Issue 44 / May 2012
Creator Bryan Talbot talks about the inspiration behind his steampunk graphic novel series
The initial inspiration for Grandville was the anthropomorphic illustrations of the early nineteenth-century French cartoonist Jean Ignace Isadore Gérard. I was looking at a book of his work that I've owned for several years when suddenly his animal characters came together in my mind with his nom de plume, JJ Grandville, sparking the idea of a steampunk Paris populated by animal-headed characters. I'd never done an anthropomorphic story before, a genre tradition in comics with a venerable history and memorable characters, from Tiger Tim to Scrooge McDuck to Fritz the Cat, so I took it as a challenge.
The first story seemed to write itself. Within the first week, I'd mentally plotted it while doing other work and I typed up the script well within the second. I usually pencil thumbnail sketches of all comic pages first to ensure that they work visually but in this case I simply sat down and began typing, laying out the panels in my mind as I went along. It was like taking dictation.
In the story, Grandville is revealed as the nickname for a retro science-fiction version of Belle Epoque Paris, the biggest city in an alternative world that's been dominated by a French Empire since Britain and her allies lost the Napoleonic Wars. Grandville is a city of automatons, iron airships, steam-powered hansom cabs and, of course, anthropomorphic animals. There are humans too but they are an oppressed underclass, menial workers with no citizenship rights. The Parisians contemptuously refer to them as "doughfaces".
In this first book, called simply Grandville, Britain is introduced as having been part of the French Empire until twenty-three years beforehand, when it was begrudgingly given independence after a prolonged campaign of civil disobedience and anarchist bombings. It's now called The Socialist Republic of Britain, a small and unimportant country connected to France by the Channel railway bridge. The language of Britain is French, a result of two centuries of French rule, though, fortunately for non-Francophones, the speech balloons are thoughtfully translated into English! The prime minister is a bulldog (it just had to be) called Harold Drummond, who often ends sentences with "Oh, yus!".
The protagonist of the series is Detective Inspector Archibald LeBrock of Scotland Yard, a great barrel-chested working-class badger. I'd long harboured a desire to pen some detective fiction, so I absolutely love writing his stories. LeBrock, as well as being adept at Holmesian deduction is, being a badger, a bit of a bruiser and quite happy to beat the living spit out of a suspect to extract information. Badgers are ferocious and extremely tenacious and, if anything, this sums up Archie's character to perfection. His loyal adjunct, his Watson to the D.I.'s Holmes if you like, is a dapper, monocled, bow tie- and boater-wearing rat named Roderick Ratzi who sports a walking-cane rifle and talks in the manner of Bertie Wooster or Lord Peter Wimsey. As I'm a great P.G. Wodehouse fan, his lines are a joy to write.
Grandville concerns LeBrock's investigation into the apparent suicide of diplomat Raymond Leigh-Otter in the sleepy rural village of Nutwood. It's a story that's a little like The Lord of the Rings, only in that it begins low-key and small and gets bigger and more far-reaching and exciting as it progresses, as the badger detective's investigations lead him inexorably towards the murderers of Leigh-Otter and their secret masters, The Knights of Lyon. It sets him on the trail of a ruthless secret police death squad, a trail taking him to Paris and right to the heart of a conspiracy that goes to the top of Grandville high society. Like all true heroes, he battles against huge odds and ultimately triumphs. But victory comes at a great personal cost.
The second book in the series, Grandville Mon Amour, begins a scant month after the climax of the first book. It begins with the shocking and brutal escape from the Tower of London maximum-security prison of notorious serial killer, Edward "Mad Dog" Mastock, as he's escorted to the guillotine for his multitudinous crimes. LeBrock, recovering from a monstrous bender after making a hefty dent in his large collection of single-malt whiskies while mourning his loss at the end of the first story, resigns after having a blazing row with Brigadier Belier, the Chief of Police, for his refusal to put the badger in charge of the Mastock manhunt. Mastock who, you've probably guessed, is a dog, is an old adversary of LeBrock's and former urban guerrilla during the French occupation, a member of the extreme fanatic wing of the Resistance known as the "Angry Brigade". LeBrock, accompanied by Roderick, follows Mad Dog's trail of carnage to Grandville and the demimonde of Parisian prostitution where Mastock is stalking and butchering anthropomorphic ladies of the night. It's here that he makes the acquaintance of an exceptionally attractive badger, the streetwise and tragic Billie, who becomes drawn into the dangerous game of cat and mouse between LeBrock and Mastock as the repercussions of an atrocity perpetrated over two decades ago surface to threaten the status quo of Britain and France.
I'll make no bones about it, the Grandville books are out-and-out detective thrillers and I've striven to create real page-turners with drum-tight structures. There are no lengthy expositions or meandering plotlines. Instead there's intrigue, suspense, action and a great deal of humour. And, I hope, attractive sequential illustration.
Apart from Gérard, aka JJ Grandville, there are influences and references aplenty, from Sherlock Holmes, James Bond and Wind in the Willows on the literary side to Rupert the Bear, French ligne claire bandes desinnées, Art Nouveau and Impressionist paintings on the art side. The late nineteenth-century artist Albert Robida, the father of science-fiction illustration, is there in spirit throughout the books, as is the influence of cinema. If Grandville has a few nods in the direction of Quentin Tarantino, Grandville Mon Amour has a couple of sequences that definitely pay homage to Alfred Hitchcock.
The next book will be Grandville: Bête Noire. It's already scripted and I have the next two stories plotted out. In over thirty years of writing and drawing comics and graphic novels I've never produced a series of albums before, usually preferring to experiment with different types of story and art styles, but I've been having so much pleasure inhabiting the fantastical world of Grandville that I intend staying there for a while.
Bryan Talbot's Grandville Mon Amour is published by Jonathan Cape.
Sunday, 19 December, 2010
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