Latest / Half the Picture / #19 - BRYAN & MARY TALBOT

Transcript

#19 - BRYAN & MARY TALBOT · Half the Picture

0:00
I was one of the people who had hunted by a DC, you know, the, which they were doing, the late 80s and 90s.
0:05
They used to have a big party every year, you know, DC and London were the invited all the British creators, you know,
0:12
Wyndon Dinders, everything's great.
0:14
Oh, you've heard of that, you know, why they do it?
0:16
Because they've never had this kind of treatment for publishers before, you know,
0:20
they've always been used, and you know, the publishers feed you nice food and give them free drinks,
0:25
and they all ended up getting completely slushed.
0:28
The bodies in the street, outside later, you know, totally unconscious, because I've got all these food being thrown
0:34
across the levels, and I sort of missed it, because I wasn't invited.
0:46
Hey everyone, I'm Billy, and welcome back to Half the Picture.
0:49
I'm so pleased to say that I guess this episode, a comic book power couple Brian and Mary Tarball,
0:54
whose comics include that were of her father's eyes, Sally Heath Gritzer Fraget, Rain, I mean, there are so many.
0:59
Brian initially came on the podcast to talk about the casebook of Stanford Hawksmore, his new comic,
1:04
which is a prequel to his best selling Grandville series of comic books,
1:06
and then Mary joins in about 30 minutes into the conversation to talk about the upcoming comic they're working on together
1:11
on Mary Walston Craft, Mary Shelley's mother, the author of Frankenstein.
1:15
I was so excited to get Brian and Mary on the pod, because if you guys have been watching the channel for a while,
1:19
you'll know that I'm a huge fan of both of theirs, you know,
1:22
Brian's comic house in Sunderland, I recently put on my top five comp books of all time,
1:25
the list I did with Owen from Owen Light's comics, and so it was just such a pleasure to get them on the pod
1:30
and pick their brains about their creative process.
1:32
There was also a bit of added personal significance as well for me to get Brian and Mary on the pod cast,
1:35
because an old friend of mine, Russell Wall, who sadly is no longer with us,
1:39
actually directed what is now held up to be the definitive doc on Brian and his work, the graphic novel man,
1:44
which is really, really good if you haven't heard of it, and you should definitely check it out.
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And so there was just a bit more personal significance for me in terms of just getting Brian and Mary on the pod
1:51
and talking to them about what they do.
1:52
So without further ado, let's roll on my conversation with Brian and Mary Talbot. Enjoy.
1:57
Hi Brian, welcome to this show, how are you doing today?
2:00
You're okay, how are you Billy? Thanks for inviting me.
2:04
My pleasure sir, my pleasure, I've been a fan of yours for years and years.
2:07
I mean really since I was a kid, since I first read Alison Sunderland,
2:11
which, you know, one of my favorite comics and I'm a huge fan of all the comics that you've done over your career,
2:15
you know, from Granville and Wombad Rat.
2:18
And we've got you on today to talk about your latest comic, which I have here,
2:22
which is the, here we go.
2:25
Here's my copy that I picked up from the other night from the launch party that you had at the Cartoon Museum.
2:30
The casebook of Stanford Hawksmore, I read it over the weekend, it's fantastic.
2:33
I love it.
2:34
To give a brief idea of it, it's a prequel to your series of comics, the Granville series.
2:40
You could describe it as a sort of hybrid of Rupert the Bear and kind of Quentin Tarantino
2:43
with a steampunk kind of style.
2:45
It's the sort of action detective comic series set in a kind of alternative steampunk universe
2:50
where the French kind of conquered Britain and rule Europe.
2:55
And as I say, this is a Stanford Hawksmore as a prequel to that series,
2:59
featuring this kind of Sherlock Holmes-esque character of Stanford Hawksmore.
3:03
And I guess for a kickoff, when did you realize that you wanted to do prequel to Granville?
3:08
Because Granville, you wrapped up Granville a number of years ago.
3:10
When did you realize you knew you wanted to go back to that world?
3:12
You know, it was second to 2018, I think, the last one came out.
3:17
Only a couple of years ago, well, three years ago, while I was working on this biography of me,
3:24
that was, it was being written by JD Herlock, and I would join him,
3:29
because there's a lot of stuff he didn't, it couldn't find through interviews and articles and things.
3:35
So I was sort of partly writing it with him.
3:38
And we were doing a bit on, we did it all by email over a year or two.
3:42
And we were talking about Granville.
3:44
And they said, I've got any ideas for future stories.
3:46
And I said, well, I did have quite a few.
3:50
But I decided to finish Granville on the fifth one, which I thought was my strongest story.
3:55
And you know, in the fifth one, we meet LeBroch's mentor at the first time,
4:01
Stanford Hawksmore, who is this sort of Sherlock Holmes-in-type thing with a deer stalker
4:06
on and smokes a mere shone pipe and everything.
4:09
Somehow, this idea of a prequel got floated about what was he like when he was a detective.
4:18
I mentioned it to a couple of people who didn't care at Charlesworth,
4:22
who worked with on Sally Heathcott's suffragette.
4:25
And she even said, oh, you should call it the case book of Stanford Hawksmore,
4:30
which is a reference to the last Sherlock Holmes collection short stories,
4:34
case book of Sherlock Holmes.
4:35
So I'd started thinking about it and sort of developed from then.
4:39
Now, I thought, well, you know, I didn't want to do Granville again.
4:43
So it's not LeBroch's story.
4:45
I wanted it to be quite different.
4:47
So, you know, the Granville story just set it in Imagery,
4:50
in Ballet Park, Steampunk, the universe.
4:54
We lots about Nouveau and Edwardian clothes and things.
4:59
So this is set on the last day the French occupation of Britain
5:05
and on Independence Day.
5:06
It's not Deco, it's Nouveau, it's not Ballet Park.
5:12
It's not even Steampunk as much.
5:15
It's a before the steam revolution.
5:18
So it's very, very, very Victorian,
5:20
with there's also handsome cabs and, you know,
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foggy, foggy couple streets.
5:24
And I was, that's all set in London.
5:26
There's both the others which I'll set partially.
5:28
They were all set in Paris.
5:29
Another big difference is that all the Granville books were computer.
5:35
Colored, I colored them on computer, just took a long time.
5:38
I had a full day of page at least.
5:40
This is a full, fully digital-painted colouring.
5:43
But the Holtzmer books, I did them all in watercolor.
5:47
So they're all, they're in watercolor washes, you know,
5:52
fine line with the watercolor wash,
5:53
which I tinted, Cepia, on computer.
5:57
The idea being it was, they looked more like,
6:00
you know, Victorian photograph or something.
6:02
So to accentuate this difference,
6:04
so it's on a monotron, it's Cepia,
6:07
the watercolor, it gives a different texture, you know,
6:09
it's more sort of hazy and clodian and everything.
6:13
A lot of people said they'd prefer it actually.
6:15
Especially the French readers, the French publications,
6:18
doing very well.
6:19
That came out early up here in September.
6:21
And a lot, I mean, it did quite well with Granville books
6:25
in France, but a lot of French readers really hate computer colouring.
6:28
So with this came out, it's getting rare reviews, you know,
6:31
it's every single review I've read, it's fantastic.
6:35
Yeah, another big difference is that there's no text
6:39
in Granville books, all the text is spoken word,
6:43
it's all in the speech billions,
6:44
whereas in the Holtzmer book, well, it's the case
6:46
with Stanford Holtzmer, he's narrating it.
6:48
So there are lots of text boxes all narrated in this,
6:52
you know, exaggerated sort of Victorian style.
6:57
Did you enjoy that sort of bit when you were reading it to our specs?
7:00
I did, I loved it.
7:01
And having recently read the Granville books for this interview
7:06
and some of your other work as well,
7:07
we reading it, revisiting it.
7:09
And then going from Granville straight into Stanford Holtzmer,
7:12
I was really struck by how marked the difference
7:14
is not just in the visual style, as you say,
7:17
you talk about how Holtzmer is washed, you know,
7:20
watercolour and its seapier.
7:22
And Granville is this quite kinetic, you know,
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digitally coloured, very vibrant, can you know,
7:27
these action roms and the sort of the difference in tone
7:29
and sort of pacing.
7:31
No, I really enjoyed it.
7:32
I loved the sort of the approximation
7:34
you did of the codendoyle, the pro style and the captions,
7:37
you know, and it's interesting reading it
7:39
and as someone who is a fan of comics,
7:41
and as you're reading it, you're aware of how that can slow,
7:43
that slows down your reading pace
7:45
because you're absorbing that text.
7:47
But when the prose is great, like it is in Stanford Holtzmer,
7:49
you know, you really like being sort of gently sort of
7:52
taken deeper and deeper into that story.
7:54
Did that sort of, I guess, going from Granville to that,
7:57
I mean, that sort of, I guess in Granville,
7:58
like I say, kind of more sort of kinetics, sort of,
8:01
I guess, overtly cinematic,
8:03
point book style, going from that to Holtzmer,
8:05
where this sort of more Victorian seapier style,
8:09
was that, does that present any challenges?
