Bryan Talbot and the Monkey

I got a chance to see Bryan Talbot speak last week as he stopped in Toronto to promote his new graphic novel, Alice in Sunderland. The book is about Talbot moving to Sunderland, England, and exploring the many connections the area has to Lewis Carroll, creator of Alice in Wonderland. Talbot spoke for about two hours, and much of that was a discussion about Carroll and his influences. During this part of his talk I was acutely aware of how hard and uncomfortable my chair was. If I knew anything about Carroll or Alice I'm sure I would have been more into it, but I was much more interested when he discussed his process in working on this book and other comics, particularly when he spoke about the mechanics of the comics page.

The best part of the talk was when he went into some of the individual stories that make up Alice in Sunderland. The book isn't one story, but dozens, all having to do with the area. At one point he told a story about how when Napoleon's armies were marching across Europe, people in Britain worried that England would be his next stop. As in World War I, Talbot explained, when stories went around that Germans ate babies, during Napoleon's time the English spoke of the French as being inhuman. Thus, when a French ship was destroyed off the coast of the port town of Hartlepool, and the local fishermen came across the French sailors' pet monkey in the wreckage (dressed up in a little military uniform, no less), they assumed they'd found a Frenchman. So they took him to the mast of a ship, and hung him.

Just in case you didn't catch that: they hung the monkey.

To this day, Talbot said, in the same way that people from Newcastle are called "Geordies" because they supported George II, people from Hartlepool are still called "Monkey-Hangers", because-- well, you know.

I wish the page from the book on which Talbot tells this story was online, so I could show you. It's quite well done, and while I wouldn't say it's worth picking up the book for that one page, it does sweeten the pot.

Oh, and here's a reference for the story, in case you think he's making the whole thing up.