The front cover to Dotter of her Fathers Eyes by Bran Talbot and Mary M Talbot

Bryan is currently drawing a graphic novel written by his wife, Mary Talbot, to be published by Jonathan Cape in the UK and Dark Horse in the US, hopefully later this year. "Dotter of her Father’s Eyes" is partly autobiographical, charting the relationship between Mary and her father, the Joycean scholar James S Atherton and partly biographical, dealing with the life of James Joyce’s daughter Lucia. Mary has written several academic textbooks but this is her first piece of creative writing.

She says: "I think what's been most distinctive about this project is that I haven't just completed a script and then passed it over to an artist. We've been able to work on the book together, with an intensive and ongoing creative interaction that's usually missing from writer / artist collaborations."

Bryan adds "I’ve developed what I think is an appropriate art style and visual storytelling technique for the book. I’m hoping to finish the artwork within the next six weeks."

Dotter of her Father’s Eyes is Bryan’s third non-genre graphic novel, the others being The Tale of One Bad Rat and Alice in Sunderland. Meanwhile, keeping it all in the family, he’s also collaborated with his youngest son Alwyn on Caterpillars, a Judge Dredd story for 2000AD.

"Alwyn’s an incredibly talented illustrator and concept designer for computer games, which is why I asked him to colour some of the pages of my last graphic novel, Grandville Mon Amour, to help me meet the deadline. When Tharg asked me if I’d be interested in illustrating Michael Carroll’s Dredd script, I immediately thought of him. I didn’t have the time to ink and colour the strip myself so that suggested that Alwyn turned my pencils into fully rendered artwork. He did a great job. I also like Michael’s script, which is basically a cool, self-contained short SF story."

Though working in the computer game industry for the past eleven years, Alwyn’s previous comic work includes strips for Negative Burn, DC Comics and the miniseries Armageddon Patrol, recently reprinted by Kult Creations. Caterpillars will appear in 2000AD Prog 1730 on 20 April.