8:10
No, not really, no, no, no.
8:12
I just choose a different approach, which I do.
8:15
I've always done that on every book I've done.
8:18
I've always let the story dictate the style of illustration
8:22
because that style of illustration
8:23
can't be the same for each story.
8:24
It has to, everything has to bend towards the story,
8:28
including the style of, you tell the story in,
8:30
that the art style has to be totally suitable
8:33
and to the story and has to accentuate it.
8:37
That's what I've always tried to do.
8:39
And I didn't go straight from Granville to that.
8:41
I've, in the meanwhile, I did the Legend of Lutheran Wright,
8:45
which is that the third and final art Wright story,
8:48
which I did it 20 years after the last one.
8:51
And that was quite long.
8:52
It was, I love 200 pages, long on this intense crosshatching,
8:58
and I also did, Mary's last book,
9:01
The Armored Manless, which was a biography
9:05
of Leonora Carrington, the last survivor in Surrealist artist.
9:10
Yeah, and is it true that with Hawksmore,
9:14
you mentioned in your introduction to the addition
9:18
that the opening, which is a sort of this key character
9:24
commits suicide on the sort of Suffolk,
9:25
the beautiful Suffolk fields?
9:27
Is it, you mentioned in the introduction
9:29
that you had the idea for that sort of opening sequence,
9:31
like something like 40 years ago, and it was that true?
9:34
Are you on a train?
9:35
Is that right?
9:36
You want to train through Suffolk and you have the idea?
9:38
Absolutely.
9:39
I was doing, it was 80, it was 88, 89.
9:42
I could be because I did an art write to it both years, I think.
9:45
And when?
9:46
Or the country doing signings, different comic stores.
9:51
During that tour, I was the first English artist
9:54
to do a signing in Northern Ireland
9:55
during the troubles, it was very bellfast,
9:58
which was really scary.
9:59
There was all these checkpoints and stuff
10:00
in the middle of the time, so I didn't turn.
10:03
Crazy stuff.
10:04
But yeah, I went to Suffolk for the first time,
10:06
to this comic shop called Ace, Ace Comics,
10:09
which I can't wait to start for the house,
10:11
like an American comic, something other.
10:13
Emporium, perhaps it was.
10:14
Looking out the train window,
10:16
these endless flat fields that had been recently plowed
10:22
and had to got the image,
10:24
which is basically the opening scene of the,
10:27
of the Holtmanner block, and it stayed with me, you know.
10:29
The only difference was that instead of a wind-up,
10:32
cylinder player in Holtmann, it was a Walkman,
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which was popular at the time.
10:38
You know, the ones you put cassette in.
10:39
That was the only difference, and of course,
10:42
modern clothing in the original idea.
10:45
But I always thought, well, that's great opening for a story,
10:47
and I never used it, I never forgot it.
10:49
So when I started writing Holtmanner,
10:53
I suddenly thinking about it, I thought,
10:55
this is it, this is where I can use that thing,
10:58
that idea I had, visually striking,
11:00
these open skies, you know, big wide open skies,
11:03
big flat fields.
11:04
Yeah, it's a terrific opening.
11:06
And so you say you had that idea for a lot of sort of knock
11:08
about in the back of your head for best part of 40 years.
11:11
I mean, when you were sort of putting together
11:12
some of the comics you've done in those 40 years,
11:14
like I guess maybe one bad around,
11:15
or some of the grandville stories,
11:17
or some of your works are married,
11:18
were you thinking, oh, maybe that opening could go here,
11:20
or are you thinking, no, I'll save it.
11:22
Well, you're trying it with each one.
11:23
Yeah, each one, you know, it occurred to me.
11:26
That could start, no, it wouldn't shoot this story,
11:28
it wouldn't shoot that sort of story.
11:31
Sticking with the introduction to the book,
11:32
because Philip Paulman, who's obviously an incredible writer,
11:36
himself, you know, did his dark materials,
11:38
he provides the forward to the comic.
11:40
I mean, how did that come about?
11:42
Was he a big fan of grandville, big fan of your comics?
11:44
Yeah, he's full of grandville, I think,
11:47
since the second one,
11:50
and he gave a, there's a quote from him
11:52
on the back cover of second to third one, I think,
11:55
originally touched him, just a go during the,
11:58
somewhere around 2007,
12:00
because I thought, you know, Leo Baxendale needs,
12:06
he needs no BA or something, you know?
12:08
So I went through the process of suggesting him
12:11
for no BA, and we got the forms and everything.
12:14
And I required letters of support,
12:18
from at least two other people who got the OBE,
12:21
he supplied one, Lenny Henry, and Paul's a Simmons.
12:25
He didn't get it, but the following year is something,
12:30
I was, because I used to seem quite a lot, you know,
12:33
there's a guy from our childhood,
12:34
I did, he invented the Bass Street kids,
12:36
many of them inks, you know, he's one of our heroes,
12:38
well, I was a kid.
12:40
We got to know each other very well,
12:41
because he used to, he came from Preston
12:43
when we were living 25 years,
12:44
and he used to come up to visit his mother,
12:47
and he stayed at our house, about years to after this.
12:49
I said to him, you know, you never heard from
12:52
Buckingham Palace about anything, did he?
12:55
And he said, oh, yeah, last year,
12:56
I got an invitation to the party, you know,
13:00
it was some garden party, and I said, did he go?
13:04
He said, no, I don't have to fuck off.
13:05
Well, that's why he didn't get it,
13:08
because he would have been invited to that,
13:11
he would check in the road, you see, I don't know.
13:13
I knew it wasn't anti-Rolls and everything,
13:17
but I thought it would be worth it in Gary and LBE,
13:21
because he could publicly turn it down,
13:23
and it had advertised his books,
13:24
because at that point, he was sell publishing,
13:27
his own prose books, but he'd written quite a few,
13:30
at that point, he had his little complicate,
13:32
called Reaper Books, and I thought, well,
13:35
at least he can get some publicity from it,
13:38
help sell his books, but he didn't have it.
13:42
Well, I guess his street cred,
13:44
which obviously would have been very high,
13:46
you know, for Bass Street Kids,
13:47
and he kind of went through the ceiling, I guess, after that.
13:49
It reminds me of when David Bowie turned down a knighthood
13:52
and people liked Danny Boyle,
13:53
so I think there's a kind of, you know, obviously,
13:55
if he wasn't a big fan of the rules,
13:56
it was tracks, if he was, you know, Bass Street Kigs,
13:58
that kind of anarchy, you know, in his comics.
14:01
I'm curious to ask about Stanford Hawksmore.
14:04
There's a moment in the book where you quote Samuel Johnson's
14:07
famous quote, or rather the character of Stanford Hawksmore
14:09
quotes it, he says,
14:10
patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,
14:13
and which is obviously such an iconic quote,
14:15
and there's a real strong anti-hate sentiment,
14:20
political sentiment in the comic,
14:22
and also anti-nationalist,
14:24
because the context of the story is set, as you said,
14:27
at the start, is set against the backdrop
14:29
of sort of British independence from France,
14:32
and there's a lot of sort of, in the comic,
14:34
there's a lot of xenophobia against
14:35
the sort of totalitarian French, I guess,
14:38
in the world of the story.
14:39
And as I was reading it, a lot of that sentiment
14:41
was chiming with me for right now.
14:43
I mean, the world outside, you know, our window,
14:45
it's, you know, the Britain outside our window,
14:47
there's, as we know, there's a lot of nationalism
14:49
seems to be back on the rise and reform,
14:52
seems to be on the rise.
14:53
And I guess with the comic and with that particular quote
14:57
from Samuel Johnson,
14:58
were you hoping to comment as much on, you know,
15:02
on today, and the politics of the days you were
15:04
in the context of the story?
15:06
Well, exactly, I mean, the whole,
15:08
I think it's all tinged with, like,
15:09
post-Brexit sadness, the whole story,
15:12
but, yeah, like I believe in this biggest empire
15:15
of the world, and all the trade links and everything.
15:18
And everybody knows by now, you know,
15:21
Brexit's been a total disaster.
15:22
I would say it cost us so far,
15:24
£100 billion every two billion a year,
15:28
sometimes like that.
15:30
And it still is, it still is costing us money.
15:33
But, yeah, it is anti-nationalistic,
15:36
so is the art right story.
15:38
If you've heard that, the legendary Luther art right.
15:42
But, yeah, and he explains Johnson's quote,
15:45
he doesn't mean true patriotism.
15:48
He means patriotism, and it's used to excuse
15:51
the worst excesses of what you believe in, you know,
15:54
to push your own agenda.
15:55
It's not, you know, a phrase in that,
15:59
he's using patriotism extremely synodally,
16:02
you know, and so are these newspapers,
16:04
mailed to telegraph some, you know,
16:07
outrage sells newspapers,
16:10
and they're using this nationalistic, stirring it up
16:13
because they know it can get the readers up in matter.
16:15
They keep buying newspapers.
