'huge, queer and tawdry' but 'much admired by the public'

Bryan Talbot's Alice in Sunderland was one of the most impressive comics achievements of recent years. Unusually, it was an actual 'graphic novel' in format terms - but not in content (being part memoir, part psychogeographical carnival, and all wonderful). It was the sort of thing a non-comics reader could appreciate, and many did - broadsheet reviews, massive bookshop sales, all that. So I was somewhat puzzled when I heard that he'd be following it with an anthropomorphic animal story. This is an area of comics I've never really got - and given it's the area which shades all too easily into the fearful land of the furries, I'm OK with that. I don't mind if a story features a funny animal character for a reason, you understand - just handwave 'genetic engineering' and I'm happy. And obviously something cartoony is fine. But if I'm meant to take a story seriously and it's been cast from Sylvanian Families, I just have a disconnect. This is not to judge the form, because I know other people get the same problem with, say, science fiction - and so long as they don't start making canon judgments based on that, leave it as a personal preference, that's fine (nobody's complaining if you only fancy blondes, so long as you don't then start muttering about Aryan supremacy).
But, even knowing Grandville was unlikely to be my favourite thing Talbot had ever done, I still wanted to read it at some point, and fortunately I found one in Tottenham library (to which I took a small detour on my way back from yesterday's walk, of which more anon). After all, it's a steampunk murder mystery and, with the astonishing Luther Arkwright, Talbot was one of the progenitors of steampunk. He draws good valve.
The problem with this, though, is that steampunk settings often don't make much sense. Certainly not this one, where Napoleon conquered Britain; two centuries later, France grudgingly granted Britain independence after ongoing terrorist campaigns. Well, maybe. But while what we see of British country life is an idealised version of British country life, this free Britain is now supposedly a Socialist Republic. The hero's sidekick talks like Bertie Wooster, but apparently he's doing so in French, the English language now being strictly a parochial and rural argot. I don't feel like these elements match up at all. And, of course, this whole society is populated with talking animals. OK, there are a few humans - 'doughfaces' - but uniquely among all the various species, they don't have citizenship. Why? There's no other evidence of a caste system. And in this land where pigs and dogs are people, we also hear mention of bacon, see a man (or rather, crocodile in top hat) walking his pet dog. I can accept that Mickey Mouse is friends with Goody but owns Pluto - but that was a whimsical world, not the setting for a thriller (and besides, I always preferred Warner Brothers cartoons).
The real icing on this cake, though, is that the crime our heroic badger cop is investigating is a thinly-veiled stand-in for a 9/11 conspiracy theory. A version whose transposition to this nonsensical world handily includes a few changes which make it less of a self-evident farrago of paranoid, puerile idiocies (it comes before an election rather than soon after, for one).
So: a world which makes no sense either on a (pseudo)scientific or narrative level, depicted in a form which makes no sense, apparently promoting a conspiracy theory which makes no sense. Scattered around the background are versions of several famous paintings reimagined for this animal world, and well-done as they are, they're reminiscent of nothing so much as those dogs playing snooker. Which is a sadly accurate summary of the feel of this whole thing. What a waste.