Tom Shapira

At first glance Bryan Talbot’s long-running Grandville series isn’t very promising. Why yes, it is yet another historical detective drama set in the world of anthropomorphized animals – another stuffed head to hang on the wall alongside Inspector Canardo, Animal Noir and (of course) Blacksad. Yet it takes no more than a few pages into any volume to see that Talbot is playing things differently.

There is a certain subset of comics fans that are convinced — certain — that the best comics by esteemed beard-owner Alan Moore are these penned for veteran British organ 2000 AD in the early 1980s. We have many names for such people. "Old" is one, but the preferred nomenclature is "wrong." These people are wrong. Which not to say the comics in question are bad in any way shape or form.

They called it “The Sevepenny nightmare.” Some works of art achieve immortality for their quality, some for being stepping stones in the way for something greater, some for being spectacularly bad, and some… for being too much. Too violent, too sexual, too dangerous. Inevitably, as these works become part of the general milieu of culture, we forget that people ever treated them as such.