16:16
They don't want this read very saddened
16:18
because I grew up doing the, you know,
16:19
I put the teenager in the 60s,
16:21
and there's a whole different atmosphere
16:24
and different vibe.
16:25
And it was, it was actually cool to be nice, you know.
16:29
For once, it was uncool to be violent.
16:32
Oh, there was a TV series during the 60s,
16:37
which you probably heard of later, all in the family.
16:41
Oh, no, that was American titles, isn't it?
16:43
No, no, no, to death do us part.
16:45
It was when his family was getting it,
16:47
who called Alpha Garnet, who's this mean spirit.
16:50
It's small-minded, nationalistic, bigot.
16:54
The Tory basically is a working class Tory,
16:56
which was a ludicrous thing to be then in the 60s.
16:59
And it was a national figure of thought.
17:01
It was a laughing stock.
17:02
People used to switch on to watch,
17:05
to death do us part, to laugh at him
17:06
because he was so ludicrous this character.
17:09
And then since then, the whole country seemed
17:11
to have become Alpha Garnet.
17:13
They'd been slaughtered into Alpha Garnet.
17:15
It's actually become a lot worse.
17:17
So you've got all these small-minded, mean-spirited assholes
17:20
all around these days, it's over.
17:22
Yeah, what you said there about how it's almost cool,
17:24
it was cool to be nice back in the day and now.
17:27
I actually, yeah, I agree.
17:28
I think it's actually the inverse is cool now.
17:29
It's cool to be hateful, it's cool to be.
17:31
Or certainly, as you say, it sells,
17:34
and it gets people's attention,
17:35
which it shouldn't be the case, but it is.
17:37
It's a real shame.
17:39
And you feel that in the comic, in San Mateux,
17:41
while you feel like you say it's a post-Brexit comic,
17:43
you feel that it's a very melancholy book in a lot of ways.
17:47
I mean, obviously it's very spirited at the same time.
17:49
It's very engaging, it's fun.
17:51
There's action at this mystery,
17:52
but also, there's a very melancholy tone to it as well.
17:56
And was that how you were feeling?
17:58
You just wanted to just put it into the comic?
18:00
Yeah, I mean, the Granville ones are quite light-hearted rumps,
18:04
I know there's lots of killing you then,
18:06
and bombing and stuff like that.
18:08
But I mean, they're just their adventure rumps,
18:10
basically, with some good detective work.
18:14
But yeah, I wanted the auction want a bit more thoughtful,
18:19
a bit more serious.
18:20
I hope I wrote a really intriguing detective story.
18:23
Oh, you did.
18:24
One of the things I was most impressed by it was how labyrinthine it gets,
18:27
because I think like any sort of classically great sort of Sherlock Holmes story,
18:31
or I guess like a Dashal hamlet, or those kinds of mysteries,
18:33
where the narrative gets so labyrinthine and sort of dense
18:36
that you kind of, you know, the sort of the blinds between what's,
18:39
obviously, what sort of fact and fiction,
18:41
but also like who your enemies are, who your friends are, gets blurred.
18:44
And you kind of, you really get the sense of emotionally being just pulled into that
18:47
twilight shades of gray world that obviously Stanford is in.
18:51
And he's kind of the only sort of sort of figure,
18:53
even though obviously he sort of crosses the line.
18:55
There are times where he crosses the line in the comic, you know,
18:58
he sort of holds his own in that world.
19:00
One of the French reviews said it was an excellent adventure story,
19:05
a detective story, because he said it was the first one he'd ever read
19:10
that didn't contain, you know, a cliché, a muguffin.
19:14
You know, that what Alfred Hitchcock used to call,
19:16
you know, the reason for the plot.
19:18
Didn't have this little thing that people are searching for.
19:21
If people are, you know, does have something.
19:23
People are searching for it, actually, but it doesn't have a simple muguffin, you know.
19:27
It's not all about trans-stopper bomb exploding or a computer taking over the world
19:31
since the right now.
19:32
Totally, yeah, and that's how it felt,
19:34
even though you do have a sort of muguffin in there.
19:36
You don't think, when I was reading it, I wasn't thinking,
19:38
oh, it wasn't as simplistic as just, oh, that's the device.
19:40
That's the thing we need to get to get here.
19:43
It just, it felt totally organic with the story.
19:45
Yeah, and each other comes and goes, really, isn't it?
19:47
It's not, let's just do it.
19:50
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
19:51
That political edge that we were talking about,
19:52
you're writing has always had that, I feel, that political edge.
19:55
I mean, and that sense of sort of class awareness in Britain.
19:58
I mean, going right back to Lufaracri, which you mentioned,
20:00
which is held up by many, is like the first graphic novel,
20:03
or one of the first graphic novels, certainly in this country.
20:06
And that's obviously has a political kind of anti-imperialist edge
20:10
with that heart of empire.
20:11
And then Alison Sundland has the sort of,
20:14
the psychogeography of Sundland and sort of the marrying,
20:17
the low brow of sort of, of working class,
20:19
some working class culture like the carry on films
20:21
to sort of Lewis Carroll, you know, perceive Ty Brown.
20:24
And when you, when you're writing a story,
20:25
or create crafting a comic,
20:27
is that something that you, do you have like a subject
20:30
that politically that you think,
20:31
okay, I wanted to tell a story about this,
20:32
or does it just organically emerge as you go and you,
20:35
and it surprises you?
20:36
It comes out, I mean, all writers, whether they say it or not,
20:39
they're all, they've all got some sort of political bias,
20:41
so it's some sort of ideology,
20:43
which comes out in the writing.
20:45
You can't help it if you're,
20:46
if you try to be, tell a story that feels to you truthful.
20:50
Outright was written, you know,
20:52
it was in the, in the 70s, mid 70s,
20:56
to late 70s, which was seen the rise of the far right
21:01
for the first time, it's the second world war, really.
21:05
You know, with the thought of government coming to power
21:07
and the national front marching on the street,
21:10
openly, it's openly fragist organization marching on the street.
21:14
So, I mean, they care about of that, outright,
21:17
as well as just me wanted to tell an intelligent science fiction story
21:21
when a few years later, they care about,
21:22
well, other moograped group, same time,
21:25
and they care about the vendetta about four years later, you know,
21:29
the same sort of, you know, fear of totalitarian state and everything.
21:34
Well, as you say, it's back again now,
21:35
I mean, it feels like they've been in Germany in 1930s at the moment,
21:39
so it's very disturbing.
21:41
Yeah, so it is a frightening time.
21:42
And in those comics that we mentioned,
21:44
so Leuphar Cry and Samford Hawksmore and Granville,
21:47
like, yeah, the politics come through and it's,
21:49
and they're very much, it's sort of coming from a very,
21:50
it seems to me like your voice, which is obviously, you know,
21:53
you grew up in a working class community up in Lancashire
21:56
and, you know, post-war, and then, you know,
22:00
it's a, that voice comes through in the comics.
22:03
And then, but you have, and a lot of those comics,
22:05
you know, like your biggest success is Leuphar Cry
22:07
and Alistair Sunderland.
22:09
They're, they're very, they feel very much to me,
22:11
like sort of homegrown, British sort of gems of comics,
22:14
but then you have, obviously, worked for a lot of the big mainstream
22:16
companies, like DC Comics and in America in 2000 AD,
22:20
how much interest do you have in that sort of world?
22:22
Almost none, though.
22:23
I did have at one point.
22:25
I was really to Marvel Comics when I was a teenager,
22:28
you know, Jack Kerb is still on the favorite artist.
22:30
So Steve did call people like this.
22:34
And, and then during the 80s and 70s and 80s,
22:39
you're DCing, you know, the comics doing some good things, you know.
22:42
Even back then, when I was creating art rights in the 70s,
22:47
I wanted it to be a very, very British,
22:49
because not only were all adventure comics,
22:53
it seemed at the time, both in America and in Britain.
22:56
I mean, 2000 AD when it started,
22:59
we're actually aimed at,
23:01
the catchment period, they were aimed at 12 to 14 year old boys,
23:04
all the venture colleagues were on that level,
23:07
back from the occasional one, you know, like, you know,
23:10
we did near myths in the 70s, which we were at right,
23:13
first appeared, and then a bit later,
23:16
they're skimmed in warrior.
23:18
Well, I just made our most name very big.
23:23
But they were all aimed at kids.
23:26
There's a ratcheter mid 80s when Alan did watchmen,
23:30
and Frank that they did direct night.
23:33
And then things influenced that by that started coming out.
23:39
But yeah, so, I mean, that was one of the things I wanted to do with that.
23:41
I don't want to do some in adult, not for kids.
23:43
That's about the time I stopped reading superhero comics
23:46
and things like that in general,
23:47
because you've ended up with two guys hitting each other more or less,
23:51
for the glory.
23:54
But yeah, Alan made them interested again
23:56
with his swamp thing, work in watchmen,
23:59
and there were several interesting stories on them.
24:01
But I don't know, I was sort of stopped
24:03
to tell off reading them in the 90s.
24:06
I was reading the 30-year titles,
24:09
which was very interesting at the time,
24:10
you know, that son, man, and shared the changing man and things.
