carried away there, but it really is something that we're proud to be part of. To answer your question, this year, we have, as usual, artists from all around the world, including a large contingent from Australia, many from the United States, such as the legendary MAD cartoonist Sergio Aragones, and many top names from the U.K. and the rest of Europe. Two of the themes this year are Tove Janssen's The Moomins and 2000AD's 40th birthday celebration.
Natasha: Will you be continuing your collaboration with Véronique Tanaka?
Bryan: Ha ha! I shouldn't think so, as Metronome, the only graphic novel I created under that nom-de-plume, sold very poorly, despite it being named as one of the top ten graphic novels of the year in the New York Times Magazine. It was an experimental comic in storytelling terms and putting it out under a different name, one that was as far removed from mine as I thought I could get, was another part of the experiment. It was produced in a style I thought of as "existentialist manga", which mustn't have been very commercial!