A review by paracyclops
Heart of Empire, or The Legacy of Luther Arkwright by Bryan Talbot

adventurous challenging dark emotional funny hopeful inspiring lighthearted mysterious reflective relaxing tense fast-paced

4.0

Many years passed between the first instalments of The Adventures of Luther Arkwright and the creation of Heart of empire, Bryan Talbot's sequel to the comic that made his name as a creator. In that time Talbot had progressed from an underground experimentalist to an accomplished commercial comics artist, and a highly regarded writer-illustrator. His development as an artist is immediately obvious on opening this second instalment in the Arkwright saga. The original series had been characterised by intricate, highly worked illustration, that often traded movement for detail. This is not a criticism—in terms of page layout and design it remains some of Talbot's best work, but very little of it was anything a modern comics editor would want to be supplied with. It was art to pore over, to puzzle over, a series of mind-expanding mandalas expounding a narrative that was more interested in Luther Arkwright's being than in what he did. The art in Heart of Empire is much more conventional in many ways, but it is also far more technically accomplished. Talbot learned in the intervening years to take his detailed, finely worked pen-and-ink drawing, and to express it with unparalleled dynamism—he learned to express a narrative with extraordinary clarity, while losing very little of the intricacy in which his earlier work was so rich. Gone is the awkwardness once to be seen in his figure drawing, in favour of a virtuosic three-dimensional visual imagination that is cinematic in its flexibility.

The story itself is also much more conventional, and much more skilled in its plotting and its disclosure. At this point in his career, Talbot knew how to please an editor and an audience. In the first run of Arkwright he gave the world a pictorial reification of the counterculture and its obsessions. In Heart of Empire he plunders the counterculture to build his world, and uses his world to structure a taut, exciting thriller, full of all the methodical character building, high stakes, and comic relief that such stories require. This book is perhaps less profound, and less agenda-driven, but he'd already told us everything he needed to tell us about spirituality, violence, and the limits of human potential. Now he just wanted to entertain us (and himself), and Heart of Empire does an incredible job of that. The Adventures of Luther Arkwright presented a subtle and nuanced account of power, violence and human relations, while Heart of Empire offers a much more direct political analysis—anyone who wants power is probably an evil psycho! In both cases I find myself entirely in agreement with Talbot's analysis. As Arkwright himself says at the end: 'Show me a country that needs a strong leader, and I'll show you a nation of sheep! Now sod off!'