24:13
I was one of the people who had hunted by a DC,
24:16
you know, the, which they were doing at the late 80s and 90s,
24:20
because they were saying these British guys can do it better
24:22
than there's an hour of people, you know.
24:23
They used to have a big party every year, you know, DC and London.
24:28
Worthy invited all the British creators, you know,
24:30
Wind and Dinders, everything's great.
24:32
I didn't actually go to the very first one,
24:33
but the first one was at Savoy and London,
24:35
all the first with us eating.
24:37
Why they do it?
24:37
Because they've never had this kind of treatment
24:39
for publishers before, you know,
24:41
they've always been used.
24:42
And the other publishers feed in nice food,
24:44
and give them free drinks,
24:46
and they all end up getting completely slushed.
24:49
And yeah, there were bodies in the street outside later,
24:53
you know, totally unconscious because of alcohol.
24:55
There's food being thrown at those and everything.
24:57
Yeah, it's a, it's a legendary night to that tonight.
25:01
I sort of missed it because I wasn't invited.
25:03
Oh, I went along from the second one onwards to...
25:07
Grant Morrison describes those sort of nights
25:09
of sort of bringing American publishers
25:11
when they came over to London and sort of bringing them
25:13
in the UK quite craters together as being kind of like,
25:16
almost kind of it shocking for the Americans a little bit
25:19
because British comic artists would arrive
25:20
and they're sort of like with their piercings and tattoos
25:23
and, you know, Ben Sherman jackets and like Chelsea boots.
25:26
And there were kind of, it was quite a strong,
25:27
you know, impression that they left on these quite,
25:30
I guess, sort of straight-laced DC and Marvel comics,
25:34
editors and publishers.
25:36
So sticking with the sort of creator-owned stuff
25:38
that you've done, which is obviously fantastic.
25:40
And I mean, this year, 2025 marks the 30th anniversary
25:44
of your comic, The Taylor One Bad Rat,
25:47
which I want to say, I heard an interview recently
25:49
that you gave, that it's your most successful comic.
25:53
Your most commercially successful, is that right?
25:54
Yeah, of the years, yeah, I think so.
25:56
Even more so than I, I think, which has been published
26:00
in a few countries, The Bad Rat.
26:02
I think I've lost courage.
26:04
I think it's up to 18 countries by now.
26:06
This year, January came out in France.
26:10
For the second time, at first time it came out.
26:11
It was in 89, 98, when it was republished.
26:16
February, year before it came out again in Italy.
26:19
And that's about the fifth different publisher
26:21
it's had in Italy.
26:22
But the French publisher, who I've been with for the last three years,
26:26
Lauren Loner, he's great.
26:28
He's probably published some of my books.
26:30
He's only did Bad Rat this year.
26:31
But he's been published in the...
26:34
He studied publishing the Grand Old Books
26:35
about three years ago.
26:38
And he's been publishing more than every...
26:40
I mean, it translated everything.
26:41
Publishing more than every six months.
26:43
Which is great, because he's been building up a momentum, you know?
26:46
And they've had staggot reviews.
26:48
I don't know how much they've sold.
26:50
I know it's reaped into them a few times,
26:52
but they're not selling huge and high in the big selling French
26:56
but their albums, they sell to it.
26:59
You know, they sell to 200,000 or something.
27:02
Not selling anywhere near those,
27:03
but they've been growing for sales.
27:05
If I could say it's auction, we're a KMAT in September.
27:07
Sorry, it's going to press this week on a second edition of it.
27:12
And with Bad Rat then, it's amazing to hear
27:13
it's been translated into all those different languages
27:15
and different countries.
27:17
Because I guess there's something...
27:18
I mean, why do you think that is?
27:19
Because I guess there's, for me, I guess there is something
27:21
universal about the story, which is the story of, kind of,
27:23
of child abuse fused with the sort of the iconography of Beatrice Potter.
27:27
I mean, yeah, why do you think that is?
27:29
That it's so...
27:30
I guess it's transcended some different language barriers.
27:33
It's not a genre story.
27:35
And I actually had designed it.
27:37
I changed it to all style of artwork
27:39
and I completely designed this visual storytelling of it
27:42
to be accessible to people who weren't used to reading comics,
27:48
people who didn't have that sort of acquired knowledge,
27:51
a comic grammar that we have through reading comics,
27:55
people who've never.
27:56
And indeed, I've had lots of people saying to me
27:59
that was the first comic I ever read.
28:02
And it's very straightforward.
28:03
The story telling is very easy to read.
28:05
At the same time, I think, quite subtle,
28:09
sophisticated because, you know, with Supply Art Right,
28:12
it was very, very experimental at the time,
28:14
consciously and experiment.
28:16
I was trying to do all sorts of things with the farm,
28:19
but with bad routes, a lot of experimentation in it.
28:23
But it's all under the surface.
28:25
It should all be hidden.
28:26
The reader shouldn't see it.
28:28
And these are subtle things like,
28:30
you know, the placement of eye level,
28:33
the way the eyes led through the from one panel to the next,
28:36
through the down through the page,
28:38
everything down to the size of a pupil.
28:40
And the size of the character on the page, you know.
28:45
Yeah, it's probably like experimentation I did on that sort of level.
28:49
I carried over some of it into her to vampire, actually.
28:52
Yeah.
28:52
Maybe you kept it quite subtle.
28:54
That's interesting because we had to grab Morrison on the pod,
28:56
not too long ago.
28:57
And they said that when it comes to structure,
29:00
for them when they're writing a comic,
29:01
you want to keep it quite subtle and implicit.
29:03
You don't want to announce what you're doing
29:05
in a sort of structural sense as a storyteller.
29:07
Is that something that you,
29:09
kind of a principal that sort of resonates with you too
29:10
when you're crafting a comic?
29:12
Yeah, absolutely.
29:12
Absolutely.
29:13
I mean, I used to have a lot of time on the structure
29:16
before I started writing the script weeks sometimes.
29:19
Till I know it's a bit of a structure in the story.
29:22
Instead of everything that's foreshadowed
29:24
at exactly the right moment, you know,
29:26
there's enough information to read it from here to there.
29:30
And, you know,
29:31
at least spend a lot of time on that sort of stuff.
29:33
It's great in grants that the lakes festival,
29:36
this time, I'm not seeing for years,
29:38
I'm not seeing for 12 years.
29:40
I guess I'm the only big oak festival
29:42
about 12 or 13 years ago.
29:43
It was interviewed on Saturday night.
29:46
After that, we were all tell.
29:47
We went, went and sat down together,
29:50
we had a good, a good old chat.
29:52
As I put on grunts, it was 17, you know,
29:54
we, um, we publishes first,
29:58
comic strips when he was drawing them himself
30:00
in, in the Ameths,
30:02
in, uh, from 78, yeah.
30:03
I remember that because I was up at the lakes.
30:05
That's where we first, uh, met her and I,
30:07
and I told you about the board.
30:08
I remember Grant saying he was doing a talk and he was saying that,
30:11
you're seeing you do Lou Ferrar Cry
30:13
and seeing you sort of working your studio
30:14
was what made them realize comics night
30:17
can be done to a high level,
30:18
but this can be done produced properly professionally.
30:21
And I guess I did want to ask like,
30:23
what are your memories of sort of like,
30:24
of being friends of Grant
30:25
and also of those near MIFs days
30:27
when you were sort of producing
30:28
getting Lou Ferrar Cry started?
30:29
Yeah, it was, it was published by, um,
30:31
Rob King, the science fiction bookshop in Edinburgh.
30:34
He said, it's published in comic,
30:36
it was suggested by, uh,
30:38
Graham Manley,
30:39
the comic artist Graham Manley,
30:41
who was one of his customers.
30:42
He said, let's do a comic
30:43
and it was Graham who suggested,
30:45
he can't type me to get me on to do the strip.
30:47
I don't know how they got hold of Grant.
30:48
I think they met him at a comic convention,
30:51
uh, before it came out.
30:53
But, uh, yeah, it was strange.
30:54
It was a bit of a collective really
30:55
because of some of these meetings
30:56
before everyone, usually
30:59
in Rob King's flat.
31:01
That's the first time I met Grant
31:02
and came along when he was,
31:04
it was 17 and, uh, it was really timid.
31:08
If not like, you think it was a Graham Ocean.
31:10
No, he wouldn't say boot or goose.
31:12
And, uh, we were all, we could all,
31:14
rest of us were about 10 years older than him.
31:17
Oh, we're all sat,
31:17
we're all along him,
31:18
we're all sat right and smoking dope
31:21
and passing joint.
31:21
And Grant would say,
31:22
we're kind of like this.
31:24
What do you guess?
31:26
Because later on he became worse than us, you know,
31:29
but, uh, you know,
31:30
I'll talk about his drum decayed habits,
31:31
but, uh, you know,
31:33
the public record.
31:35
He was telling me he wrote a lot of,
31:36
uh, some of his, uh, DC stories.
31:38
And as it did take,
31:39
as it is, right,
31:40
a lot of it's tripping.
