As a transgender individual I’ve heard, been called, and sometimes even identified with a lot of different words, including but not limited to: transsexual, trannie, transvestite, genderqueer, trap, crossdresser, drag queen, feminine man, hermaphrodite, androgyne, and (in the most negative sense) fag. All of these terms have VERY different definitions to them but at the exact same time find themselves falling under the same umbrella term: Transgender*.

Hey, I know this isn’t a transgender magazine; it’s a steampunk magazine, but I want to talk about how these communities overlap for me. Within the steampunk community, I have found tremendous strength and openness. This is partly due to the “alternative history,” aspect of steampunk. Since one can cherry-pick what ideas, philosophies, and beliefs they wish to include and which they wish to neglect one can create a world where Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas can be free to kiss in public and maybe even get married! I also believe that this post-modern mash-up that is steampunk is also similar to the concept of transgenderism: like my own identity, steampunk cannot be reduced to one simple definition or label. That’s why no two steampunks ever steam the same way.

Steampunk, like one who questions gender in society, is finding it hard to live within the skin that it had been created in. Steampunk doesn’t just want to stay in Victorian England. It loves the idea of Dr. Steel and the Atomic Age. It pines to know its own future. Will it be like Waterworld, Tank Girl, or maybe populated by contraptions like the amazing train Doc Brown rode in on at the ending of Back to the Future III?

Whenever I bring up these examples at a convention, on a panel, or in conversation one person inevitably will ask “Where’s the Steam?! You can’t have Steampunk without STEAM!” In the introduction to the pulp short story collection Steampunk Prime: A Vintage Steampunk Reader, editor Mike Ashley explains how the concept of steam technology in the nineteenth century did not always represent the only form of energy during that era:

Mary Shelly really got things going by showing what wonders of electricity might bring with the possibility of recreating man in Frankenstein in 1818 and then things really began gathering pace. As new scientific and technological marvels came along, so writers pounced on them to see what else the future might bring.

It is perhaps a bit bizarre, then, that the genre should be called “Steampunk,” and not “Electricpunk,” but there is no doubt that it was the opening up of the world through steam trains and the opportunities that steampower introduced that ushered in the Industrial Revolution and began the true scientific revolution that allowed science fiction to prosper. It doesn’t matter that electricity superseded steam as a main power source, because by then the legacy of steampower was so great that it personified the marvels of technology.”
Ashley pg. 8-9

Steampunk is less about “steam” itself and more about potential technology, and what the future COULD bring. Thus, looking at how Atomic Punk handles technology in a retrofuturistic sense or how Post-Apocalyptic/Junk Punk handles rebuilding technology can still be valid to steampunk. But this is hard for a lot of people to wrap their minds around, especially since “steam is in the title of the movement!” Steampunk has, however, become a catch all term for anything anachronistic. For example, part of the marketing strategy behind George Mann’s novel Ghosts of Manhattan was to advertise it as the world’s first steampunk superhero novel, yet it is set in an alternate 1920’s.

Thus the term “Steampunk,” has become an umbrella term in popular culture for anything anachronistic. Despise it if you must, disagree with it if you want, but when popular culture accepts something it can take a very long time to enact a change. But that doesn’t always have to be a bad thing. Leslie Feinberg, author of Transgender Warriors, experienced something similar in the 1960s during one of the first waves of the queer liberation movement when dealing with the term “Gay,” being accepted as the popular term for her sexual identity:

When we all first heard the word “gay,” some of my friends vehemently opposed the word on the grounds that it made us sound happy. “No one will ever use ‘gay’,” my friends assured me, each offering an alternate word, none of which took root. I learned that language can’t be ordered individually, as if from a Sears catalog. It is forged collectively, in the fiery heat of struggle.
Feinberg pg. IX

In She’s Not the Man I Married, Helen Boyd describes her life with Betty, her real-life male-to-female partner. While defending why she uses the term “transgender” to refer to her partner’s identity as well as those of transsexuals and crossdresser she mentions in her book she says:

…I still find it problematic the way crossdressers and transsexuals self segregate, playing games of “Better than,” or “Who suffers the most,” that aren’t productive for anyone. I don’t find the self-segregation difficult simply because of the border wars or hierarchies, but because the two big camps in the male to female (MTF) world leave those who might pursue a middle ground with nowhere to go.
Boyd pg. 18

And so, very much like within the transgender movement, the steampunk movement runs the risk of staying stagnant because it can’t get past semantics. All anachronistic punk has been accepted into steampunk’s giant parasol of possibilities. Yet, also like the Transgender movement, we should respect that each steampunk is different and chooses to express themselves in the way they find most apt to their personalities and preferences. That’s the way we can see the genre grow and become more interesting it will be.

