Alice in Wonderland trailer

There's a very brief - but good quality - trailer for Tim Burton's version of Alice in Wonderland now on YouTube. Sadly you'll have to follow the link as embedding has been disabled for it, which always annoys the hell out of me - if you are going to share a video publicly via YouTube then you obviously want people to see it; you do that best in the virtual world of the web by encouraging others to share it, the digital version of word of mouth and being able to embed makes sense for multimeda like trailers, blocking the function while still having it up publicly shows a PR firm who haven't quite grasped the digital world and how to use it to share and include their client's works with their audience. Still, the video looks amazing, as you might expect, Burton and Lewis Carroll being rather obvious bedfellows to my mind, although it may be slightly over-egged in the pudding department.

Random book meme

Yvonne tagged me for a random book meme. I don't often follow up on memes, but since this was a book based one I couldn't resist, so here's how it works:

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.

I'm guessing that to do it properly you have to indeed pick up the nearest book and not go rummaging for something you think will give you a cool quote; I picked up Bryan Talbot's excellent graphic novel Alice in Sunderland and page 123 just happens to be a page executed in a 19th century style of illustration quoting from Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky:

"Beware the jubjub bird and shun the frumious Bandersnatch! He took his vorpal sword in hand: longtime the manxmome foe he sought. So rested he by the Tumtum tree and stood awhile in thought."

And I hereby tag Ariel, Jeff VanderMeer, Padraig, Richard Bruton and George Wakley: let me know in the comments if you decide to follow up on it, geezers. And if any of the rest of you fancy trying it, go ahead!

Going down the rabbit hole

We had one of the top talents in Brit comics in the Edinburgh FPI yesterday in the form of Bryan Talbot, creator of Luther Arkwright. Bryan has spent several years researching and working on his new work Alice In Sunderland, a large, hardback graphic novel with Lewis Carroll's Alice books at its core, but going off onto all sorts of related tangents which influenced Carroll and his work, from local history in and around Sunderland, folklore, the family history of Carroll and of Alice Liddell's family and some of Bryan's own personal life. There can't be many creators who can work in Lewis Carroll, the Venerable Bede, smugglers, naval heroes, the Jabberwock, mass murder, cholera, the Civil War, white rabbits and the ghost of Sid James and make it all work.



I've been dying to read Alice in Sunderland since I interviewed Bryan last summer and I haven't been disappointed. Sure I am biased since Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are two of my all-time favourite books and have been since I was a boy; as an adult I still adore the sheer dreamlike imagination of them but also came to admire the incredible intellect behind them, Carroll's astonishing use of immensely clever word play (and number play too, for that matter - check the Annotated Alice to see what I mean). No wonder Alice has been such an incredibly influential work, re-interpreted endlessly in more books, films, animations (despite liberties with the books I do like the old Disney version because of the richness of the animation, but my favourite animated version is by Jan Svankmajer - the Prague Alchemist of Film and one of my favourite animators), songs, games and, of course, comics.



With such a mixture of local history and literature and folklore I think Alice in Sunderland is one of those graphic novels which can easily crossover into the mainstream - if you don't normally read anything in comics form and assume it is pretty much all capes and tights, ignore your preconceptions and have a look at Alice; there are many different and wandering routes through the rabbit hole and this is one of the more scenic ways. I posted some pictures from the signing on the FPI Flickr stream and also tried shooting a couple of very brief video clips as an experiment to see how it came out: