Rating: WORTHY!
I've been to Durham, but never to Sunderland, so why read this? Well, I loved the title. I'm a real sucker for a good play on words, and every time I passed it in the library, I picked it up and took a quick look and put it back. In the end I realized it would haunt me forever if I didn't so something about it, so I finally checked it out, and I loved it.
The more I read of this the more fascinating it became. I can’t pretend every word engrossed me, but I was really surprised by how much was interesting, and by how much stuff was connected in one way or another with Sunderland. Of course, if you're looking for connections and coincidences, it's not hard to find them (six degrees of separation bullshit aside), but this didn't look like the author was stretching very much - it was all right there!
Note that this is not an Alice in Wonderland story. It's a history of the city of Sunderland in NE England - a history of the greater Sunderland area which is replete with fascinating facts and tidbits, including some strange and wonderful stuff that you wouldn’t expect. There are a lot of tie-ins with Alice and Lewis Carroll, but why this was in a library in Texas is a mystery to me, since you really have to be English or extremely well versed in England to get the best out of this; however, the graphic novel is a tour de force of graphic style and creativity, so maybe you will appreciate it just for that.
There’s a horrible side to this history, too. The death of almost two hundred children. The Victorian slums. The death tolls taken by cholera, which arrived by ship in 1831, and typhus which followed almost literally in its wake seven short years later. Both are the reward of having a huge shipping industry. By 1850, Sunderland was the biggest shipbuilding port in the world. The famous “liberty’ ship was invented here. And you may be surprised to learn that the light bulb was invented by a Sunderland native - not by Thomas Edison!
Sunderland was also a huge coal mining town for a long time. At one point having the world’s deepest coal mine (for the time) at almost two thousand feet. Those mines also went out up to five miles under the sea. It’s not surprising, because of this, that it also was among the first places to get a railway. It has links to Lewis Carroll (lots!), to Thomas Paine (unexpected), to Isambard kingdom Brunel, to George Stephenson, through his son Robert, to Sid James(!), and on the macabre side, to Burke and Hare, the infamous Scots grave robbers.
The city has been the host to many celebrities over the years, primarily in the old music halls and variety theater where acts like legend George Formby, Charles Hawtrey, Frankie Howerd, Sid James (who pretty much died on stage in Sunderland, and not metaphorically), Morecambe and Wise, and Vera Tilley. Doctor Who even gets a mention here. The blue police box that is the outward appearance of his venerable TARDIS time and space travel machine was first manufactured in Sunderland in 1923. Here's a fact you don't hear often enough. The incandescent light bulb was not invented by Thomas Edison, but by Sunderland's Joseph Swan - and a year earlier. Edison purloined Swan's design and patented it in the USA. Amusingly, it's the Edison company which made the first movie version of Alice in Wonderland!
It's close by in Whitby that Bram Stoker received some of the inspiration for his little story about Dracula. He read of the shipwrecked Dmitry in the Whitby gazette, and changed it into the doomed ship Demeter, which ran aground in Whitby. Sunderland was once a ship-building and shipping juggernaut but now all that has gone and the area overwritten with an outdoor sculpture garden which grew slowly from roots buried deeply in the past, but with an eye on the future.
The artwork was superb. And it was not monotonous. This guy really knows how to lay out a spread, and how to change it up, incorporating a host of different styles from the photorealistic to the cartoonish, and everything in between. I loved this book and highly recommend it, especially for those who may have an interest in Sunderland, in Alice, or in how to push the boundaries of graphic novel creation.
