This is the official homepage for Bryan Talbot's Alice in Sunderland; here you'll find all of the up to date news and info about Alice.

Alice in Sunderland was one of the weekly political magazine The New Statesman's Books of the Year 2007! It was also in The Guardian's list of books of the year and in the 2007 top ten comics list of Diamond Distributors, USA.

The third printing of Alice is now available from the publishers, Jonathan Cape. This is actually a new edition, rather than a reprint, as Bryan has taken this opportunity to correct a couple of typos and fine-tune some of the images.

There have been so many reviews of Alice that I have created a dedicated page for them; see the Alice in Sunderland review page for more!

Don't forget the Bryan Talbot fanpage Yahoo group; it's an excellent place to discuss Bryan's work with other fans - and even talk to Bryan on occasion!

Alice in Sunderland will be an approximately 320 page long graphic novel with the themes of storytelling, history and myth in a form I’ve been describing as a "dream documentary". It is not one story but literally dozens, short and long, the central spines being the history of Sunderland and the story of Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell (the “real” Alice), both of whom had connections with the city and surrounding area. For example Jabberwocky, the most famous nonsense poem in the English language, was written here.

The stories are told within the structure of an imaginary performance on the stage of the Sunderland Empire theatre, the shorter ones interwoven within the two main threads and consistently underpinned by the stage setting. As the Empire is an Edwardian music hall, the work is a “variety performance” in that different visual styles are utilised for each story, according to its needs. The artwork is a mixture of black and white, line, monochrome and colour, line work, watercolour painting, collage and digital artwork. The styles vary wildly from a conventional 9 panel grid, and full page illustrations to multiple image pages, or metapanels, using original art collaged with old prints, maps etc.

Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass were stories of dreams and dream is one of the themes of the book.

The entire comic is now complete and Bryan is finalising details with the publishers.

Sunderland! Thirteen hundred years ago it was the greatest centre of learning in the whole of Christendom and the very cradle of English consciousness. In the time of Lewis Carroll it was the greatest shipbuilding port in the world. To this city that gave the world the electric light bulb, the stars and stripes, the millennium, the Liberty Ships and the greatest British dragon legend came Carroll in the years preceding his most famous book, Alice in Wonderland, and here are buried the roots of his surreal masterpiece. Enter the famous Edwardian palace of varieties, The Sunderland Empire, for a unique experience: an entertaining and epic meditation on myth, history and storytelling and decide for yourself—does Sunderland really exist?

From Bryan Talbot, the acclaimed creator of The Adventures of Luther Arkwright and The Tale of One Bad Rat, comes Alice in Sunderland, a graphic novel unlike any other. Funny and poignant, thought-provoking and entertaining, traditional and experimental, whimsical and polemical, Alice in Sunderland is a heady cocktail of fact and fiction, a sumptuous and multi-layered journey that will leave you wondering about the magic that’s waiting to be unlocked in the place where you live.  

"Alice in Sunderland is parochial in its focus - but not in content. I believe anyone interested in the way history is formed and, in itself, forms culture, character, and a sense of place will be entranced by it." - John Tufail, Carrollian scholar

"The narrative and artwork are magic and the structure is magisterial" - Leo Baxendale, "The Father of British comics"