Writer and illustrator Bryan Talbot may be best known to some for his work on 'Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight' for DC comics, but he's created or contributed to some of the great British comics of recent times, from scripts for 'Judge Dredd' in '2000 AD' through a pioneering series called 'The Adventures of Luther Arkwright', which was one of the first British graphic novels, to collaborations with Neil Gaimain on 'The Sandman' and more unusual fare like 'Metronome', a textless and erotic visual poem published as by Véronique Tanaka, and this hard-hitting slice of realism.

The One Bad Rat of the title is Helen Potter, not because she is but because she believes herself to be. Initially, she's a homeless girl, androgynous but pretty, who's trying to survive on the streets of London with only her pet rat for company. She rejects an offer from some prostitutes to join them, but is then propositioned in the street by a stranger, later revealed to be a member of parliament, and finds herself rescued by some young men who allow her to move into their squat; even though she's very standoffish and unwilling to join in their usual activities.

It's here, as she befriends one of them, a Geordie wannabe musician named Ben, that we realise a more serious background. She's homeless because she ran away from home, given that her mother doesn't care and her father is sexually abusive. While he may not go as far as some, he crucially has no remorse about his actions, truly believing that he's just having fun and not realising how deeply he's traumatising his daughter. That story arc comes back around when she finds a true welcome at a pub in the Lake District, reads up on psychology and abuse and gains confidence enough to invite him over to confront him about what he did to her. Those are powerful scenes indeed.

If those are the bookends, the meat of this graphic novel comes in between, as she moves from the one to the other, not just physically but mentally. Talbot wrote Helen sympathetically enough that we're on her side from the very outset, as a Christian tries to save her on a train platform, but she only becomes more sympathetic as the story runs on. The hardest scene to deal with isn't the hints at abuse in a succession of flashbacks, but the moment she discovers her rat has been killed by the squatters' cat. That's when she takes off for the north.

And there's some serious depth here, which many British readers of a certain age will notice right from the outset, given the iconic design of the cover, but a broader readership will only gradually discover as Talbot explains it in the third act. You see, there was a famous children's author called Beatrix Potter and she was a troubled child too, albeit in a very different way, receiving not sexual but verbal abuse and isolation. You'll know her from such stories as 'The Tale of Peter Rabbit' and a string of other books that shared the look of this cover, merely in a smaller format size.

Beatrix was her middle name, her first being Helen, so Talbot is exploring the real life story of the author Beatrix Potter as reimagined into a more modern equivalent. The real Potter was born and raised in London but found her way to the Lake District in Cumbria, where she found fame with her books, as well as other efforts with sheep rearing and land preservation. Much of the Lake District National Park exists because of her and I know it well, given that many family members live there, including my mother, sister and a couple of niblings. I even recognise some of the views that Helen discovers in this book, especially the one over Derwent Water.

Not content with reimagining the historical Beatrix Potter as the fictional Helen Potter, Talbot has the latter be a fan of the former, having discovered their shared name. In fact, that's why she aims for the Lake District when she decides to get out of London. Many of the buildings that she sees in her wanderings are real buildings important in Beatrix Potter's life, as this book details in a sort of afterword/appendix. This reaches the point where she takes a tour of Potter's house and imagines finding a lost book there, 'The Tale of One Bad Rat', which indeed Talbot then reproduces.

I should add that Helen imagines rather a lot here. She's a creative soul from the outset, as we see in her art, one thing that draws Ben to her. However, once her real pet rat is killed, she imagines an oversize equivalent as a travelling companion and security blanket. This is a wonderful choice from Talbot, not only because it adds a neat and obviously fantastic visual element to the story, but with the part it plays in Helen's evolution as a character. She has quite the story arc here and it's a very powerful one. In that afterword, Talbot explains that this wasn't originally going to be about abuse but, once that was factored in, it became the driving force.

I'm not ashamed to say that there were tears on my face when I turned the final page here, partly, it's true, because of my personal connection to the Lake District and how that made everything a little more real, but mostly because of the power that Talbot managed to instill into Helen's story. She's not a character easily forgotten, as indeed are her fathers, both the real one who abused her and the patient substitute who finds her passed out from hunger next to his Lake District pub and takes her in. There's definitely bad in this world, Talbot tells us, but there's definitely good, too, and neither are things to take lightly.

This one will stay with me. ~~ Hal C F Astell