Description

Writing back to Rome in 36 AD from Londinium, the illustrator Malus Maximus wrote: Depravity, plague and licentious debauchery seem to bring out the best in the rude, blunt, thick-skinned Saxon people. There is no shortage of subjects for me to depict. Comics have thrived in London over the centuries with Gilray, Hogarth, the first edition of 'Comick Magazine' in 1796, Thomas Rowlandson's 'Doctor Syntax' in 1809 and the first edition of Punch in 1841. In this century, there have been attempts to reserve comics for kids with the growth of magazines like Dandy and Beano. But the comic strip is too rich an art form to be just for kids in recent years, a new generation of British artists has developed a rich synthesis of the Continental graphic novel and American comic strips. In It's Dark in London the work of some of these artists are featured Neil Gaiman, David McKean, Alan Moore, Carol Swain, Dix in tandem with the stories of London writers like Iain Sinclair, Graeme Gordon, Christoper Petit and Stella Duffy. This fusion produces a portrait of London that captures the city's fundamental essence as exquisite mixture of lofty towers and gutter sleaze, of suburban gentility and urban depravity, of private vices and public philantrophy. It is a book that is as graphic as it is visionary.