31:42
Interesting.
31:43
I'm just being here,
31:43
and you know, I've talked,
31:44
spent some time in.
31:46
Yeah, I'm sure.
31:46
I'm sure.
31:47
I saw Grant that the following day,
31:49
and they did look a little bit worse.
31:50
Well, it sounded like he'd been quite a
31:52
high-spirited, uh,
31:53
evening.
31:54
Yeah, we were drinking quite a bit after that.
31:58
I think Grant even said at one point
31:59
that like Rob King and the guys
32:00
for running the MF sort of be sort of
32:01
smoking dope and sort of like,
32:03
you know, only,
32:03
and only a few issues of an MF,
32:05
I think, got made.
32:05
And Grant said that, uh,
32:07
at one point that you have to sort of come
32:08
and then take over the editing a little bit
32:10
because the work just wasn't getting done.
32:12
Is that right?
32:12
You had to be coming and be like,
32:13
right, okay,
32:13
and let's get this done, Lads.
32:15
Yeah, and I also thought it needed to look
32:17
more professional in the magazine.
32:19
You know, it looked to Amitrich to me.
32:21
So I said,
32:22
can I come in?
32:23
Can I edit an issue?
32:25
And he said, yeah, sure.
32:26
So I had to,
32:27
Alex was in go,
32:28
who's a pen name was bonk.
32:29
He used to do cartoons and comic strips
32:31
and then bonk,
32:32
under your own catalyst.
32:33
And he was a trained graphic designer like me.
32:35
Well, I met him at my,
32:36
I was at design college,
32:38
graphic design,
32:38
comic.
32:39
So I had him,
32:40
we designed the logo
32:42
and all the graphics for the pages.
32:44
So the old had a host style
32:46
and it looked a lot more impressive after that.
32:48
And I started commissioning stuff.
32:50
I commissioned a strip from
32:51
Trina Robbins,
32:52
which we had him on
32:53
issue,
32:55
I commissioned a strip from Glen February.
32:58
For the sixth one,
32:59
which would have been his first professional work.
33:01
I had not
33:03
Rob King run out of money.
33:05
And just in a bunk,
33:06
he did a moonlight flip
33:08
or in his blood load.
33:09
Lots of money.
33:11
And he left all the neomeths back at his flat
33:13
and as long as the other junk
33:15
and the landlord,
33:16
threw it all the skip.
33:17
Yes, that's why there's not many issues in neomeths
33:19
for a round.
33:20
Yeah, so this issue,
33:22
the hard and then that we got paid for his strip,
33:24
because he just,
33:25
he just vanished.
33:27
And he think his surface to about five years later,
33:29
and I'm still certain of something.
33:30
But this six issue never came out,
33:32
because it was really an exaggeration to look good.
33:34
Do you know?
33:35
And we had national distribution.
33:36
No, we were told all over the country
33:39
in shops,
33:40
news agents and shops all over the country.
33:42
It's very,
33:44
yeah, bigger.
33:44
I mean, something that people can't do
33:46
is just it's so hard to get
33:48
a comic published these days.
33:50
Because to get the distribution,
33:52
no, you have to pay smiths and menzes.
33:58
People like that.
33:59
You have to pay them thousands of pages.
34:01
Hey, Mary.
34:02
You have to pay them thousands of posts
34:04
to distribute the comic.
34:06
Really, you know, to get it in the shops,
34:07
you have to pay them.
34:09
Which is ludicrous.
34:10
At the time, there's lots of little independent
34:12
distributed all over Britain.
34:14
It'd take anything,
34:14
as long as it was published.
34:16
And they just take money for what they could say sold
34:19
and return the rest.
34:21
Great situation.
34:22
It meant the copies of brainstorm,
34:24
the first comic in NEMS,
34:26
in every news agent's property in the country.
34:28
You know, all around the country.
34:29
It was going,
34:30
cat don't have that.
34:32
But yeah, Mary's just joining us.
34:34
Yeah, I don't know if you can see me.
34:36
Welcome to Half the Pod as well, Mary.
34:38
I mean, I've been a fan of the comics
34:39
that both of you have been working on for so many years.
34:42
So, you know, since I was a teenager,
34:43
since you guys first-pound daughter of her father's eyes,
34:46
which I love.
34:46
So it's a real pleasure to have you on the pod too.
34:49
I wanted to ask about the next comic that you guys are working on.
34:52
I understand that you guys are working on a new comic.
34:54
Is that right?
34:56
Yes, it's another biography, another graphic biography.
35:00
This time, setting the 18th century,
35:03
about one of the first feminists.
35:05
Well, what we know called feminism,
35:08
she was a writer.
35:09
I'm really interested in finding out more for my own,
35:13
perfect, my own interest,
35:15
about fascinating, powerful women in history.
35:19
That I think other people be interested
35:21
in want to know about as well, you know.
35:23
Mary Walston Kraft is, well,
35:24
in some circles, extremely well-known.
35:27
Not for everybody, of course,
35:29
but for some people she's known as being the mother of Mary Shelley,
35:34
who is the writer of Frankenstein,
35:37
but for other people she's well-known
35:40
in her own right as a writer for the righty,
35:42
the vindication of the rights of woman in 1792.
35:48
Oh, wow, that's great.
35:49
And so, Brian, are you in the process
35:50
of drawing that right now?
35:51
Is it, or are Mary have you written it all up?
35:53
Is it, what sort of...
35:54
Yes, I'm working from Mary's script right now.
35:57
I'm up to that page, 80, I think.
36:00
140 pages, I said.
36:02
Well, together.
36:03
Just under that of artwork pages, you know,
36:06
but then I'm currently working on annotations
36:09
and I don't know quite how much space they'll take up.
36:11
When you're writing about a historic figure
36:13
and that entire life,
36:15
you can't fit everything into a comic again.
36:18
Great deal has to be edited,
36:22
one scene representing many scenes and so on, you know.
36:26
So, I'm now going through looking at where I can enhance
36:31
a particular aspect of the story
36:33
with a little note for people to read afterwards.
36:36
Wonderful.
36:36
Yeah, because I mean, I love how,
36:38
one of the things I love about the comics,
36:39
I mean, but that you've produced on your own, Brian,
36:42
but also the comics that you guys have produced together.
36:44
Like, you know, I like daughter of her father's eyes
36:46
and Sally Heathcoats, so for Jett,
36:47
is how rich and textured they are.
36:50
Like, it's obvious that you guys really do your research
36:53
and like that comes through the annotations at the back of the books,
36:56
but just in the general sort of, you know,
36:58
the texture of the stories.
37:00
And with Mary Walson craft, I mean, I guess what was it specifically
37:04
that attracted you guys to that story?
37:07
Lots of things.
37:08
I mean, the period's fascinating in terms of early print culture,
37:14
you know, so I thought visually it looked really interesting.
37:19
There's lots of cartoonists around, of course,
37:22
mainly that it was Mary Walson craft herself, you know,
37:25
because what an important figure she is for the beginnings of feminism.
37:30
And it was that that I wanted to explore.
37:33
There's a lot about her life, I had no idea, you know,
37:35
she kept falling in love and she had all that sort of difficulties
37:39
with her family and so on, you know,
37:41
some of which I've included, some of which I haven't
37:43
because it gets tedious, I feel one.
37:45
But yes, she's just intriguing, she's just an intriguing person.
37:49
Do you see anybody, anybody at the time, you know,
37:52
and a good friend of William Blake,
37:56
so I feel illustrated some of the books.
37:57
I think she met Samuel Johnson, but...
37:59
She met Samuel Johnson briefly.
38:01
A few celly, you're paying to.
38:03
A few celly, very well, net words with courage.
38:08
They were fanboys.
38:09
Yeah, they were from the first year.
38:11
Fantastic.
38:12
And then one of the things that you're so gifted at, Brian,
38:16
is, I guess, the variances in your style is an artist.
38:19
I mean, like, you know, I think back to Alice and Sunderland and how
38:21
you seem to cycle through, like, seven or eight different styles
38:24
and the course of that comic, at least, and it's fantastic.
38:26
And with the books you guys have worked on together,
38:28
there is that variance in style and, like, the materials that you're using.
38:32
And I mean, you mentioned Blake.
38:33
I mean, do you do a similar thing with this one?
38:35
Is that style, or are you going to be working with, or any sort of styles?
38:39
This reference is to Blake in the artwork here.
38:42
But yeah, it's all Walter Colour.
38:44
This, in the line book.
38:45
It's not ink work.
38:46
It's actually black.
38:47
Walter with a fine brush.
38:49
So I'm not used to really any of it.
38:52
So it's all, you know, had done, you know,
38:55
so it's a bit shaky, but I wanted to give that sort of completely,
38:59
that raw sort of look, nothing to the computer about it.
39:02
I did the lettering on computer.
39:04
Very distinctively different.
39:06
I mean, I've been quite a time making all the people in,
39:11
they've not got wigs on, but they've all got the same sort of hair,
39:14
and they all seem to have the same big noses as well.
39:16
Yeah, they're such a lot of men.
