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the adventures of Luther Arkwright

Lex

18:44 / 29.08.01

Got it last month,anyone read it?

Templar

19:06 / 29.08.01

Hell yes. But go and get the sequel (Heart of Empire) - even better.

Lex

20:41 / 29.08.01

Got it.
Still liked the first one better.
I like BW.

DaveBCooper

07:26 / 30.08.01

I reckon it's smashing - all things considered, I think I prefer it to Heart of empire, possibly because there's more detail visible in the artwork.

I think it was Alan Moore who said that Arkwright was ahead of its time when it was first published, and that only towards the mid-to-late 1980s did the medium really start to catch up with what Bryan was doing. Sounds about right to me.

And Bryan Talbot is a very friendly and intelligent chap, to boot.

Have you read The Tale of One Bad Rat by him? It's a very different work, but a good 'un nonetheless - the sort of thing that you can pass to people who think all comics are about superheroes, too, which is always handy. Certainly worth your time, if you haven't seen it (there's a TPB available, IIRC).

DBC

Warewullf

07:45 / 30.08.01

Weird. I was just reading this yesterday. Bloody brilliant book.

Must pick up the sequel...

rizla mission

08:31 / 30.08.01

Luther Arkwright is bloody terrific.
A fantastic example of a dedicated artist/writer mixing up all his favourite stuff into a great, big, mad, epic story and simply going for it without giving a fuck about criticism or audience reaction..

..an attitude to be admired.

I didn't rate Heart of Empire quite so much, despite the greatly improved art.
But only because it focused on all my least favourite elements of the story and .. well .. it had a habit of dumping plot & character development in favour of grotesque, mindless carnage. And, unlike the first book, the Eastern mysticism / Galactic harmony angle seemed to be tacked on as an afterthought. And the ending was pretty corny, too.

But still highly enjoyable and technically stunning.

sleazenation

10:35 / 30.08.01

I did my dissertation on this at uni-- I even got to interview Bryan, as everyone says he is a really nice bloke

Arkwright was the first self consciously experimental british graphic novel. It was first serialised in Near myths in 1978 (alongside the first comics work of grant morrison) if you haven't read it so far i suggest you seek it outr (although the A4 size UK tades of the 1980's are better value than the current dark horse version since they shrink it down to the size of american format sacrificing some of the detail of bryans fantastic artwork)

Sax

15:08 / 30.08.01

Bryan is a nice bloke. I used to interview him all the time for one of the newspapers I used to work for. He lived in a big old house in Preston and worked in a room jammed full of old comics and books. I used to sit there and interview him, and would have spent hours there except he had a big white rat running around which used to unnerve the fuck out of me no end.

pacha perplexa

15:48 / 05.09.01

"Bloody terrific"´s the right definition.

Know that big-haired warrior woman that fights along with Arkwright? She reminds me of King Mob in his combat suit, with the hair, the guns, the fighting techniques (enters a room shooting and kicking everybody), only she doesn´t have the mask.

DrDee

17:55 / 23.09.01

Possibly my favourite comic - the sequel's good too, but the original Luther has all I look for into a narrative (no matter what format).
I got it because of the Michael Moorcock connection, and it actually got me back into reading comics (and occasionally writing them) after five years of self-imposed exile (I had been traumatized by mangamaniacs

Kit-Cat Club

10:17 / 05.06.03

I finished this last night - was amused to see a drawing by one Grant Morrison in the 'Arkaelogy' issue. I was also struck by the resemblance of the idea of Luther as Homo novus to some of the mutations in New X-Men, and specifically the idea of evolution beyond the human (where the merely human is dying out).

I enjoyed it - thought it a little emotionally cold though (perhaps this was because I thought the emotional centre of the book - Luther and Rose - was marred by a bit of a cop-out, in that when a Rose dies in one dimension all the others remain alive - so you know he'll be able to see her again). I really liked the totalitarian Protectorate stuff, but then, well, I would, wouldn't I...

