Grandville

Two hundred years ago, Britain lost the Napoleonic War and fell under the thumb of French domination. Gaining independence after decades of civil disobedience and anarchist bombings, the Socialist Republic of Britain is now a small, unimportant backwater connected by a railway bridge, steampowered dirigible, and mutual suspicion to France. When a British diplomat's murder is made to look like suicide, ferocious DetectiveInspector LeBrock of Scotland Yard stalks a ruthless murder squad through the heart of a Belle Epoque Paris, the center of the greatest empire in a world of steamdriven hansom cabs, automatons, and flying machines. LeBrock's relentless quest can lead only to death, truth... or war. * Following on the heels of his internationally acclaimed graphic novels The Tale of One Bad Rat and Alice in Sunderland, Grandville is a fantastical and audacious rollercoaster ride, visually stunning and rich in memorable detail.

Ancient burial mounds lined the river, known to the native people as the Owashtanong. The first white settlement was built in 1832, and the fur-trading post at the bend in the river, then known as Oakestown, was settled before the city of Grand Rapids with the expectation that Oakestown would be one of the area's larger cities. Plaster mining prospered throughout the area until an accident filled the White Plaster Mill with water, creating the present-day Big Spring Lake. Eventually, farming, lumbering, and a small oil industry replaced plaster mining as the local source of commerce. It was a destination site for shopping, restaurants, and saloons until floods engulfed the city in 1904, forcing an inland relocation.

Examining how the rise of book illustration affected the historic hegemony of the word, Keri Yousif explores the complex literary and artistic relationship between the novelist Honoré de Balzac and the illustrator J. J. Grandville during the French July Monarchy (1830-1848). Both collaborators and rivals, these towering figures struggled for dominance in the Parisian book trade at the height of the Romantic revolution and its immediate aftermath. Both men were social portraitists who collaborated on the influential encyclopedic portrayal of nineteenth-century society, Les Français peints par eux-mêmes. However, their collaboration soon turned competitive with Grandville's publication of Scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux, a visual parody of Balzac's Scènes de la vie privée. Yousif investigates Balzac's and Grandville's individual and joint artistic productions in terms of the larger economic and aesthetic struggles within the nineteenth-century arena of cultural production, showing how writers were forced to position themselves both in terms of the established literary hierarchy and in relation to the rapidly advancing image. As Yousif shows, the industrialization of the illustrated book spawned a triadic relationship between publisher, writer, and illustrator that transformed the book from a product of individual genius to a cooperative and commercial affair. Her study represents a significant contribution to our understanding of literature, art, and their interactions in a new marketplace for publication during the fraught transition from Romanticism to Realism.

'I've never come across a fictional world as fully-realised as Bryan Talbot's Grandville... It's a world you'll never tire of exploring' IAN RANKIN Beware the Badger! The acclaimed steampunk series from graphic-novel pioneer Bryan Talbot explores an alternate art-nouveau world populated by intelligent animals, a human underclass, and wondrous technology. Within this rich fantastical milieu, the relentless Detective-Inspector LeBrock of Scotland Yard pursues shadowy death squads, psychotic killers, dark political conspiracies, ruthless crime lords, and bloodthirsty cults through the streets of London and the center of the greatest empire on earth, the Belle Epoque Paris known as Grandville. Grandville L'Intégrale collects all five Grandville novels in one deluxe hardcover volume accompanied by voluminous author notes never before in print. *WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY IAN RANKIN* 'I have greatly enjoyed the Grandville books. I think they're superbly designed, beautifully conceived, admirably written - everything about them is terrific' PHILIP PULLMAN 'These ingeniously plotted fantasies will make you bark with laughter' METRO 'Utterly delightful' THE TIMES 'Bryan Talbot is a genius' OBSERVER

Le blaireau est de retour! Alone in Grandville, Detective Inspector LeBrock stalks a growing religious cult led by a charismatic unicorn messiah who, along with his con-men partners, are responsible for horrific mass murder. With Paris in the grip of the mysterious crime lord Tiberius Koenig and increasingly violent attacks by human terrorists, can LeBrock stop the inevitable slide into fascism? And could these conditions all be the manipulations of a centuries-old conspiracy to throw the world into war? From the imagination of Bryan Talbot comes Grandville Noël, the fourth installment of the acclaimed steampunk fantasy series.

Beware the Badger! The acclaimed steampunk series from graphic-novel pioneer Bryan Talbot explores an alternate art-nouveau world populated by intelligent animals, a human underclass, and wondrous technology. Within this rich fantastical milieu, the relentless Detective-Inspector LeBrock of Scotland Yard pursues shadowy death squads, psychotic killers, dark political conspiracies, ruthless crime lords, and bloodthirsty cults through the streets of London and the Belle Epoque Paris known as Grandville, the center of the greatest empire on earth. Grandville Integral collects all five Grandville novels in one deluxe digital volume accompanied by voluminous author notes never before in print. Collects Grandville, Grandville Mon Amour, Grandville Noël, Grandville Bete Noire, and Grandville Force Majeure.