With The Legend of Luther Arkwright, creator Bryan Talbot brings to a close a story that began almost 50 years ago. Talbot’s multiverse hopping secret agent/assassin Luther Arkwright first appeared in Brainstorm Comix. Since then, the character’s first full length adventure The Adventures of Luther Arkwright became one of the most influential British graphic novel of its time. The Beat emailed the creator to talk about this latest adventure and the processed behind creating it.
D. MORRIS: How does it feel to be called “The Father of the British graphic novel?”
BRYAN TALBOT: It’s something that I’ve become used to by now, though I don’t know that it’s completely accurate. There were a couple of proto-graphic novels produced a year or two before The Adventures of Luther Arkwright. They were comic adaptations of two Michael Moorcock Elric stories by Jim Cawthorn, though they were published in a large stapled comic book format, similar to the “Treasury” editions that Marvel did in the ’70s and, as such, don’t conform to the “comics in book form” definition. The original volume collecting Arkwright came out in 1982, the same time as the other two first GNs in the U.K., Raymond Brigg’s When the Wind Blows and Posy Simmond’s True Love though, as Arkwright was serialized in Near Myths and Pssst! from October 1978 (the same month as the publication of Will Eisner’s A Contract with God, the first to use the definition) it does seem to have the edge.
MORRIS: Something that makes Arkwright such a unique character in comics is, even among his fellow icons of British comics characters such as Judge Dredd, he’s a uniquely British character. While there are similar characters in British science fiction but what was the impetus of introducing this kind of character into comics?
TALBOT: Apart from Dan Dare, it was rare to have a British hero in SF/superhero comics at the time. It was just one of the many different things that I was trying to do with the book, the main one being to produce an intelligent SF adventure comic for adults. It must be hard now for readers to imagine what the US and UK comic world was like back in the late 70s when, except for the relatively few underground publications, comics were produced solely for a young adolescent target audience. The vast majority were bland, repetitive fare. There was no blood, no swearing, no sex, no politics, religion, philosophy etc etc. There were no equivalents to adult novels and films in comics. That’s what I tried to do.
MORRIS: It’s been over 20 years since the completion of Heart of Empire; The Legacy of Luther Arkwright, the sequel to The Adventures of Luther Arkwright. This volume is titled The Legend of Luther Arkwright. While this still follows Luther fighting a threat to the multiverse, the majority of this volume centers on the passage of time. A couple of supporting characters die in this volume. Luther confronts his legacy in the form of Proteus and what that means for humanity’s evolution. I’m curious if this was an inspiration for telling a new Luther Arkwright story after such a long time?
TALBOT: It made the story as different from the original as the sequel was. I designed Proteus to look like how experts believe humans will look if they continue to evolve. Arkwright was dealing with the concept of the homo superior (indeed, the multiverse) way before any other comics, so it wasn’t the inspiration for this story
MORRIS: I think that it’s safe to say that each volume of Luther Arkwright reflects the time it was created in. Adventures could only have been created in the Margaret Thatcher era, and Heart of Empire in the Tony Blair years. How much would you say parts of The Legend of Luther Arkwright mirror the last decade or so?
TALBOT: They do. Science Fiction, as opposed to space opera (the good ones of which I also like) is always inspired by what is actually happening at the time it was written. Right now, we’re seeing the rise of nationalism and the extreme right, all over the world, as a result of the sense of uncertainty and the bad economic times we are going through. Same thing happened in the 1930s.
MORRIS: The structure of this volume is unique. Essentially, you tell the story through multiple people telling the story and each has their own perspective. Was this a way for you to further explore the concept of what Luther’s legacy is?
TALBOT: It was a way of presenting the story differently than the other two books. I wanted to return to some of the experimentation that existed in the first one. I like the way that Luther’s basically out of the story for an extended period, a little like Sherlock Holmes is in The Hound of the Baskervilles. That’s my favourite section – watching the slow evolution of the relationship between the uncouth and down-to-earth Harry Fairfax, Arkwright’s comrade-in-arms, and the mentally-impaired orphan who attaches herself to them.
MORRIS: The most significant characters are two characters who look straight out of a Moebius comic. I don’t want to speculate on who they are but they discuss figures throughout history, people who did good or committed acts of evil. Luther is of course the protagonist but was this a way for you to let the reader cast doubt on whether Luther’s actions throughout this series were for the benefit or detriment of humanity?