39:17
Yeah, you've got galterics, you know.
39:20
Because, of course, we don't have photographic reference to go on.
39:25
Paintings of the...
39:26
Paintings, you know, portraits is all there is to go on,
39:29
to make them a different...
39:31
Yeah, it's the time of Giller A.
39:33
In Krukshank and all these fantastic early cartoonists.
39:37
Also, the language is very distinctive, of course.
39:39
We're talking, we're talking 18th century English,
39:42
which has a very, very different field,
39:44
but it looks different in print as well.
39:46
18th century typeface is another matter.
39:49
I mean, we've got a few of those just to give you the idea of it,
39:52
but I don't think anyone would be able to read it,
39:54
to add it like that all the time.
39:58
So a question I've been curious to ask the two of you for years,
40:01
is about the, I guess, the working process you guys have,
40:04
not only as a couple, but as collaborators,
40:07
because, you know, is it...
40:08
Is it the kind of situation where, like, Mary,
40:11
you'll sit down, write the script,
40:12
and then Brian will be in his studio,
40:14
and then, like, you'll sit down at the kitchen table and go,
40:17
okay, this is the story, and then Brian will chip in with ideas.
40:20
Or, how do you guys work?
40:21
What's your collaborative process?
40:22
More or less that.
40:23
More or less that, yes.
40:25
I mean, very man, we're living together.
40:28
So we talked about it at the dinner table every night, you know,
40:32
and I suggest things, I've suggested scenes.
40:36
I'll suggest...
40:37
Yeah, I'll be sort of a first editor, really.
40:39
I'll say, oh, these two balloons here,
40:41
I think this could be one balloon,
40:43
or the other way around, you know,
40:44
I think this sentence need to be clearer.
40:47
I do make suggestions like that.
40:49
Yeah, I mean, I'll have a full script with,
40:50
with pet ball of played page breakdowns,
40:53
you know, panel by panel.
40:55
But then, sometimes, Brian can see where we work better,
40:58
or I think stuff, maybe not included enough panels
41:02
in to get a particular scene across,
41:04
you know, things like that all the time.
41:06
Yeah, we're with Dota,
41:07
as Mary script was more like a stage play.
41:12
Yeah.
41:14
We've seen description and characters,
41:17
and the lines that I broke it down into pages and panels and things.
41:20
But right from Scott Hangerhead,
41:22
and from Sully Eathcott's suffrage out,
41:24
it was right, page one, panel one,
41:26
you know, proper comic script.
41:27
Talking about the language, I mean,
41:29
I suppose I'm that deeply immersed in it all.
41:32
I'll think something makes perfect sense,
41:34
and Brian will say, what the hell's that?
41:36
You know, you need your doubt to paraphrase
41:38
that a little bit.
41:39
No, no, no, that's her actual words,
41:41
but yeah, there's a lot of time.
41:43
There's not actually just things,
41:44
I mean, Sully Eathcott's suffrage out,
41:46
I suggest the whole Sully Freeman sequence,
41:48
you know, of the nursing home.
41:49
Mm-hmm.
41:50
And all the things like that,
41:52
I think I suggested it for Red Virgin as well,
41:54
and the thing with the resholt,
41:56
I think, yeah, I junk it off the high full toe, you know.
41:58
Which is hilarious, and a really dark way.
42:00
I told him about that,
42:03
I said, but I can't possibly fit it in.
42:04
He said, yes, you can't.
42:06
But you suggested the framing device for this as well.
42:08
I had it starting off of like, when she's,
42:11
she's in Callus of Versailles
42:14
after it's been evacuated, and sacked.
42:18
And she writes about it, you know,
42:19
I'm quoting her from that,
42:21
which is a lovely somber place,
42:23
a way to start,
42:24
to sort of write into the thick of things,
42:26
in the middle of revolution.
42:28
And Mary said that, well, the memorials in London,
42:33
they sent pancreas.
42:34
St. Pancreas?
42:34
St. Pancreas, church.
42:36
Church out.
42:36
And I thought, well, that'd be good to get that in it.
42:38
And she said, well, apparently it's all in there.
42:40
It's all in the 18th century.
42:43
So I suggested this scene where it's dealt
42:45
with these just two pages.
42:47
It's a woman of the, and a data,
42:50
walking past St. Pancreas, and going up to the church out,
42:53
and looking at the memorial, the last page,
42:56
they're walking away from it, you know.
42:58
And that's in colour.
42:59
That's what it is in full,
43:01
two bits of in full colour, the rest of it's in different,
43:05
different tint, you know, the sunrobes,
43:08
some reddish, some blue.
43:10
So we go from a very distinctive present days,
43:13
St. Pancreas in the middle of London,
43:15
to the 18th century.
43:17
What's it like?
43:18
We're on Friday, actually.
43:20
Let's take a couple of more reference pictures, you know.
43:23
So it sounds like it's a sort of story of her life.
43:26
It's very much, it's birth to death,
43:27
because I think there's something that some people don't know,
43:29
is that she died very soon after Mary Shelley,
43:32
her daughter was born.
43:33
That's right, isn't it?
43:33
11 days.
43:34
10 days of that.
43:35
10 days after.
43:36
10 days, which is, you know, unbelievable.
43:39
Yeah, so it's kind of, that's the sort of structure you guys have,
43:41
when the've gone for is kind of the sort of the birth to death,
43:45
and as much as you can get in reasonably in the middle, I guess, thing.
43:49
Well, you used to be quite in sanitary in those days,
43:51
and it's, it's basically a result of the birth
43:54
of where I should die, you know.
43:55
You're infected, and doctors not washing their hands,
43:58
and things like this.
43:59
Oh, I'm specifically not.
44:01
Yeah, yeah.
44:02
And what you say there about your sort of working process,
44:04
you guys have together, then, because like, so you guys have produced,
44:07
I think this is the, the, the, this,
44:09
5 or 6 comic you've produced together.
44:11
6, yeah, including rain,
44:13
and over those 6 comics, do you feel like you guys are developed a shorthand?
44:16
Like, like, but at this point, you, like, you know,
44:18
you have it sort of down.
44:19
I guess the process you have of sort of,
44:21
of writing and then Brian taking over the illustration.
44:24
Probably, probably.
44:25
Probably, yeah.
44:27
Of course, each story has been very different.
44:29
There's different requirements.
44:31
But, I mean, I know I can rely on Brian's store of knowledge,
44:36
of artistic forms, for example, with, with the,
44:39
Arnold Madness, I mean, I, I knew that he would recognize,
44:43
you'd be familiar with a lot of the artists that I was referencing,
44:46
and some of other strange directions and panels in that one, didn't it?
44:50
Oh, yeah, yeah.
44:51
Because it's a real, it's a lot of,
44:52
sorry, it's excited it, you know, being about a surrealist.
44:55
They were driving through a broidal landscape,
44:58
under a,
44:59
Gernicus Sky.
45:00
Gernicus Sky.
45:01
Oh, that was absolutely, yeah.
45:03
That's it, the children, you exactly what I meant.
45:05
But in, in one, in, in, in daughter,
45:09
Mary actually drew the bit where she's, it's one page that symbolises
45:13
several years that Lucia Joyce spent in, in institutions.
45:18
And she said rather than do year after year,
45:21
if it's dragging on like this, you know, in the institution three decades.
45:25
She summarised in one page and she dreamt this image of Lucia Joyce
45:32
dancing frenetically,
45:35
wearing a straight jacket and flailing about
45:38
with images of her behind bars in a spiral going into the distance behind her.
45:43
Whereas the thought the page after it was originally six panels.
45:46
That's right.
45:47
And they're talking about the Nazis marching into Paris
45:50
and these things happening.
45:52
And last day it's been spent wandering the streets of Dublin
45:54
that like a, about the last days,
45:55
or the last days before she was put in a silent,
45:58
like a bagel idea almost.
46:00
And I thought, well, that's last time we see it to be good,
46:03
good to go off on a strong image.
46:05
So I just used to want image of her other streets.
46:08
And we had all, we just kept the text of the rest of the pages.
46:11
Because she didn't need, didn't need to be drawn.
46:13
You can, you can read the Nazis marching into Paris and imagine them.
46:17
Marching into Paris.
46:18
You don't need to actually physically show it.
46:21
And in fact, the worst sort of comic writing is the ones where they just have
46:25
they love a description of what's happening.
46:27
They love it, things like that same thing when you're drawn in the panel underneath.
46:31
Yeah, we got away with it.
46:33
It's probably a nice, strong image on the Dublin street
46:36
in the middle of Dublin.
46:36
And where it's nothing, it's just a geologist street.
46:38
A canal.
46:39
A canal street, yeah.
46:41
And the text just wrote in the edge,
46:44
describing the thing, what's led her here and, you know,
46:47
hinting what's coming after.
46:49
Not sort of thing you can do with comics, words and pictures and that.
46:52
Yeah, bad comic writing would be sort of showing and telling.
46:56
Whereas like, I guess what you're describing is a kind of like,
46:57
knowing when to tell or knowing when just to just to show, just to do other straight.
47:01
Yep, yep, yeah.
47:02
In contrast, we're doing lecture, for example.
47:05
It's a good thing.
47:06
That's what you're telling.
47:07
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
47:09
Are you, are you, you know, are exulas work?
47:11
You did a team of blues and you think you were,
47:14
we need a game and on several things.
47:15
Yeah, I did write, drawn a thousand story.
47:19
And they got to this panel and it said, it said in the caption,
47:22
thousand falls into a trap and the picture, it's thousand,
47:26
it's actually thousand falling into a trap, you know,
47:29
they see the spikes at the bottom.
47:31
Speech balloon coming from thousand.
47:34
Help, I'm falling into a trap.
47:37
That's really about right.
47:40
As collaborators, the two of you, I mean, what do you think the each of you has sort of
47:44
learned from the other in terms of what you're doing with these comics?
47:48
I mean, in terms of the writing, but obviously the storytelling.
47:50
I mean, what you just described there, you know, is such a brilliant example of
47:53
of how comic storytelling can work at its best.
47:57
I mean, what do you think the two of you have learned from the other over the last 13 years
48:01
that you've been making comics together?
48:03
I'm not sure because it's been a very organic process and it's working together
48:07
because you've been together for 50 odd years now.
48:10
So it's just like every day of life, really.
48:13
It's just like a continuation of every day.
48:15
It's been very enjoyable.
48:17
I don't know what we've learned from it, but it's enjoyable because
48:19
we're working on projects together and working in parallel and totally different things.
48:25
We've been, yeah, instead doing things together, it's a positive nature.
48:30
Yeah, after working in two different worlds for most working on projects together.
48:36
This has been great. We've enjoyed.
48:37
And when we were talking at the overnight at the Cartier Museum at the launch party,
48:41
first time for talks more, and also up in likeaff at the lakes,
48:44
I want to say you said that, so with the Mary Walson craft graphic novel that you guys are working
48:48
on, is it still in the sort of the trying to get interest from a publisher stage
48:52
or is someone sort of snapped it up ready for it's ready to go?
48:55
No, we're waiting for the contract now for self-made hero.
48:58
Drinking the contract at the moment?
49:00
You did the last book, it's been a long time.
49:03
It's an 80-page, it's just for, oh, money, it's all about it.
49:06
The years work, it's not been better than you.
49:09
Wow. And how come you gone for a self-made hero?
49:11
Because I want to say that like, so daughter and Sally Heathcoe and Red Virgin,
49:15
I want to say they were Jonathan Kaye, like the Grandville books.
49:17
I mean, were they simply not interested or were they, you know,
49:21
was there no sort of availability for them or was there...
49:23
Well, it's not bad, it's just they cut down these two quite a lot of graphic novels
49:27
and they've cut them down to just a handful a year now.
49:31
It's also down to changing staffs.
49:34
They're changing people, you know, people have different priorities.
49:37
I think they've got someone in charge again now who's keen on graphic novels.
49:42
So I was talking to Dan Franklin, who was our editor,
49:46
and last week, and he says they're producing more now.
49:49
They weren't interested in Mary Walst and Kraft at probably put it that way,
49:52
when we, in court, when we offered it.
49:54
Yeah, but there's someone quite some time ago now.
49:57
So it sounds almost like it's whoever's in charge who's interested in graphic novels
50:00
will be like, yeah, let's do it, or if they're not, then it's almost down to the winds of failure,
50:04
a little bit, is that what it's up there to say?
50:06
I mean, years we are Dan Franklin, it was my editor on while the Grandville books
50:11
and Alice and lots of things, and I know, first three, four books.
50:16
Yeah, Dan Franklin's always been a champion of graphic.
50:18
Yeah, and he's sort of, he's what he's retired.
50:22
He's still a consultant, but he's sort of retired.
50:24
He can't do that.
50:25
He can't just say, okay, we'll publish this book now,
50:27
which he used to be able to do.
50:29
Yeah, there's one of my claims to fame that,
50:31
having the same editor as Simon Rushdie, you know.
50:37
That is a claim to fame.
50:38
With Stanford Health Hawksmore,
50:40
and then the Mary WalsonCraft project,
50:43
I mean, it seems to me that for creators,
50:45
you're both your ages.
50:46
I mean, you seem to have no sign of showing that, slowing down.
50:49
Like, you know, you haven't stopped producing great work for years.
50:52
I mean, but although I think I want to say I heard in a recent interview
50:55
that Stanford Hawksmore, and then Mary WalsonCraft comic,
50:59
will may well be the last graphic novels you guys do, is that right?
51:03
And I'm hoping it's not, but as a fan.
51:06
Well, I've been writing Stanford Hawksmore short stories.
51:12
And I quite like the idea of getting the moating comic from,
51:14
at first, which I've not done for years.
51:16
But if not, you know, if I managed to do two or three,
51:20
then they're can come out in a book, you know,
51:22
they can come out in one book.
51:23
They're not that short.
51:24
Well, as a short, this is 25 pages.
51:28
That's a short, it's the second one I wrote about 60 pages.
51:31
So I probably can do that in two halves, you know.
51:35
But we don't have any plans to do another one together.
51:37
You're not currently researching anything?
51:39
I'm trying. I'm looking for people,
51:41
but I haven't found anyone that I could stand to live with.
51:45
I think it worked for two years.
51:46
The time that it would take to work to work on.
51:51
I was keen on doing something on Alice Ghee.
51:54
And just as I started reading up on Alice Ghee.
51:56
First woman's filmmaking.
51:58
She was working on film in the 1880s for what became go on.
52:04
Yeah, I mean, I was just with a fernd out about it.
52:06
I was, I thought, wow, this is incredible.
52:09
Shortly after this book came up, a cattle and bonnie.
52:12
Two people, it's, what's the first name?
52:15
Oh, I can't remember the first name.
52:17
They do it until the cattle have a bokeh.
52:19
Is it bokeh?
52:21
Bokeh, bokeh.
52:24
She writes, he draw, he writes it and she draws it.
52:27
Yeah, I think first I haven't heard of her.
52:28
And speaking to someone who's, you know, a film fan,
52:30
like I feel kind of slightly ashamed.
52:31
I haven't heard of her.
52:32
I mean, it sounds like she was,
52:33
so was she quite an important sort of female filmmaker
52:36
back at the sort of the birth of film?
52:39
Yeah, you think so?
52:40
Yeah, I mean, there was a very short thing as you can imagine.
52:45
She did one which was the fairy and the cabbage patch or something.
52:49
It was about where babies come from.
52:51
Five in its long, yeah.
52:52
We were able to come to be legal a few years ago
52:55
that an exhibition got among exhibition on.
52:57
And we were showing the film.
52:59
But she eventually, I think she moved to America.
53:03
Through the central studio.
53:05
Through the central studio.
53:06
Film company and in states.
53:08
In Hollywood, you know.
53:08
I don't think it was Hollywood.
53:10
No, it was in New York.
53:11
It was all the tells of date, yeah, yeah.
53:13
It was arrival to Hollywood.
53:14
Yeah.
53:15
Wow, yeah, because I guess normally when you hear
53:17
those sort of figures of early cinema in France,
53:20
you think of George Malay, or the Lumière brothers,
53:22
I mean, who are, you know, men.
53:25
And I guess you don't, I don't like say,
53:26
I confess I hadn't heard of her.
53:27
So I'll have to, I'll have to check her out.
53:29
So that could be a potential project there.
53:32
Well, as I say, somebody's done it already.
53:34
Yes, we can.
53:35
Oh, as a comic.
53:36
Sorry.
53:37
Yes, you're off the novel.
53:38
Yeah, yeah.
53:39
Kiki Demonpert, that's very good.
53:40
You should check it out.
53:41
And Josephine Baker as well.
53:45
Yeah, well, so recently we had a comic book
53:48
YouTuber on his sort of essayist in a story
53:50
called Owen Light's Comics.
53:52
And we recently did our top five favorite comics.
53:55
And one of the, one of my top five picks was,
53:58
it was actually Alice in Sunderland,
53:59
which I'm a huge, huge fan of,
54:01
and which you both feature in quite predominantly.
54:03
You're like, you know, you're both,
54:04
there are multiple scenes where, like,
54:05
Brian's right in the comic and Mary, you're there as well.
54:08
And at the Sunderland Empire, there's that framing device.
54:10
Just to walk on top.
54:11
Really?
54:14
Well, I was, I wanted to ask like, I know Sunderland is your sort
54:16
of both your adopted home.
54:18
I mean, what's the ratio you guys have to that comic now?
54:21
And I guess broader to this sort of city of Sunderland,
54:23
because it really is like, I can't think of many of a,
54:25
works which kind of a such a celebration of that city.
54:29
You know, it's a wonderful celebration.
54:31
I guess what's your relationship to that comic now,
54:33
now that it's been nearly 20 years since you did it?
54:35
I don't know. Well, a lot of people,
54:37
incidentally, have heard of it, you know,
54:38
sometimes I can talk to you in a minute,
54:41
something in a shop, something like this.
