Book: Alice in Sunderland by Brian Talbot
I tend to love the making of connections; I love watching a documentary about one thing that turns into a documentary about something else, or about making documentaries in general. That's why the collage-based Alice in Sunderland by British comics artist Brian Talbot intrigued me. It's an exploration not only of the origins of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland but of some of the places and people who inspired it and, as a comic, the comics medium itself. In that sense, it's a sort of combination of James Burke's tv show "Connections," Orson Welles' F for Fake, and Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics (he even has a cameo). Talbot explains the connections the northeast of England has to the famous work, as well as all tangential curiosities of the history, art, and culture of that region.
It's all supported by archival material, arranged in a 319 page, full-color comic book with Talbot's drawings as a guide. He touches on Carroll, medieval monks, music hall stars, current public art installations, invasion, storytelling, industry, and comics history. There's a happy mix of styles, depending on the subject; a section about "Jack Crawford, the hero of Camperdown" is illustrated like a boys' adventure comic. Some of these sections succeed better than others--I could have lived without a literal illustration of the "Cry God for Harry, England, and Saint George!" speech from Henry V. I mean literal as in "or close the wall up with our English dead" is accompanied by a picture of a man doing just that.
What I also could have lived without, and what makes me loathe to recommend the book to anyone but the most ardent fan of non-narrative fact-collages about Alice in Wonderland, is that most of the images and backgrounds are bad Photoshop-filtered photographs. It's obvious and ugly, and it makes no sense to me. The photos (of Alice, of locations, of whatever) would be far more interesting on their own. Do I need to see a bubbly, blurry version of the vintage material he found? I finished the book, because I was interested in the material, but in the end I'm disappointed by the aesthetic choices made. And in a book about the comics medium, not to mention the story of Alice, you really want to love how it looks.
It's all supported by archival material, arranged in a 319 page, full-color comic book with Talbot's drawings as a guide. He touches on Carroll, medieval monks, music hall stars, current public art installations, invasion, storytelling, industry, and comics history. There's a happy mix of styles, depending on the subject; a section about "Jack Crawford, the hero of Camperdown" is illustrated like a boys' adventure comic. Some of these sections succeed better than others--I could have lived without a literal illustration of the "Cry God for Harry, England, and Saint George!" speech from Henry V. I mean literal as in "or close the wall up with our English dead" is accompanied by a picture of a man doing just that.
What I also could have lived without, and what makes me loathe to recommend the book to anyone but the most ardent fan of non-narrative fact-collages about Alice in Wonderland, is that most of the images and backgrounds are bad Photoshop-filtered photographs. It's obvious and ugly, and it makes no sense to me. The photos (of Alice, of locations, of whatever) would be far more interesting on their own. Do I need to see a bubbly, blurry version of the vintage material he found? I finished the book, because I was interested in the material, but in the end I'm disappointed by the aesthetic choices made. And in a book about the comics medium, not to mention the story of Alice, you really want to love how it looks.