I wasn't really sure what to expect when I embarked on Alice in Sunderland; maybe some kind of riff on the Alice story, set in an industrial UK town. This is far from what I expected.

The book starts with a scruffy-looking bloke walking into the Sunderland Empire Theatre, where a thespian dressed like a rabbit is mucking up his lines. The actor starts to regale his audience of one with a history of the Empire Theatre. Talbot develops this into a loving history of Sunderland from its origins to the present day, including the area's connections with notables including George Formby, Sid James, the Venerable Bede, the Liddell family, and one Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.

Talbot documents a multitude of connections between the Wear valley area and the origins of Alice, and makes a good case for doubting the accepted origin story of an idyllic boat trip in Oxford. Talbot mixes this throughout with the suggestion that maybe the whole story is just somebody's dream - like Alice itself.

Chock-full of more than 300 pages of anecdote, myth, history, coincidence and speculation about Sunderland, the Wear valley, Alice and comics, this book is constantly engaging, with loads of new information and connections to the area that one never suspected. There is a wealth of detail in the illustrations, incorporating a lot of historical material from Talbot's voluminous research. It's a unique idea for a graphic novel, which I greatly enjoyed. ( )

And a half star. Found the content really interesting but the graphic style less engrossing. Well worth a read. Love Alice and the North East. ( )

In this epic tale, writer/artist Bryan Talbot draws on centuries of European history and graphic storytelling to pen this complex, interlocking story of the Sunderland area of England, Lewis Carroll, and Alice, both fictional and real. Talbot, a comic-book artist veteran of some 40 years, creates his most ambitious project to date.

Talbot, as a multiple-identity narrator, uses the legendary Sunderland Empire theatre – Laurel & Hardy, Charlie Chaplin, W.C. Fields, Marlene Dietrich, and the Beatles all performed there – as a backdrop and himself to recount the history of Sunderland and through it the major British events of the previous 3,000 years intertwined within the lives of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, the author and mathematician. Contrary to popular belief, Dodgson, better know as Lewis Carroll, conceived of his book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in Sunderland rather than Oxford. Talbot spends a goodly portion of the book supporting this fact while leading the reader through various aspects of Sunderland, Great Britain, and the myth of Alice.

Related in a nonlinear style, Talbot uses a stream-of-consciousness method owing more to William S. Burroughs than to traditional comics. To further enhance the telling, he employs a mixed-media approach, combining a variety of techniques like photographs, collage, paintings, and drawing in a wide range of visual styles. The combined effect enables Talbot to jump from historical period to historical period and from scene to scene without losing his reader and/or having to explain the dramatic changes. The final project offers a beautifully unique graphic novel.

While Alice in Sunderland represents a visual high point of Talbot's storied career, the author occasionally meanders, causing the reader's interest to waver. His attempts to illustrate the contemporary importance of Sunderland often fall flat.

Ultimately, Talbot succeeds in producing a fascinating, insightful, and entertaining history of Sunderland, its environs, and the troubled story of Alice and her creator, Lewis Carroll. Alice in Sunderland ushers in a new epoch in visual storytelling, solidifying theories espoused by Scott McCloud and others while expanding on the works of artists such as Dave McKean.

(This review originally appeared in The Austin Chronicle, June 1, 2007.)
link: [http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/review?oid=oid:479678] ( )

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2710804.html

Wow. How come nobody told me about this sooner? (Well, yes, I know you told me. I should have listened.) This is a glorious exploration of the cultural history of Sunderland and its immediate vicinity, and specifically its impact on the Alice books and the other works of Lewis Carroll. Talbot makes the argument that Oxford has for too long claimed a monopoly on Alice, when in fact both Dodgson and the Liddell family had long-standing links with this part of North-East England, and there is convincing evidence that the relationship between the families, and many crucial details in the books themselves, depend crucially on the Wear estuary. Talbot presents the entire story as told by two of his own avatars to a theatre-goer, assisted by various mythic and historical figures including the ghost of Sid James, who literally died on stage in Sunderland (on my ninth birthday, I note). And there are many diversions into Talbot's own career and personal history, and into the history of comics, picking up many pleasing resonances and a number of spot-on pastiches.

I thought this was brilliant. I love deep local histories anyway - the Irish word is dinnseanchas, the lore of places - and the fact that I know very little about that part of the world possibly enhanced my enjoyment as Talbot makes his immediate geographical landscape relevant to the cultural references which I know much better. It's a little demanding in that some knowledge of Talbot's other work, and much knowledge of Lewis Carroll, is assumed, and I guess when this was first recommended to me I probably lacked the former. But I also suspect that readers who know less about the writer can skip the more Talbot-centric parts and get a lot out of the rest. ( )

One word: savor. Savor this book slowly. It's only 319 pages but let every page have it's moment in time. This is a beautiful piece of art, chock full of culture, biography, history, creative use of the English language ("follow your spirit" with a picture of someone chasing a vodka truck), a comic book inside a graphic novel, brimming with literary references (Thirty-Nine Steps and Rugby, the same school made infamous by Tom Brown's Schooldays, to name a few) and much, much more. This is a comprehensive walk through history with a myriad of people and places leading the way. In Book Lust To Go Nancy Pearl called it "one of the richest experiences of her life (p 68).

The premise is really quite simple. Bryan Talbot has researched his hometown of Sunderland and found every possible parallel connection to Lewis Carroll's famed The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland. It's brilliant. ( )