(One thing he doesn’t complain about, though he could, is that Talbot’s connections are often very weak and coincidental – the very fact that a city has been around for nearly 2000 years gives great scope to pick and choose shiny facts that don’t necessarily add up to anything.) That sets the pattern for the rest of the book, as the Pilgrim and the Performer speak interchangeably – with a speech often starting with one and ending with the other – while the Plebian interjects now and then to complain that the whole thing is too long, too talky, and too boring.

(We also occasionally see the Pilgrim sitting at a drawing table, working on the art for this very book.) The third person of our Talbot triumvirate shows up a few pages later: the Pilgrim, who walks around the city and surrounding areas to talk about various sites and events. This is the Performer he’ll do about half of the talking in the book. Once he sits down in his seat – alone in the large hall – a man in a white rabbit mask steps out on stage and begins reciting some Shakespeare. Sunderland begins as a thumbnail sketch, then a penciled page, and finally a fully-rendered version of the same page: a man walks into the Sunderland Empire, a hundred-year-old theater. And the various facts Talbot presents, about the history of Sunderland and of Alice, and the many connections between the two? Well, there’s an extensive list of sources in the backmatter, so I think they’re real.

To make things even more confusing, about half-way through the book Talbot breaks down and admits that Sunderland, the town he claims he lives in, doesn’t actually exist!Įxcept even that is a trick: Sunderland is a real town in the northeast of England, on the coast near Newcastle upon Tyne. And then both of those halves are wrapped up in a metafictional package, since there are two narrators (the Pilgrim and the Performer, both of them Talbot) and one audience member witnessing this performance (the Plebian, who is also Talbot).

Even for an artist as hard to pin down as Talbot, ]] is odd and unique: it’s one-half a local history of the town in northern England where Talbot lives now and one-half a popular history of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (a.k.a.

Alice in sunderland graphic novel