Doing things for no reason apart from "it’s a labour of love"


As I have mentioned before, I run the official Bryan Talbot fanpage; and I have done so for over ten years and kept it updated once every two weeks through that entire time.

This is a massive labour of love for little or no money and people often ask me why the hell I do it. Then I sat down and worked with Bryan for 18 months of evenings and weekends and created with him the Heart of Empire CD-Rom; from which I estimate to have made less than £1.00 per hour of my time that I spent on it.

Again; why the hell do I do this?!

Well, it’s simply really; Bryan’s comics – and specifically the Adventures of Luther Arkwright – changed the way I look at the world – and only the very best literature can do that. Reading them was an utterly moving experience and it was almost 5 years before I ever met anyone else in person who had read them! So I took it upon myself to spread the word and tell as many people as possible about them….

At the same time I was working as a software trainer, training people on stuff like Photoshop, Illustrator and Quark – and it being 1995 the web was just breaking and the first graphical website editors were coming out. I learned the software to be able to teach it and I know from personal experience that the only real way to learn something is to do some real work in it…. so I cast around for a subject and realised that the only thing I cared enough about to update regularly forever was Bryan’s work…. I think that even at that stage I knew that if you started a site then you should just keep it going forever; or else retire it and delete it.

Hence the Bryan Talbot fanpage was born – and I got to meet my personal hero!

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