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Bought the meg last week and only bothered to read the Charlie the Squirrel interview. Just been through a pile of megs and read "Cadet" and "Judgement Call", thinking nobody can write Dredd worth a damn but Wagner. Then read "Twenty Years to Midnight", and realised I was wrong. Al, that was brilliant. Superbly paced, hard-hitting and very funny at the same time. You maybe don't have Wagner's streak of pure evil, but there are no girls' comics do do your apprenticeship on these days. Fabulous performance by Henry as well. Just the set of Jimmie's mouth and his patchy stubble are so completely right. Chopper as a chat show guest looks subtly broken. Nobody can draw wee America like Colin MacNeil though, so good decision to keep her helmet on.

I'll get round to reading the rest of the mag at some point.

If any boarders can be in Dublin this Saturday (24 July), the second annual Summer Edition is on at Filmbase in Temple Bar! It's free in, and Ireland's finest comic creators, zine makers and book artists will be exhibiting - check out the website for the skinny.

Here's my attempt:

Is there a version of the Deirdre story that has Fer Diad in it? He's not in the versions I have. Maybe a later writer has included him to better integrate him.

Anyway, keep telling the stories. We've got one the best bodies of mythology in the world, and it deserves to be better known.

Aye, I've read Jackson, and quite a lot of other scholarship, some of it more reasonable than others. I have my own ideas as to what the "original" version of the Táin might have been like, but I'm not doing that as the comic.

For me the core of the story is the relationships between Cú Chulainn, Fergus, Medb, and to a lesser extent Ailill, with Conchobar kind of hanging over proceedings in his absence. Fer Diad is also a late addition, but one that's in keeping with the version I want to tell, so he stays. But he does sort of show up from nowhere immediately before the fight as Cú Chulainn's best friend forever, and is then forgotten immediately after, so I'm having to do a bit of work to integrate him better.

Thanks David. Eddie Campbell was certainly a big influence. I have the Cló Mhaigh Eo books, but I'm afraid my Gaeilge isn't yet strong enough to really appreciate them. They do look great. They have two books on St Patrick - An Sclábhai ("the slave") about his youth, and An Teachtaire ("the messenger") about his mission. Their Táin is a little too condensed, I think - mine will be much longer, long enough to let the characters and story breathe I hope.

I made a deliberate decision to leave the pillow talk prologue bit out of my version. It tends to overwhelm modern retellings - in the Clo Mhaigh Eo version it's fully a quarter of the book - but it's a late addition, a high medieval courtly comedy that, I believe, is out of keeping with the original core of the Táin. I made several attempts at including it, but reluctantly decided it suited my intentions better to start where the early version starts - with the gathering of the army at Cruachan. An odd choice perhaps, but posterity will vindicate me

Patrick

As PJ has already been by to plug his new comic for the Star Trek communicator, I thought it wouldn't be out of place to tell you about my rather lower-tech webcomic.

The Cattle Raid of Cooley, an adaptation of the ancient Irish epic Táin Bó Cúailnge, is serialised at a rate of a page a week and started three weeks ago. Its hero is Cú Chulainn, who partly inspired Sláine, and has to defend Ulster single-handedly (charioteers don't count as people, apparently) when Queen Medb of Connacht turns up mob-handed to steal Donn of Cooley, Ulster's prize stud bull. Watching and occasionally interfering are the gods, including the Morrígan, goddess of carnage (below).



Visit the website every Wednesday, or subscribe to the rss feed. There's also a prequel, The Ulster Cycle: Ness, which follows the adventures of Cú Chulainn's grandmother when she was young. Enjoy!

Patrick
(And yes, it is drawn in red biro. You want to make something of it?)