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

10:34 / 05.06.03

Loved Luther Arkwright... haven't yet read Heart of Empire.

But then... I always liked Jerry Cornelius

Somewhere I have a copy of a fanzine that I bought years back (can't remember what it was called) that had a dialogue between Arkwright & Cornelius atop Derry&Tom's...

And yes... The Tale of One Bad Rat is truly beautiful. Ms Uttley would be proud.

Sax

10:44 / 05.06.03

I wonder if Bryan Talbot would put Jenny Everywhere in his next Luther strip?

_Boboss

10:57 / 05.06.03

heart of empire turns into a massive bag of poo by the last issue [psychic folk shooting blue energy out of their foreheads to stop a stupid big tentacle thing] but before that it's rather good. anyone who cares should take a trip to www.bryan-talbot.com where you can buy for not much more than a tenner a cdrom with preliminary art, pencil art, inked art, coloured art and colour-clarified art, complete with full script and sixty pages of alan moore style where you get your ideas from annotations. wow. i haven't got it myself, and i'm prolly not gunna.

sleazenation

13:20 / 05.06.03

I wonder if Bryan Talbot would put Jenny Everywhere in his next Luther strip?

Oddly enough Bryan Talbot appreciated the shared roots of Jenny and Luther/Cornelius (in many ways Jenny is a combination of Arkwright and Octobrianna) When I showed him some strips and information about Jenny Everywhere at the Bristol Comics Festival...

I didn't ask him to add jenny into his strips tho...

Sax

13:45 / 05.06.03

You showed Bryan some Jenny strips? Why wasn't I told?!

Actually, I used to know Bryan quite well. I worked in Preston when he was living there and interviewed him several times. It was quite funny having full page spreads on Luther Arkwright and The Nazz in a regional newspaper. The good people of Lancashire must have been quite mystified.

Tamayyurt

00:31 / 03.07.03

I really want to read this. Is there any place online I can buy the bigger UK version? If not I guess I'll settle for the Dark Horse one.

In many ways Jenny is a combination of Arkwright and Octobrianna

Octodriana is right! One was created in the "Russian Underground" and the other in the Barbelith Underground. She's practically Jenny's mom.

sleazenation

07:52 / 03.07.03

Your chances of picking up the larger format version of Graphic novels are probably slim since they are out of print... but if you want to see the detail of comic Bryan has done a CD rom "double album" featureing Arkwright and Heart of empire, early sketches and inks fro every page of Empire is includes as a bonus... available from the Bryan Talbot website...

_Boboss

08:01 / 03.07.03

wow this thread's almost as repetitive as the last issue of heart of empire. mind out for the red tentacles! if you squint at them they'll blow up. i like the einstein guy dying of radiation poisoning now that i think of it - that was good.

yawn - thing's buddy

09:22 / 03.07.03

I liked that panel sequence in the first one, where all you saw was a hail of polic batons and increasingly large splatters of black blood.

_Boboss

08:03 / 04.07.03

yeah all the batons with lumps of meat and hair hanging off them - wicked

sleazenation

08:12 / 04.07.03

all the batons raised like little errections

_Boboss

08:19 / 04.07.03

and the rubbish king getting killed. yeah damn good sequence

yawn - thing's buddy

10:10 / 04.07.03

lets pop yorkie (michael york) in a time machine and get him to star in the film.

bisset=rose. (jacqui not steve)

finger n' thump

20:00 / 06.07.03

yeah yawny, good idea, but make sure you give yorkie back issues to take back with him because to get to a time when yorkie'd be the right age, bryan talbot would not have yet written the thing.

but, here's where it gets interesting.

because in our reality, we know that talbot's work was a good adaptation of a poor film which failed at the box office. (in fact I beleive it was only ever released in poland and belgium, where the majority of it was filmed)

Come to think of it, wasn't talbot a costume designer on said flop?

that would tie in with his stint on the Nemesis mini-series, i suppose. (which of course inspired the contraversial pat mills 'rip-off')

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