Bryan Talbot

Bryan Talbot (born 4th February 1952) is a comic artist and writer from Lancashire who has been active in the industry since the late 1960s, when he broke into it via the underground comix scene, creating the character Chester P. Hackenbush. He began his epic work The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, one of the first British graphic novels, in 1978 in Near Myths magazine, and in the early 1980s began working for 2000AD on series' including Ro-Busters, Slaine, Judge Dredd, Tharg's Future Shocks and a lengthy run on Nemesis the Warlock. He created the graphic novel The Tale of One Bad Rat, which deals with the thorny subject of childhood sexual abuse, and in the 1990s broke into the American market, working primarily (though not exclusively) for DC Comics on characters such as Batman and books including Hellblazer and Neil Gaiman's Sandman, and later Bill Willingham's Fables. He also returned to the Luther Arkwright universe with Heart of Empire, and illustrated cards for the Magic: The Gathering collectible card game. In 2006 he released the graphic novel Metronome, an erotic visual poem (written under the pseudonym Veronique Tanaka, though Talbot admitted authorship in 2009), and in 2007 the groundbreaking social history work Alice in Sunderland. He created the detective steampunk thriller Grandville (starring a talking badger) in 2009 and has since continued the series, and in 2012 collaborated with his wife Mary, providing the art for her biographical graphic novel Dotter of Her Father's Eyes, which won the 2012 Costa Biography Award. Talbot himself has won numerous awards, including seven Eage Awards between 1985 and 1993.