Armed With Madness The Surreal Leonora Carrington

Award-winning storytellers Mary M. Talbot and Bryan Talbot’s full-color graphic novel Armed with Madness presents a new perspective on the 1930s Paris art scene from neglected artist, feminist icon, and influential surrealist Leonora Carrington.

Reluctant muse and feminist champion—heiress, rebel, refugee—and perhaps the last of the great surrealist artists, Leonora Carrington played many roles in her long and extraordinary life. Exchanging her privileged upbringing in prewar England for the more exciting elite of Paris’s 1930s avant-garde, she comes to rub shoulders (and more) with the likes of Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, and Salvador Dalí after embarking on a complicated love affair with Max Ernst.

But the demons that have both haunted and inspired her work are gathering, and when the world goes mad with the outbreak of war and the Nazi invasion, Leonora’s own hold on reality collapses into a terrifying psychotic episode of her own. Eventually fleeing war-torn Europe, she emerges into a new and richly creative life in Mexico City, establishing herself as a prodigious painter, writer, and advocate of women’s rights.

Armed with Madness, from the acclaimed partnership of Mary and Bryan Talbot, celebrates the life and career of a truly remarkable artist and woman.

Mary M. Talbot is an academic turned graphic novelist. Her first graphic novel, Dotter of her Father’s Eyes (with Bryan Talbot), won the 2012 Costa Biography Award. Her recent book, Rain (2019, with Bryan Talbot), is a rallying cry to protect the planet. Her previous graphic novels are Sally Heathcote, Suffragette (2014, with Kate Charlesworth and Bryan Talbot) and The Red Virgin (2016, with Bryan Talbot), and she wrote the academic book Language and Gender (3rd ed, 2019). She is the visiting professor of graphic narrative at Lancaster University.
Multiple award-winning artist Bryan Talbot has been working in comics for more than 40 years. He’s produced underground, fantasy, and superhero stories such as Batman and (with Neil Gaiman) Sandman, and graphic novels including The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, The Tale of One Bad Rat, Alice in Sunderland, and the Grandville series, as well as illustrated the books written by Mary.
Bryan and Mary Talbot are both founding patrons of the Lakes International Comic Art Festival. Bryan was awarded a doctorate in arts and another in letters and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.