Not sure if you will enjoy the Heart of Empire Directors Cut ? - not a problem! - we have put the whole of Chapter One online for free!

Go check it out and see if you like it: if you do then you can come back to this page and buy it; if you don't like it then you've avoided spending cash on something you wouldn'tve enjoyed!

Also available from each page are links to the annotations – over 60,000 words of detailed and entertaining commentary, where Bryan Talbot points out the inspirations, influences, references, symbolism and in-jokes underlying the whole graphic narrative.

Why is this the "second edition" - what is better than the first edition? Well, we're glad you asked! The first edition contained the entirety of the prequel to Heart of Empire, the Adventures of Luther Arkwright, but Bryan and myself were never 100% happy with the quality of the scans. We added the comic on there for the sake of completeness but never really made a big deal of the fact that it was there.

We also were aware that rescanning the whole of Arkwright to the point of "digitally remastering" it would take about six months or so.... And then a fan who is also a publisher in the Czech Republic talked Bryan into lending him all of the original artwork to Arkwright and he literally spent six months doing nothing but scanning it in at massively high resolution. And so the second edition of the digital download was born, with much better quality versions of the Adventures of Luther Arkwright.

There are also brand new pieces of artwork, preparatory sketches and other illustrations showing where the inspiration for certain scenes were derived: e.g. the original Eighteenth Century Hogarth engraving that inspired the Bedlam sequence. In the annotations to the artwork, there are bawdy anecdotes, silly tirades and many mini-essays on related subjects as diverse as William Blake, English mythology, the sexual activities of Charles II, William Hogarth, Free Love, Catastrophe Theory, Magic Mushrooms, Pagan Festivals, The Golden Section, Orgone Energy, Subliminal Imagery, Famous Farters, Synchronicity and the Twenty-three Enigma.

A veritable treasure trove of entertaining and educational information! All this plus two interviews, biographies, a very user-friendly interface, a full index to all the annotations, a directory of all the front and back covers with commentaries, a directory of additional artwork and also the FULL “Adventures of Luther Arkwright” graphic novel. This is the “Directors Cut” of Heart of Empire: it shows exactly where Bryan got his ideas and references from and tells how he wove all of his influences together into the award winning graphic novel that is Heart of Empire.