Geek Syndicate
Finally, there is a long-running subtext about the comics medium as a storytelling form - or at least that unique combination of words and pictures that we label as “comics” today. This form of illustrated story-telling ties in with medieval illuminated manuscripts, the political cartoons of Hogarth (which includes a fantastic analysis of a couple of his works) and the war adventure tales of my own youth. Here especially we see Talbots ability to mimic other styles really stand out, with his own (equally distinctive) art forming the framing narratives but cut away stories are drawn in whatever style is appropriate to the format he is talking about. All three strands weave together in what at first feels like a slightly random stream of consciousness but you soon realise that this is a finely crafted structure. In fact, the amount of work that must have gone into Alice In Sunderland starts to feel slightly intimidating - I’ve read it twice and I’m sure that there is stuff I’ve missed in the backgrounds and occasionally dense (well, dense for a comic) text. The whole thing is inviting you to “feel the quality” - right down to the hardback presentation and physical production quality; never something to underestimate when you’re presenting such quality content. What you have in the complete package, is a story that I just cannot imagine being told any other way. This is a story not just about folklore, history, and art, but about how they merge and diverge and feed off each other, and the melding of words and pictures in the comic format is the perfect way to do it. Television would flash by too quickly and you wouldn’t be able to take it all in. Pure prose-based text would rely too heavily on longwinded description and be desperately short of the visual texture that gives this so much clout. There is only one format to present this in and it’s the format it is presented in. So essentially what I’m saying is that Alice In Sunderland fulfils the two main criteria for novels-in-graphic-form. Firstly it’s inherently a single, complete work that is unburdened by having to be serialised and takes advantage of that to feel like a unified, extended work. Secondly it’s not just textwith-pictures, but something that needs to be projected as both words and pictures, with equal emphasis on both to make the whole work. On top of that, it’s genuinely fascinating - a wealth of information from the trivial up to the perspective shaking. Now I’m not going to claim that Alice is Sunderland is the “Best Graphic Novel Ever”, or that it reinvents or redefines the form, because I don’t think that it does. What it is, however, is a great example of the form - a clear demonstration of the novel-in-graphic-form that can only be presented in that form, and something you could give to someone who’d shy away from a volume full of say, Anthropomorphic Steampunk Badgers, even though it’s from the same writer. And
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these demonstrations of the form are all the more important in an age when comics sometimes feel inward looking, not accessible to outsiders, which is all the more reason that Alice In Sunderland should be applauded for the great achievement that it is. M att Farr Rating:
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