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The Official Bryan Talbot fanpage / Heart of Empire home
 

Heart of Empire Directors Cut :
Press Release

 

The Second Edition of the Heart of Empire Directors Cut is now here! Well, we're glad you asked! The first edition contained the entirety of the prequel to Heart of Empire, the Adventures of Luther Arkwright, but Bryan and myself were never 100% happy with the quality of the scans. We added the comic on there for the sake of completeness but never really made a big deal of the fact that it was there. We also were aware that rescanning the whole of Arkwright to the point of "digitally remastering" it would take about six months or so.... And then a fan who is also a publisher in the Czech Republic talked Bryan into lending him all of the original artwork to Arkwright and he literally spent six months doing nothing but scannign it in at massively high resolution. And so the second edition of the CD-Rom was born, with much better quality versions of the Adventures of Luther Arkwright.

See the whole of the Heart of Empire Directors Cut first chapter online for free! - because so many people have asked for it we have now published the whole of the first chapter of the Heart of Empire Directors Cut online for free viewing; go take a look and see if you like it!


What is the Heart of Empire Directors Cut ?

When Bryan completed Heart of Empire he started to get asked a lot of times: "where do you get your ideas from?" One time that he mentioned this to me, I suggested we create a CD-Rom that answered all of those questions, and thus the Heart of Empire Directors Cut was born.

Bryan took the opportunity to annotate his text, explaining all of his weird and wonderful references and allusions: I simply put it together in html format: I chose this so that it would be readable by the greatest number of people on the greatest number of computers: besides - I wanted the content to shine, not the presentation.

All the way through working on it I kept asking: "what would I as a fan want to see here?" - and then making darn sure that it got put there, whatever it was: this is why every single page from the comic is there in full colour - and high resolution - and penciled format - and inked format - and also why you can navigate from page one to page two and so on through all of these formats - and also why you can go straight from the coloured version of a certain page to the penciled version to the inked version to Bryan's annotations. Everyone who has read it has said that it is utterly intuitive to read, and this was my intention: it was designed by a fan, for other fans.

Read chapter one of the Heart of Empire Directors Cut for free online right now!

Heart of Empire Directors Cut Reviews:

Ninth Art and Borderline have both just reviewed the Heart of Empire Directors Cut . The Ninth Art review is readily accessible on the web and the Borderline one needs you to download their PDF magazine first: - which is something I cannot recommend highly enough: not only is their magazine on the comics industry one of the best I have read for a long time, but they are all genuinely nice people!

Jean Rogers has also written a great review over at The Shadow Gallery: check it out also for what it says on the importance of quality content when authoring for any medium - print, web or CD. The CD also got reviewed on the Guardian's website, (which has now been taken down) and the chap who wrote that also wrote a fuller review on his own site.


Also check out the CD welcome page, created for people who come to the site direct from the CD, and the Heart of Empire main homepage on the site.


In conjunction with the imminent release of the trade paperback edition of Heart of Empire, Bryan Talbot is proud to announce the release of the Heart of Empire Directors Cut . Below is the press release direct from Bryan:

Announcing the Official Heart of Empire Directors Cut !

On this CD-Rom, he actually does it! He gives all the secrets away! He answers the age-old question: Where do you get your ideas from?

In over 60,000 words of detailed and entertaining commentary, Bryan Talbot points out the inspirations, influences, references, symbolism and in-jokes underlying the whole graphic narrative.

There's also annotations to the artwork, bawdy anecdotes, silly tirades and many mini-essays on related subjects as diverse as William Blake, English mythology, the sexual activities of Charles II, William Hogarth, Free Love, Catastrophe Theory, Magic Mushrooms, Pagan Festivals, The Golden Section, Orgone Energy, Subliminal Imagery, Famous Farters, Synchronicity and the Twenty-three Enigma.

There is the whole of the Heart of Empire graphic novel in its penciled, inked and coloured forms, plus a brand new piece of artwork, preparatory sketches and other illustrations showing where the inspiration for certain scenes were derived: e.g. the original Eighteenth Century Hogarth engraving that inspired the Bedlam sequence.

A veritable treasure trove of entertaining and educational information! All this plus two interviews, biographies, a very user-friendly interface and a full index to all the annotations.

A lot of people have been emailing and posting on the bulletin board the question "will the cd be Mac friendly?" And the answer is "hell, yes!" Since I am authoring it on a Mac - since they're the best computers around ;-] it damn well better be Mac friendly! The cd will be in html format so that anyone with a browser can read it.

Below are some screenshots of the CD and it's contents: any claims that I chose page 211 as the demo page simply because it is one of the pages with me as character on it will be hotly denied initially, then grudgingly admitted to, because as regular readers of the site will know, I am a firm subscriber to the "it's my ball and if I don't get to pay with it then I am going home!" principle!

Read chapter one of the Heart of Empire Directors Cut for free online right now!

The contents page

The entry point to the entire CD: based on the Heart of Empire frontispiece

(please click on the image opposite to go to the full size version - alternatively go to the contents page here)

Click here to see this image at full size

Click here to see this image at full size

An example of one of the colour pages

Page 211 of Heart of Empire in colour, as presented on the CD-Rom: with links to the pencil and ink versions, and also to the applicable page of notes - and also a direct link to the next page in the sequence and the previous page.

(please click on the image opposite to go to the full size version - alternatively go to the colour page here)


The same page - inked

Page 211 of Heart of Empire in its inked version, as presented on the CD-Rom.

(please click on the image opposite to go to the full size version - alternatively go to the inked page here)

Click here to see this image at full size

Click here to see this image at full size

The same page - penciled

Page 211 of Heart of Empire in its penciled, as presented on the CD-Rom.

(please click on the image opposite to go to the full size version - alternatively go to the penciled page here)


The notes for this page.

The notes for page 211, explaining Bryan's thoughts, the references used, the historical and literary references and all of the thinking behind this page.

(Please click on the image opposite to go to the full size version - alternatively go to the notes page here)

Click here to see this image at full size

Click here to see this image at full size

The introduction

An example page from the introduction to the CD-Rom.

(Please click on the image opposite to go to the full size version - alternatively go to the introduction page here)

Buy the Heart of Empire Directors Cut from Cafe Press.

 
   
The design and content of this page and this entire website is copyright 1999, 2006 by James Robertson: all images are copyright 1999, 2006 by Bryan Talbot