TALBOT: Luther’s always been morally ambiguous. In the first story I wanted to give the impression that another step in human evolution would bring a different way of looking at the world, a different sense of morality to that of sapiens. The short stand-alone historical narratives, apart from reinforcing the theme of the book – that people can be good or evil, depending upon how they’ve been conditioned by their experiences – I simply had never seen it done in an adventure comic: stepping out of the story to chart real-life experiences, totally unrelated to the plot, but emphasising the theme. As I said, I wanted to return a little to the storytelling experimentation that I was very self-consciously aware of doing in the first story. It’s one of the reasons I returned to the black and white, meticulous cross-hatched illustration style of the original. And I love Moebius, which is why I drew the framing device of the storyteller and her listener’s sequences in that style.
Morris: I’m fascinated how the various worlds in the multiverse that readers visit become more removed and backwards from our present versus magnificent futuristic landscapes you might see in other multiverse stories. The last two volumes were set on a world where the English Civil War raged for over 300 years. The majority of this volume is on a parallel where England went back to the Dark Ages after a plague. Is it more fun to tell a story in a world where the world went wrong versus one where things went well?
TALBOT: The parallel of Zero-zero, which is a fundamental part of the story, is a
futuristic utopian one, but, yes, dystopias are much more interesting. A story set
in a perfect world full of nice people would be very boring!
MORRIS: In previous volumes, the concept of the multiverse and how each parallel worked was kind of left in the dark other than these parallels existed. Why explain how this works finally?
TALBOT: It is first discussed in Heart of Empire and I expand on it here. It makes my version of parallel worlds very, very different to the quantum theory of parallel worlds usually used in stories, wherein a new alternative reality can begin at any point in time and spark divergent realities. In my stories, there are a finite (though vast) number of temporal alternatives, existing at the same time, in different dimensions – different facets of the same reality, literally parallel. If this was not the case, there’s be the ludicrous situation of multiple versions of Luther running around at the same time as multiple antagonists! Or multiple Firefrosts, in the original.
MORRIS: One of the things that makes reading the various Luther Arkwright stories so enjoyable is how you play with the comics medium. Whether it’s the way you convey information in The Adventures of Luther Arkwright or the framing devices in this volume, you clearly enjoy this aspect of storytelling. Does content dictate form for you, the other way around, or is it both?
TALBOT: Comics are pure storytelling. The drawing style chosen to illustrate the
story is a fundamental part of that. That’s why my style changes from comic to comic – it must totally suit the type of story being told. The images in comics are the equivalent of descriptive passages in prose. They dictate how your mind perceives it. I can’t tell an adventure story, a ghost story, a comedy, a documentary in the same drawing style. It would not only be lazy of me but would be undermining the story being told. Every part of the visuals must reinforce what it being communicated. Not just the drawing style, but the composition – not only the overall composition of each page but of each individual panel, the use of diagonals, horizontals and verticals, panel sizes, shapes and layouts, to lead the eye from panel to panel, the use of eye level and light source to emphasise plot points and atmosphere, even the placement of the speech balloons is an important part of the storytelling.
The layout of facing pages is crucial to the atmosphere and information that can be encapsulated within them – when needed, you can turn the page to completely change the atmosphere or to reveal a surprise. I’m always puzzled when a review of a story doesn’t mention the storytelling once, as if the reviewers don’t even notice it.
And, in a way, they shouldn’t. It should be beneath their perception unless the
artist wants to bring it to their attention for a specific effect.
MORRIS: The final chapter of this book clearly mirrors the opening one of Adventures of Luther Arkwright. That’s an incredible bookend. While this feels like it could be the final volume, is there a possibility of future Luther Arkwright volumes? Or do you feel you’ve had all you had to say with this character?
TALBOT: Yes, the first and last books start and end at the same place – 50 years
apart in real time – and, yes, there will be no more Luther stories.
MORRIS: With Luther Arkwright now complete, can you talk about any future projects?
TALBOT: I’ve just finished the artwork for the 172 prequel to my Grandville series,
The Casebook of Stamford Hawksmoor, out at the end of 2025. Next up, I’ll be
illustrating Mary’s 6th graphic novel. It is already scripted, but the subject is
definitely under wraps!
The Legacy of Arkwright is currently for sale from Dark Horse Comics in print and digital.
