The Art of Bryan Talbot

Bryan Talbot has drawn some damn fine books, most notably a chunk of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman (and Gaiman provides a very friendly introduction), as well as some classic Brit graphic novels and comics: 2000 A.D. (yep, that’s where Judge Dredd came from) and The Adventures of Luther Arkwright. But rather than concentrate on reproducing the very best of Talbot’s work (there are only a couple of pages devoted to Sandman pieces), this is a survey of all the etchings he’s produced thus far. Maybe the fanboys want to see his first scratched-out comics (on school notebook paper, no less), but I could do without the juvenilia. In fact, I’d love to see more of the work from The Tale of One Bad Rat, especially Talbot’s homage to Beatrix Potter, and from the recent Alice in Sunderland.