I am a Steampunk which means I could be Post-Apocalyptic, Atomic Punk, Stitch Punk, Sandal Punk, Bamboo Punk, Gypsy Punk, Edwardian Punk, a dandy, a sky pirate, a mad scientist, a tinkerer in a t-shirt, a goggle-wearing Brechtian clockwork doll who also has an I-Pad with bronze and copper casing jammed into my chest which plays a non-stop mix of Rasputina, Abney Park, and HUMANWINE through the speakers mounted onto my shoulders. Because, as Scott Westerfield says in the afterword to Leviathan, “That’s the nature of Steampunk, blending future and past” Westerfield pg. 438.

* This term, in and of itself, is often debated as it CAN have a very specific definition: one who feels that they are born outside their gender (The social expectations of their sex) but the individual has no interest in making any physical change to their sex (their biology). Transgender, much like Steampunk, has been widely accepted to encompass all deviations from the norm within it’s context. As for Transgender this would be heterosexual Gender/Sex/Sexuality.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ashley, Mike, ed. Steampunk Prime; A Vintage Steampunk Reader.
New York: Non Stop Press, 2010.

Boyd, Helen. She’s Not the Man I Married.
Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2007.

Feinberg, Leslie. Transgender Warriors.
Boston: Beacon Press, 1996.

Westerfield, Scott. Leviathan.
New York: Simon and Schuster 2009.

It did not disappoint:
The book has all the steampunk fun one expects after the dirigibles, mechanical arms, and underground tunnels of Boneshaker. Dreadnought gives a much wider picture of Cherie Priest’s alternate history: Mercy Lynch, the main character, starts off in the South, then travels up the Mississippi and out across the Rockies by dirigible, boat, and train, providing plenty of time to see the giant battle robots employed by the Union and Confederacy, the feared battle-ready steam engines, and the mysterious disease sweeping the country.

But where Dreadnought really shines is in its characters. Its pace is more leisurely than Boneshaker: traveling from Virginia to Washington, as Mercy Lynch does, takes a long time, even with dirigibles. Since there’s not as constant a need to fight off zombies, readers get the opportunity to really see the people who inhabit this world of an endless, steam-powered Civil War. Mercy shares her journey west with an astonishing assortment of people, mostly terribly ordinary, yet still endlessly entertaining. To my personal enjoyment, all of these interactions show the racial tensions and gender disparities of Mercy’s world quite well without dwelling too much on them; it’s part of the setting and worldbuilding in a realistic fashion I appreciated.

At the center of it is Mercy Lynch herself, who is currently my favorite Steampunk heroine (Alexia Tarabotti, from Soulless, is a close second, but I digress). She’s a good Southern girl, equal parts charm and irreverence, with a matter-of-fact approach to the variety of odd situations she encounters. And though the book occasionally feels slow (for example, during days of empty train travel across the Plains), Mercy sustains the story with her sharp observations and interesting conversations, all easily imagined in an adorable Southern accent. Priest’s alternate United States is hardly a land of gender equality (unlike some steampunk worlds, which toss Victorian gender roles out the window and just keep the corsets) – but her characters deal with it in interesting ways.

My complaint with Whitechapel Gods and books like it was that, when the ordinary citizens of a steampunk world were faced with adventure, the ladies were told to go hide somewhere. In Dreadnought, the ladies wield pistols, climb on top of trains, and tend injuries, all in long skirts and petticoats, before settling in for tea and a game of cards. And really, the men are pretty cool, too. The characters are awesome characters regardless of gender without ignoring it, and the result is a lot of adorable steampunky fun.

”Despite some narrative missteps, S.M. Peters’ Whitechapel Gods is one of the most representative works of twenty-first century steampunk currently in print. No other book is as successful as capturing the secondary world of grit, grime, and gilding that the subculture, art, and fashion have suggested.”

