As I see it, Bryan Talbot is one of the three biggest, living British talents in comics, along with Pat Mills and Alan Moore… oof, with Neil Gaiman pretty-much nuking his reputation, recently. :S
Talbot’s The Tale of One Bad Rat moved me a lot, winning multiple awards as it were, and I’d say his five, hard-hitting Grandville books are just about the pinnacle of conventional anthropomorphic adventure-dramas in BD’s, alongside the sensational Cité 14 / “District 14” series.
Now, I’ve had this panel queued up -forever- to post, but have been equally torn since forever whether I wanted to actually post it. For example, as someone fascinated by sea life, such as mollusks & crustaceans, the fact that we keep lobsters in tanks like this, with their pincers tied, only to meet a boiling end when they get ‘lucky,’ doesn’t sit very well with me. OTOH, in art there is truth, and one thing Talbot does a lot of in Grandville is demonstrate the vagaries of human cruelty.
In any case, it’s a great BD art piece IMO.
I met Talbot at a comic festival in Lancaster some time back. Spent an awfully long time chatting to him. Fascinating and kind human.
Wow, that’s awesome.
And truly, I could not imagine him otherwise given his “Rat” story.
Really, I kind of dropped the ball here not covering his Grandville stuff sooner. For example, I’ve no problem with people loving Blacksad, much of that I presume due to the excellent art and enjoyable noir genre, but Grandville is just levels above IMO.
The number of hilarious (and even sadly nuanced) guest appearances doesn’t hurt either, such as the fading Snowy’s cameo (from Tintin).