54:43
So I work about it and they'll say,
54:45
what do you do?
54:45
You know, we're very often to come here and see me studio
54:47
and they go, well, you're doing in there, you know.
54:50
So do you come and say, oh, yeah,
54:51
have you heard of Alice in Sunderland?
54:52
They go, oh, yeah, I've heard of that.
54:54
Is it at the times in old papers,
54:56
a lot of papers, it was on, on a lot of TV?
54:59
Unfortunately, it's out of, it's out of print.
55:01
I mean, yeah.
55:02
So that's a print.
55:04
Oh, yeah, it sold very well.
55:05
I mean, it went into five rebrints, I think,
55:08
the care petition sold over 20,000 in the first year.
55:12
The lawful waterstones in the Sunderland sold a thousand copies.
55:16
So, yeah.
55:16
But it's all just thing that we keep on selling in Sunderland.
55:19
It was keep on selling indefinitely,
55:21
probably not everywhere, in Sunderland clearly.
55:24
The care petition in the lawful museum till it stopped.
55:27
So it went into print.
55:28
That's such a great shame that it's out of print,
55:30
because I mean, because not,
55:31
because I understand that like obviously in Sunderland
55:33
is popular, but like, I mean, just for me,
55:35
reading, I mean, I'm from Sheffield,
55:36
I mean, as a northern reading it,
55:38
obviously there's so much sort of northern soul in it,
55:40
but also in terms of just the spirit of the North,
55:42
but also just like, you were seen that you were sort of being
55:44
encapsulating everything in one comic,
55:46
like obviously there was Carol and Sunderland
55:49
in the mac and culture, but also kind of life and death
55:52
and like change in like, you were swinging it so many
55:54
of the huge sort of themes, I guess,
55:57
that like, I've just literature really in that project.
56:00
And it's one of the reasons why I love it
56:01
and why, like I said, I included it on this list,
56:04
on that list, because it was just,
56:05
and I felt like giving it, and it's such a shame
56:08
that it's not in print anymore.
56:09
It needs, you know, that's such a shame.
56:11
I mean, there's an American edition,
56:13
it's all two printings from Dark Horse
56:16
and a Spanish edition, and I tell you in one as well,
56:19
which are as they're being sitting,
56:21
Sunderland, you know, can't get a French edition,
56:24
but French public says it's just two British,
56:26
French people, we buy it, you know.
56:29
Because one of the things it felt like you were doing in that
56:31
comic is sort of like planting the flag down in Sunderland
56:33
and say like, and it's almost like a potted history of England
56:36
through the lens of one town of Sunderland.
56:38
And it reminded me a little bit of what Alan Moore would do later
56:41
with Jerusalem, his novel about Northampton.
56:43
It's like, it's kind of a potted history.
56:45
It's like, you know, sunk in the town of Northampton,
56:48
you have that kind of history of Britain.
56:50
And it's like, but you were doing it in graphic novel form
56:52
years earlier with our Sunderland.
56:54
I was fascinating too, different, you know,
56:55
Northampton and Sunderland.
56:57
Yeah, it's two, you know, obviously great towns.
57:00
It inspired a couple of two books,
57:02
came out of it, directly inspired by it.
57:04
What was I'm about Brian?
57:05
Yeah, Brian.
57:07
The Bristol story was in the book.
57:09
The Bristol, yeah, we were about to know it.
57:10
Yeah, it's like the Brian one.
57:13
I did, they even got me to do the introduction and the cover.
57:16
So that's right.
57:17
Well, didn't they, didn't the Sunderland Council get you to design the,
57:20
is it the queue line?
57:21
The sort of the goes through Sunderland,
57:22
which is the sort of the, is it the pictorial
57:24
history of Sunderland?
57:25
But it was that based off, Alison Sunderland?
57:27
Well, I didn't have to research it,
57:29
because I've done all the research, Rowis.
57:31
No, the Lawsville Council, I just saw the Lawsville Council,
57:36
there's a new city square we've had,
57:37
because there's a big brewery that took up most of it,
57:40
right in the centre of Sunderland.
57:42
And that, that draws down the Valks brewery 20 years ago.
57:46
And this whole new, it's never, it's never had a proper big city square.
57:49
So we've got one there, we've got this thing called Keel Square.
57:53
There were a lot of connections with the shipping industry,
57:55
because it used to be the biggest shipbuilding port in the world.
57:58
Sunderland, mid-19th century.
58:00
Yeah, and they were putting out a tender,
58:03
saying, you know, for people to design this queue line.
58:05
Children, 23 yard, okay, I'm sorry,
58:10
a strip of black granite,
58:12
paving stills, it goes straight across the queue line.
58:16
And it's actually only this year they've laid the last birds of it.
58:19
I thought, I've got to put it for this tender.
58:21
I've got to see if I can get it, because if I don't,
58:24
I'm going to be walking past this,
58:25
and every time I walk past, I'm going to say,
58:27
I could have done something better than that.
58:29
You know, design's been better than that.
58:31
So I put this tender in and then forgot about it.
58:34
You know, there's some sampled panels and sampled stones
58:39
and things, stuff and designs.
58:40
And actually, one of the tender, I was against the big design studios,
58:44
he'd put in print.
58:47
So, yeah, what they wanted with this strip of
58:51
paving stills, with all the names of the ships that have been built on the way
58:55
and there's hundreds of them.
58:55
After I won the tender and I went in through meeting at the chief architects
59:02
office to talk about it, he showed me the other designs that have been put forward.
59:07
And I couldn't instantly see why mine won.
59:09
Well, there's with boring.
59:11
Still no one would picture them.
59:12
Yeah, but I'm a little old picture.
59:14
There's a little wall of boring olds, you know.
59:17
And mine, I chose, I didn't choose a classic face,
59:22
like times I chose a big chunky sancery face,
59:26
which looked quite nice.
59:27
I also added a few paving swords at the beginning of the line on the side,
59:33
two coils of rope, asymmetrical coils of rope,
59:36
that come together and then cross over like that.
59:39
And then form a border that runs the entire length.
59:42
And every, I think it's every 23 paving stones,
59:45
they cross over like this.
59:47
And in the triangles that they form,
59:50
these, these are the rope design.
59:52
There's an illustration.
59:54
Chromrods is telling the history of Sunderland,
59:56
as it goes along the line.
59:57
So, yeah, mine was visually interesting, I think that's why it won.
1:00:01
And this is granic comic.
1:00:02
Yeah, it's a granic comic.
1:00:04
I've got to be one of the, perhaps the only granic comic in history.
1:00:07
Is that fair to say?
1:00:08
Dregions color.
1:00:09
It's got the very color, the comic strip,
1:00:12
but it's nothing granite in it.
1:00:14
That's fantastic.
1:00:15
Well, I mean, I'm not surprised that you'd be out of the competition.
1:00:17
I mean, if they were going up against the graphic novel man,
1:00:20
so, you know, it didn't surprise me there.
1:00:21
You know, what was nice, there's a second world wall,
1:00:26
so you couldn't set everything up.
1:00:27
One, I've got picture showing,
1:00:30
a person represented the different,
1:00:31
falsetto area from there, I mean, everything.
1:00:33
And the sailor on the, there's an ordinary seaband on the,
1:00:39
that's my dad, he'd come from Sunderland,
1:00:41
but he was in the navidry, there was.
1:00:43
So, when I was bright, please, because I, I, I,
1:00:46
I showed him that a year or two before he died,
1:00:48
I said, look, you're, you're authorized, didn't granite.
1:00:52
Oh, I bet he was right, chef, for that.
1:00:55
I, wonderful.
1:00:56
Well, this has been such a pleasure, guys.
1:00:58
It's just such a pleasure to listen to you, chat and to talk about,
1:01:02
you know, Stanford Hawksmore, of course,
1:01:03
and the upcoming Mary Wastoncraft comic.
1:01:06
And what can I say?
1:01:07
I can't wait to see it when, when it, when it comes out.
1:01:10
We're all going to the end of next year,
1:01:11
but we don't know.
1:01:12
Next year is we're looking.
1:01:13
Oh, no, not one, we'll be at this time next year.
1:01:15
Or perhaps, does it, and you?
1:01:17
It is the end of the year.
1:01:18
It is true.
1:01:20
Wonderful. Well, and as I say, as I,
1:01:22
all I can say is as a fan, like I hope you guys,
1:01:24
personally, I'm hoping that there'll be many more
1:01:26
Brian and Mary Talbot comics coming from you guys down the line.
1:01:30
So, but that's just a, that's just going to be being a fan.
1:01:32
So, good to see you.
1:01:34
Good to be back.
1:01:35
Yeah, thanks to you guys again.
1:01:36
Thanks to the chat.
1:01:37
Thanks again for coming on the pod.
1:01:48
Hey, guys.
1:01:49
Thanks so much for listening to my chat.
1:01:51
We're Brian and Mary Talbot.
1:01:52
Remember to like and subscribe to the podcast
1:01:54
for more exciting interviews and guests coming soon on half the picture.