And indeed, the world Peters’ has created is fantastic. I didn’t give it as careful a read as it deserved, but it was undoubtably steampunk-y, full of big dark machines and people with mechanical arms and factories and uprisings and all those lovely things. Only one element was glaringly lacking, and that was women.

There are, for the bulk of the book, exactly three women of any importance:: Missy, our “hooker with a heart of gold;” Giselle, who runs a brothel and mostly is in Missy’s head calling her a whore; and Mama Engine, one of the gods of Whitechapel. There’s Mrs. Flower and her girls who run an opium den and don’t really do anything for the plot, a handful of Missy’s fellow prostitutes at the end, and occasional references to someone’s wife, or to the women and children hiding safely while the men do the fighting.

At first, I didn’t notice because Missy is a pretty interesting character, and by the end she helps save the day. But there are long middle parts where she’s either being noted for her unladylike behavior or a helpless pawn of the Bad Guy, and when she finally gets the revenge she’s spent the whole book seeking she’s treated like a madwoman. Of the other two women who contribute to the plot, one is a generic Evil Woman with no character development of any kind, and one is a machine-deity whose biggest contribution to the plot is having an “affair” with the Bad Guy which is written more like a sexual assault.

It’s a very Victorian steampunk world, for all its techno-monsters, and conversations with women (read: Missy) throughout the book are invariably laced with references to propriety. After killing the bad guy in a delusional, suicidal rage and saving the day, we don’t see Missy again until she’s out in the English countryside, every bit the proper young woman, restored from her evil whoring ways. There aren’t any women to be seen in any of the Big Final Battles – they’re mentioned as victims of the gods and their abuses, but while the men do the manly thing and fight back, the women are sent to hide.

This is just one book and a pretty shallow analysis, but if bothered me to see women so poorly represented in “one of the most representative works of twenty-first century steampunk,” especially when I’m not sure the problem is unique to this work. (My favorite steampunk anthology, Extraordinary Engines, features exactly one story with a female main character.) Suggestions of books that do the whole gender thing better would be greatly appreciated!

“Steampunks will find their reaction, rebellion and resolution spanning the spectrum of motivational reasons. Perhaps it’s the desire to learn more, do more and be more, or the need to break free of internal or external imposed limitations, or an inherent revulsion at the excess materialism clothed in a complete lack of style in a commerce-driven society.

Our group resolutions, our common acts of rebellion, take the form of corsets and top hats, of artisanship and intellectualism, of re-creation and re-imagining.”

Go read the whole thing!

The automata consist of two nearly identical small boys that sit on four legged stools and bend over tables, and a slightly larger and older-looking girl who sits at her organ.  Their bodies were carved of local apple and maple wood, with leather protecting the moving parts; their interiors are as complex as watches, filled with delicate brass gears and cams.  The three have not been separated since they were built in 1774; I believe this has at least something to do with the fact that they look like a family.  Although they always travelled together, some sources say that at times Jaquet-Droz only operated one at a time when they were exhibited.  They have suffered some wear and tear, as well as some alteration, over the years; the girl and boy I saw, for example, both had red painted nails, though paint analysis indicates that they were originally a more natural-looking pink. This original colour will be restored during the current restoration project.  Tests have shown several paint layers under the current one; apparently whenever they got scratched or nicked they would just be entirely repainted.

Caroline’s personal favourite, and the one she thinks gives the most convincing illusion of life, is the drawing boy, who during my visit was at an exhibition in Lugano; I have to say, though, that I find it hard to believe he can be more realistic than the musician.  Unlike the two boys, her body and head move independently of her task, and she can sit and breathe and fidget (her head and neck making almost imperceptible movements) independently for an hour.  Also unlike the boys she is operated by four separate pieces of machinery—one to pump the organ, one to operate her hands and fingers, one to operate her head and body, and one to power the bow she performs at the end of each song.

