The Adventures of Luther Arkwright

The Adventures of Luther Arkwright
The cover of issue 2 of the Valkyrie Press edition of The Adventures of Luther Arkwright
Publication information
Publisher	Valkyrie Press
Schedule	Monthly
Format	Limited series
Publication date	October 1978 – April 1989
Number of issues	9
Main character(s)	Luther Arkwright
Creative team
Writer(s)	Bryan Talbot
Penciller(s)	Bryan Talbot
Inker(s)	Bryan Talbot
Letterer(s)	Steve Haynie
Creator(s)	Bryan Talbot
Editor(s)	Bryan Talbot
Collected editions
The Adventures of Luther Arkwright

The Adventures of Luther Arkwright
Big Finish Productions audio drama
Series	New Worlds
Release no.	1
Featuring	David Tennant, Paul Darrow, Siri O'Neal
Written by	Bryan Talbot, adapted by Mark Wright
Directed by	Jason Haigh-Ellery
Produced by	Jason Haigh-Ellery
Executive producer(s)	none
Production code	LACD01
Length	3 hrs 3 min
Release date	March 2005

The Adventures of Luther Arkwright is a limited series comic book written and drawn by Bryan Talbot.

Luther Arkwright made his first appearance in the mid-1970s in "The Papist Affair", a short strip for Brainstorm Comix where Arkwright teamed up with a group of cigar-chewing biker nuns to recover the sacred relics of St. Adolf of Nuremberg from "a buncha male chauvinist priests".

The first parts of The Adventures of Luther Arkwright followed as a serial in the British underground comic Near Myths in 1978, were later continued in pssst! magazine, then interrupted in 1982, less than half complete. Between 1987 and 1989 Bryan Talbot completed the story, which was published as a series of nine standard comic books by Valkyrie Press, followed, at readers' request, by a tenth issue containing articles about the history and production of the comic and some extended back story and character information. It was subsequently published in the United States by Dark Horse Comics.

The story is adult in tone, with many mythological, historical and political references, and a little explicit sex. Its genesis owes something to the influence of Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius stories, though Moorcock and Talbot agree that the similarities between the characters are limited. Warren Ellis calls Arkwright "probably the single most influential graphic novel to have come out of Britain to date... probably Anglophone comics' single most important experimental work."

In 1999 Dark Horse published Talbot's sequel to Luther Arkwright, which was called Heart of Empire.

In 2005 the artwork was digitally remastered by Comics Centrum for an edition in Czech (Dobrodružství Luther Arkwrighta), allowing proper reproduction of both light and dark parts of "tonal" pages. The new artwork was also used for a French edition by Kymera Comics. Bryan Talbot has described the Czech edition as "the best ever published".

In 2006 it was republished as a webcomic using the digitally remastered files at the official fanpage.