It took me months to start this graphic novel because Bryan Talbot's visual design is off-putting to the point of headache ugliness: a color-drenched overload of photos, news clippings, Tenniel prints and dozens of different drawing styles. Muscle your way past that, though, and Alice in Sunderland is truly a wonderland. It's Talbot's attempt to relocate Lewis Carroll's inspiration from Oxford to his life in the seaport coaltown of Sunderland. Just like its visual style, the book is self-indulgent, long-winded, the attic-emptying obsessions of a crank historian and town booster. But like its Carrollian inspiration, it's also whimsically