Caroline has recently provided her with a new wig and a new dress made from a bolt of silk woven in an authentic pattern by a Jacquard loom at the museum during the seven months of an exhibition held there in 1986.  Caroline specifically chose a bodice and skirt rather than a gown and underskirt, a type of dress generally worn in domestic rather than public settings; the musician is clearly designed to represent a girl playing for her family rather than a performer in a concert hall.  I asked Caroline why she’s chosen not to give the musician jewellery, and she replied that a woman living in this strictly Protestant region at that time would not have worn jewellery.  The musician does have holes in her ears for earrings, but Caroline pointed out that they have no idea whether the holes were original; during the restoration it may be possible to determine this, perhaps by microanalysis of the grooves to determine how they were made.  There’s no way to know for sure now what the automata originally wore, but it’s fascinating to see in images made at various times how their clothes and hair changed over more than two centuries.  19th century drawings and photographs, for example, show the musician in a crinoline dress, with long Romantic ringlets, and the boys in robes rather than suits.

She doesn’t have eyelids, and only her head moves, but the way she looks at the keyboard as she plays is eerily realistic; when she finishes her tune she leans forward slightly and bows her head.  She can play five tunes, all of which are recorded on one cylinder under her seat, so she can go from one to the next easily.  The cylinder contains 500 lines of ‘instructions’—five tunes for ten fingers each.  The movements of the arms and fingers are controlled from the cylinder, but none of her other movements is, except for the bow, which is triggered by a peg on the cylinder at the end of each song.  It is possible to depress a lever which lifts her body and hands slightly off the keyboard, to demonstrate that her fingers are actually playing the keyboard and she isn’t just an elaborate music box.

As she has little range of movement in her forearms, and her arms are fixed at the elbow, she plays on a rather modern-looking curved ergonomic keyboard.  Her instrument, in a beautiful marquetry box, has been extensively restored.   When the museum got it it contained one register of 24 wooden pipes, but research demonstrated that only the large horizontal wooden pipes were original and there was room in the box for two registers of metal pipes, which have since been installed.  The registers are now controlled via a brass knob on the right side of the box, and she can play in the higher, the lower, or both.

Caroline told me the musician was actually made by Henri-Louis, who had only been 20 years old at the time. He was a musician, and had written her music himself.  Caroline also told me baroque keyboard performers have come to watch her play, in order to study the fingerwork of the time—they’ve discovered, for example, that the thumb was more often used then than it is now.

The writing boy apparently draws the most professional interest, as an early example of ‘programming’—but this is misleading, as he is only ‘programmed’ in the same way type is set for a printing press.  A wheel in his back accommodates 40 arm movements—letters, spaces, the movement to get more ink from the inkwell.  Each is controlled by a small brass tile with a tooth that ranges in height from nothing to about half an inch.  Each tooth height selects three cams, one for the boy’s arm’s horizontal movement, one for its vertical movement, and one for its up and down movement (which allows him to dip his pen or exert more pressure on the paper).  Altogether 120 cams are lined up vertically from the boy’s shoulders to his hips.

Since it can take up to eight hours to reset the wheel, the writing boy’s text (‘Les automates/Jaquet Droz/à neuchatel’) is rarely changed; I believe the last time was for François Mitterrand’s visit to the city. Caroline pointed out that the magic of video technology (like the clip linked at the bottom of this piece) can effortlessly allow the writing boy to produce any number of phrases.

He can write up to four lines on his small piece of paper (the size of an index card).  Unlike the musician, his body doesn’t move at all, but his eyes follow his writing.  He needs a little help to get started and sometimes in moving the paper, and he needs his pen blotted before he writes to avoid getting ink all over everything.  Unlike the drawing boy, who moves his hand over the entire fixed paper, the writing boy only writes in one spot, and moves the paper along with his other hand, which holds a brass knob on the side of a frame in which the paper is set.  Interestingly, another reason the musician is the most realistic automaton for me is that the music covers any mechanical sounds she might be making; the writing boy completes each letter with an audible click as the readers move to the next set of cams.  I was startled to be handed his crank and instructed to turn it; needless to say I did it very gingerly but the boy still seems pretty robust after all these centuries.

Both the drawing and writing boys have a conical fusee in their upper right sides, which keeps a steady pressure on the mechanism as it unwinds.  The musician doesn’t have a fusee; the force in her mechanism is kept constant by two large tightly-wound springs under the organ (these exploded in 1987, fortunately with no one around, which allowed researchers to have a good look at the mechanism).  What I found particularly interesting about this is that these clockmakers’ techniques for regulating the mechanism solved a problem that Charles Babbage had been unable to solve, or uninterested in solving; the Babbage engine cannot keep a steady force on the mechanism as it’s cranked, which causes some problems in calculation.

