As I see it, Bryan Talbot is one of the three biggest, living British talents in comics, along with Pat Mills and Alan Moore... oof, with Neil Gaiman pretty-much nuking his reputation, recently. :S
Talbot's The Tale of One Bad Rat moved me a lot, winning multiple awards as it were, and I'd say his five, hard-hitting Grandville books are just about the pinnacle of conventional anthropomorphic adventure-dramas in BD's, alongside the sensational Cité 14 / "District 14" series.
Now, I've had this panel queued up -forever- to post, but have been equally torn since forever whether I wanted to actually post it. For example, as someone fascinated by sea life, such as mollusks & crustaceans, the fact that we keep lobsters in tanks like this, with their pincers tied, only to meet a boiling end when they get 'lucky,' doesn't sit very well with me. OTOH, in art there is truth, and one thing Talbot does a lot of in Grandville is demonstrate the vagaries of human cruelty.
In any case, it's a great BD art piece IMO.
Yeap, understood.
Indeed, I kinda like how they sometimes touch on that in Star Trek, even as it's set two centuries ahead or so. There is just nothing like a satisfying book in one's hands...