Bryan Talbot has given many interviews along the years which reflect his visionary attitude towards the creation of comics and graphic novels. It's on this latter plane that we spend most of our time, as Arkwright manipulates the nations of this world into a position where the enemy will be forced to reveal themselves, rather than to work through shadowy agents. I only found out about the audio version recently, and was intrigued as to how it was going to work. The Adventures of Luther Arkwright can be best described as an epic Steampunk Science-Fiction tale set in a multiverse that the eponymous hero can access by jumping from one parallel world to another. A second Civil war is brewing - its aim to bring Prince Charles to the throne and Luther must help to ensure that the right side wins - not just for the sake of this world, but for all worlds.

It's a rare work that can survive being influential, but Arkwright not only survives it but still looks fresher and more original than almost everything that came after and was indebted to it. In a parallel world where Imperial Russia and Prussia still flourish and a descendant of Cromwell is Puritan dictator of England a multiverse-travelling spy battles to avert cosmic apocalypse.

In 2014, this publisher released Arkwright Integral, which combined both stories with an introduction by Michael Moorcock, an afterword by Warren Ellis, and plenty of additional material. The character of Luther Arkwright owes something to the influence of Michael Moorcock's [5] [6] [7] Jerry Cornelius stories, [8] though Moorcock and Talbot agree that the similarities between the characters are limited. The eighteenth-century British artist and storyteller William Hogarth had a big influence on the illustration style. Although it's got a fairly straightforward mechanic, it's marred by an horrendous character generation system and ugly presentation.

The storytelling of the early episodes is complex, with flashbacks to Arkwright's upbringing by the Disruptors, escape to the parallel of his birth, and early missions for zero-zero intermingling with the course of his mission in neo-Cromwellian England, with story-telling techniques and art styles shifting to match. In addition, the book was given the 1989 Mekon Award for "Best British Work" by the Society of Strip Illustration.

Reading this graphic novel about the savior of the multiverse was more a flashback to my Heavy Metal days than anything else. The Adventures of… (first issued in 1990) was just reprinted by Dark Horse, so this is a great chance to snap up both collections.