The drawing boy is the simplest of the three mechanisms.  He uses a pencil, and blows graphite off his paper; Caroline points out that the blowing is a distraction while the pencil is reset to a different position.  He can draw four images—King Louis, portraits of a king and queen, Cupid driving a chariot pulled by a butterfly, and a little dog with the words ‘mon toutou’—which are on three cylinders (the dog and the king are on the same cylinder). The dog takes 174 movements; the Cupid and butterfly is the most complex and has only been set into the machine once during Caroline’s time at the museum.  In addition to the writing boy’s paper, Caroline and Thierry gave me three of the drawing boy’s drawings.

Caroline was very interesting on the subject of the ‘show’—these machines were designed for a particular purpose, to amaze and dazzle their audiences; they really have no other function.  She pointed out, for example, that part of the ‘show’ is the fact that the boys are babies—that you’d never see real children that young able to write and draw.  She also pointed out that in the case of the boys (he could cheat a bit with the girl) Jaquet-Droz was careful to house the entire mechanism within their small bodies.  The chairs and tables they sit at are spindly and open, indicating to audiences that there was no outside mechanism controlling their movements.

Caroline is very conscious of the fact that the operation of the mechanisms should be presented as a show, and for audiences operates them as drawing boy, writing boy and musician, the little bow of the latter being an appropriate ending to the presentation. She told me she’s been criticised for operating the machines so frequently, a debate familiar to anyone who owns an old motorcycle.  She points out that it’s obvious in the case of old musical instruments that keeping them in tune and in use prolongs their lives more than leaving them lifeless in glass cases.  She pointed out that her job would be a lot easier if she chose not to run them—there’d be no maintenance costs…but no one in the museum either.  They’re run three times one afternoon a month, and the small theatre in which they’re kept is always full.  She also arranges private sessions for small groups, but is very particular that these groups are self-organised and isolated; she says people won’t ask questions in front of strangers.  I found this fascinating; it would never have occurred to me to arrange and ensure private viewings.

I’m not sure I asked my question correctly, or asked for a demonstration, so I’m still not clear about whether the non-playing moves of the musician, and to a lesser extent the boys, are in any way coordinated with their performing moves.  What I wanted to know was whether every time one sees them in operation one gets an entirely different experience, the way one would with a live performer, or whether it’s exactly the same, and whether this affects people’s reactions if they see the robots in operation more than once.  Caroline and I discussed this; her opinion is that as audience members aren’t absorbing every detail the first time they see them perform they aren’t necessarily experiencing a ‘repeat’ of the first performance.  She did find the point interesting enough that she said she’d observe audiences to see if she could get a sense of this.  I find this question interesting in general–how is it that we’ve adapted our taste for entertainment such that are wiling to enjoy, for example, multiple identical repetitions of a piece of recorded music or a movie?

These machines are part of a long historical tradition of automation which still continues. Jacques de Vaucanson, inventor of the ‘digesting duck’, told Jaquet-Droz, ‘you start where I finished’; a few years ago modern-day creator Francois Junod has made a copy of, or rather homage to, the writing boy, a robot that blinks, breathes, bends over his drawing and kicks his feet as he works.  He has apparently also made a similar version of the musician, with a tambourine as well as a keyboard, but I haven’t seen her.  People still find these machines compelling; Caroline points out that people today see exactly what people saw in 1774 and we are still amazed and delighted.

Questions I didn’t think to ask at the time:

What sort of joint does the musician have in her neck that allows such free and natural movement of her head? She doesn’t appear to have a joint between her head and neck, but her neck is quite short, and concealed by a high collar.

How much routine maintenance do they require, and does this vary according to how often they are operated?  (This relationship could very well be inverse.)

Questions the researchers may someday be able to answer:

What wigs and clothes did the machines originally wear?  Did they have several different outfits, as the evidence seems to indicate?  If so, was there a particular protocol for changing their outfits?

These delicate machines routinely travelled all over Europe on 18th century roads—how were they prepared for transport, and how were they carried?  What sort of routine did Jaquet-Droz establish for their transport?

The organ has two registers, and which register is controlled by a lever on the right side of the organ; this has been established by inspection of the box.  But how were the registers controlled originally?  Were they somehow automated?

