14 ALICE IN SUNDERLAND
artistry. Starting in the 1980s, the publication of longer story arcs across single issues
and their compilation in trade paperback format coincided with the evolution of comics
as an art form, the maturation and diversifi cation of subject matters, and the appeal of
comics to a wider audience. Public interest in every type of comic— especially Japanese
manga , independent trade paperbacks and graphic novels, and alternate-earth versions
of superhero standards—continues to increase exponentially.
Tim Bryant
ALICE IN SUNDERLAND. Described by Paul Gravett as “a tour de force landmark in
graphic literature,” Bryan Talbot’s magnum opus Alice in Sunderland combines line draw-
ings, watercolors, Photoshop collages, and pastiches of various comic and artistic styles
with elements of travelogue, fantasy , historiography, biography, and polemic in a genre-
bending, visually inventive epic about stories and storytelling. Presented as an imaginary
Edwardian-style variety performance on the stage of the Sunderland Empire theater,
Talbot’s sprawling Alice follows two main threads that often intersect in unexpected
ways: the history of the real port city of Sunderland in northeast England, and the lives
of author Lewis Carroll and his child muse Alice Liddell. Along the way, the nonlinear
narrative moves through a series of intricately plotted digressions that tell the history of
England in microcosm and reveal Sunderland as an underappreciated infl uence on not
only Carroll’s classics Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Th rough the Looking-Glass
but also modern commerce, industry, and culture. More than a revisionist take on Sun-
derland and Carroll, however, Alice in Sunderland also presents a wide-ranging survey
of comics and their antecedents, including metafi ctional sections on the book’s own
creation, as well as an extended narrative about the making and remaking of individual
and collective identities.
Subtitled “An Entertainment,” Talbot’s Alice stages a theatrical performance in the
form of what its author calls a “dream documentary.” Talbot plays three diff erent roles
in his one-man show: the churlish Plebian, overweight and unshaven, dressed in a
leather jacket and jeans, standing in for both the Empire’s legendary tough audience and
the reader; the aging Performer, in a puff y white shirt, who serves as the master of cer-
emonies and co-narrator; and the black-clad Pilgrim, the writer-artist who creates the
book and serves as a second narrator, moving freely through time and space. Th e black-
clad Pilgrim has an incarnation tightly connected to still-another version of Talbot: the
photo-real blurry-style version of himself who dreams the narrative. (Th e book ends
as this “Bryan Talbot” awakes from a nap in a theater.) Th is cast of avatars is joined by
the Empire’s spectral odd couple, uninvited ghosts who occasionally interrupt Talbot’s
show: the austere White Lady and the wise-cracking, lecherous spirit of comedian Sid
James, who died on the Empire stage and is rumored to haunt the theater. Other indi-
viduals, real and fi ctional, interact with the Pilgrim in slides projected onto a screen
on stage. Talbot’s paper theatricals also feature an opening curtain, an intermission,
a backstage tour, a fi nale, and an encore about Sunderland’s post- industrial renewal.
Talbot adds his own drama in the form of a MacGuffi n by announcing the presence of
