The Tale Of One Bad Rat

Dark Horse, this week released a new collected edition of Bryan Talbot's The Tale Of One Bad Rat, in hardcover (surprisingly it wasn't previously available as such). As Bryan Talbot explains in his afterward, The Tale Of One Bad Rat began as his ode to the work of Beatrix Potter and the English Lake District, but as he started to develop his central character, Helen, and her back story, which involves sexual abuse, The Tale Of One Bad Rat became a graphic novel about sexual abuse, but it's not just a story about victimization


The Tale of One Bad Rat was originally a four issue comic book mini series and was first collected in a trade paperback in 1995, went on to be translated in several different languages, as well as winning an Eisner Award. I think that too may books / graphic novels are put in hardcover, when a softcover version would suffice, but The Tale Of One Bad Rat is definitely hardcover worthy (and a mere $19.99!) as it is every bit as excellent as it was when it was first released.

Thus endeth another entry that doen't have anything new to say about a great cartoonist or graphic novel (because one can just do an internet search on Bryan Talbot and The Tale Of One Bad Rat to find much more insightful musings then I can come up with), but I like to think exists as one of my blog entries that hopefully prompts people to take another look at the cartoonist or graphic novel I'm spotlighting that they may have overlooked because, yes, there really is a LOT of great comics and graphic novels out there and The Tale Of One Bad Rat is one of those graphic novels.