Did Jaquet-Droz ever reveal the mechanism to audiences?  We do now, because people find it fascinating how the automata work, but we are used to the idea of machines controlling movement; would that have destroyed the illusion of 18th century audiences, and was maintaining the illusion Jaquet-Droz’s primary goal?  It seems there are two reasons to show the mechanism, or rather two reactions that can be elicited—to demonstrate the impossible complexity of the automata (i.e. show the machinery but not demonstrate or explain how it works), or to demonstrate the mechanism that creates the effects.  Would either or both of these reactions be something Jaquet-Droz would like to elicit?  Might he have treated different audiences to different types of demonstration?

More links:

The drawing boy’s images
Francois Junod’s drawing boy

(via The Steampunk Home)

Antique science-y things!

(via The Steampunk Workshop)

Epic old doors!

(via Gizmodo)

A home theatre like the inside of a submarine?!

While I can do nothing so epic, I have been making a rag rug out of old t-shirts. This isn’t inherently steampunk-y, I know, but it looks pleasantly old-fashioned, and is in the spirit of DIY and sustainability that makes steampunk awesome. Do you have any steampunk decor projects underway? E-mail them blog@steampunkmagazine.com or go show off at The Gaslamp Bazaar!

The podcast can be downloaded and listened to via the Pods and Blogs webpage and includes an interview with Allegra, one of our editors.

Bryan Talbot is a man of many talents; renowned in the field of comics for his outstanding abilities as an artist, Bryan has collaborated with the likes of Neil Gaiman, Pat Mills, Alan Moore and Bill Willingham during his illustrious career. Never a man to be pigeonholed however, 2007 saw the publication of The Naked Artist: Comic Book Legends – a book of humorous anecdotes collected by Talbot during his many evenings spent chatting to other comic creators in convention bars. More recently Bryan penned the graphic novel Cherubs – a supernatural comedy with British indie artist Mark Stafford handling the visuals. Yet, it is arguably in the role of writer/artist that Talbot has achieved his greatest successes; 1995’s The Tale of One Bad Rat earned Bryan much well deserved praise for its beautiful artwork, masterful story telling and sensitive portrayal of a teenager escaping an abusive home life. Alice in Sunderland: An Entertainment is another fantastically well respected work of Talbot’s. The book was several years in the making and is an extraordinarily dense and visually luxurious blend of history, psychogeography and the life and works of Lewis Carroll, amongst other things. However, as wonderful as all Bryan’s above mentioned works are, there is little doubt that by far his most attention-grabbing stories, so far as this publication’s particular field of interest is concerned, feature a certain Mr. Arkwright. Talbot’s The Adventures of Luther Arkwright and its 1999 sequel Heart of Empire (AKA The Legacy of Luther Arkwright) span multiple parallel worlds within a Moorcock-ian multiverse, which logically have more than a whiff of steampunkery about them.

Now in 2008, Bryan is midway through working on a brand new steampunk graphic novel entitled Grandville which stars Detective Inspector LeBrock – a “large working class badger” in Talbot’s own words. Grandville is set in a retro sci-fi world populated by anthropomorphic animals and looks likely to become yet another Bryan Talbot masterpiece. Bryan was kind enough to take time out from his busy schedule to answer a few questions about the upcoming graphic novel, his work in general and what steampunk means to him.

John Reppion: Bryan, first of all thanks for your time, I know you’re really busy at the moment. When do you think you first became aware of the concept of steampunk?

Bryan Talbot: I’m certain that the Oswald Bastable stories of Michael Moorcock that I read as they were originally published must count as the first time I was aware of steampunk as a genre, though the term hadn’t been coined then. I don’t have a rigid definition of it and, more often than not, think of it as “retro-SF”, though I do think that there should be some sort of a gothic or Victorian element. Some use it to describe any sort of SF set in a historical period, e.g. ancient Rome. I wouldn’t go that far.

JR: Where you consciously influenced by Moorcock’s ideas when you began including those elements in your work – specifically with the Luther Arkwright stories?

BT: Yes, Moorcock was a big influence. As well as Bastable, some sequences in some of the Jerry Cornelius books can also be described as steampunk. There weren’t many more steampunk books around in 1978 when I plotted Arkwright. The Illuminatus Trilogy was another influence, also the films of Sergio Leone, Sam Peckinpah and Nic Roeg, and the works of William Hogarth and William Blake. I’d read Keith Robert’s Pavane so that was probably influential. Queen Victoria’s Bomb was, I think, written in the 60s but I only read it about ten years ago.

JR: What do you think about modern steampunk culture? Do you see the emergence of all these new websites, comics and novels as being evidence of the genre coming of age?

BT: I’m aware of the phenomenon and have looked at some of the steampunk sites. I even read a New York Times article claiming that it’ll be mainstream fashion by this time next year. I don’t know whether it’s come of age yet, though The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson is such a damn well written book that I think you can say that it’s come of age as a literary genre.

JR: Do you see your own influence in much of the newer stuff that is out there?

BT: No idea. I do know that the Italian edition of Arkwright influenced a whole generation of Italian SF writers and even turned them on to Michael Moorcock, who was generally unknown in the early 90s there. In one Italian SF book, I’m even referred to (as a character from history) as “The Divine Talbot”!

JR: How and when did the idea of Grandville come about? I think you said you were still working on Alice at the time weren’t you?

BT: Yes, just at the tail end. That’s when I usually start to get new ideas for graphic novels – just as I’m finishing the previous one. I was looking through a book I have on the work of 19th century French illustrator Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard who worked under the nom-de-plume of Grandville. He was a big influence on the original Alice in Wonderland illustrator John Tenniel. He frequently drew anthropomorphic animal characters, dressed in contemporary French fashions and his pictures were often politically satirical.

It suddenly occurred to me that it could be the basis of a graphic novel – Grandville could be the name of Paris in the centre of a French Empire in a steampunk setting. The 19th century proto-SF French illustrator Albert Robida is another influence.

JR: You’re well known for being someone with a gift for adapting and altering their artistic style to suit different projects. Did you have any difficulty coming up with the look of this book and to what extent have you taken on Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard’s influence?

BT: I’ve not tried to emulate his drawing style. His work was the inspiration but I’m drawing it in a contemporary European style – almost clear line but with some contour shading – and the style is consistent throughout the book. There are humans in the story too but they’re second-class citizens, menial workers, and they resemble French clear line characters like Tintin. The French call them “dough faces”. Another part of the style is the computer colouring, with which I’ve tried to add a Victorian complexity by papering the walls with art noveau wallpaper and carpeting many of the floors.

JR: Can you tell us a little bit about the story of Grandville and its lead character Detective Inspector LeBrock?

BT: LeBrock’s a large working class badger. He has the deductive abilities of Sherlock Holmes but, being a badger, he’s also a bruiser and is quite happy to beat the crap out of a suspect to get information. His adjunct and close confidant is the diminutive and elegant Roderick Ratzi, who talks like Bertie Wooster and Lord Peter Wimsey. I wanted to do one of those sorts of adventure stories that starts very small and parochial but gets bigger and more exciting as it goes along until it finishes in an epic climax. The story begins with LeBrock investigating a murder in a small English village (in actuality Rupert Bear’s Nutwood). The trail leads him to Grandville, where he discovers a shocking and far-reaching conspiracy. It’s basically fin-de-siecle Paris, populated by animals and furnished with speaking tubes, automatons and steam-driven hansom cabs.

JR: Are you working completely alone on the project or is there anyone else involved?

BT: The time I was taking to colour the pages was dismaying me. I was spending longer over the colours for each page than on the pencils and inks. Each page is fully rendered – like a fully painted comic. I now have my friend Jordan Smith, the designer who created the Alice cover, helping me out by placing the flat colours for each page. This is saving me a lot of time.

JR: I have to say that I was truly blown away when you showed [my wife] Leah and I the first few coloured pages and pin-ups in Dublin last year. Are you happy with the way the book’s coming out so far?

BT: Yes, but it’s just the first draft. I’ll be going all through it again when I’ve done, adjusting the colours and correcting mistakes. I’ve now completed just over half the book, which is all scripted.

JR: Is there any possibility of follow up stories set in the same universe?

BT: Absolutely. If it does phenomenally well, I’m happy to do a series.

JR: In that case, I’ll buy two! Thanks again for your time Bryan.

BT: Cheers, John. My pleasure.

Grandville is set for release in October 2009 and will be published by Dark Horse in the USA and Jonathan Cape worldwide. For more information about the book visit www.bryan-talbot.com/grandville.

[Interview conducted June 2008]