When I first saw V for Vendetta in the cinema aged 15 or 16 I was very impressed, but when I came back to it after reading the original comic the movie seemed cheesy and tacky by comparison.
I watched it again recently. Yes, it’s tacky. The politics of the comic are de-fanged. But it clips along nicely. If the lines aren’t all well-written, the story structure and scenes have momentum. There are enough ponderous and self-important films out there, and a lot more since 2005 when this first came out. Making this film a lot lighter in tone than the comic would not have been my favoured creative choice, but it was a fair creative choice.
In the mid 2000s I used to read Jeremy Clarkson’s film reviews in the Sunday Times. He heartily approved of 300, a fantasy so violently racist it makes Storm Saxon look harmless. He hated The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Ken Loach’s film about the Irish Revolution. He didn’t like V for Vendetta. He sneered at it and predicted that its message would fail to strike a chord with young people. His words were something like, ‘Kids these days just want to fight for their right to party.’
Six years later, the Guy Fawkes mask from this movie became a global symbol of youth protest against dictators and bankers. In other words, Jeremy Clarkson hadn’t a clue.
Along with the brilliant Children of Men, released one year later, V for Vendetta was part of a cultural backlash against the violence, authoritarianism and fear of the so-called War on Terror. Of course being a right-winger Clarkson didn’t like this message.
But re-watching it now, I figured out another reason why the film might have rubbed him up the wrong way.
The TV show Storm Saxon, which is popular in the fascist England of V for Vendetta, and which Jeremy Clarkson would probably say was ‘good old-fashioned swashbuckling fun’. From the original comic by Alan Moore and David Lloyd
There is a character in V for Vendetta named Lewis Prothero, ‘the voice of London,’ a blowhard TV commentator and regime mouthpiece (played by Roger Allam, who also portrays the useless MP in The Thick of It). In one scene Prothero rants over the phone demanding the firing of ‘that Paddy’ who works in the studio. ‘He doesn’t know how to light. He makes my nose look like Big Ben.’
I doubt that was an isolated incident. Clarkson was probably up to similar behaviour around the time he saw V for Vendetta and declared that young people would not like it. On top of the political message, my theory is that he felt personally attacked. Maybe Roger Allam’s portrayal of a ranting anti-Irish gammon had struck a little too close to home.
What makes Squid Game different from Hunger Games and Battle Royale? The fight to the death in Squid Game is not just bigger and bloodier. It is voluntary. Stephen King’s Running Man also features a lethal game whose contestants are volunteers. But King’s novel, and its movie version, and Hunger Games and Battle Royale, are set in future dystopias. Squid Game is set in our world, right now.
The conditions in North Korea are so desperate that Sae-byeok risks death to escape. But when she enters the game she risks death again, this time to escape from the desperate conditions for the poor and working class in South Korea, to escape from capitalism. As someone says in Episode 2, it’s worse out there than it is in here.
The final episode of Squid Game hammers home an anti-capitalist argument that has been running through the whole story. Many have commented on this, including the writer and director Hwang Dong-hyuk. This article goes into some detail. But I want to focus on the voluntary nature of the games and how this plays into the anti-capitalist message.
In-ho’s words in the last episode make this point very clear. He says words to the effect that ‘You chose this,’ ‘You signed up for this,’ ‘Nobody forced you.’ Another villain, the psychopathic Sang-woo, insists on Gi-hun’s personal responsibility for all the killing.
Within formal logic, In-ho’s argument is unanswerable. But Gi-hun recoils against his words and against Sang-woo’s. They are wrong. Gi-hun knows it in his gut, and so do we.
It’s true that the game is voluntary. In-ho himself, undercover among the contestants, casts the deciding vote for them all to leave. But for some reason, we don’t accept their arguments.
‘You chose this,’ ‘You signed up for this,’ ‘Nobody forced you.’ That’s what we hear when we complain about our jobs, our mortgages, our car payments. We even hear a version of this in the cliché that ‘people get the government they deserve’ – ie, the people are responsible when their elected leaders betray them. In the most formal sense, it’s all true.
The game’s overseer keeps insisting on ‘equality’ as the fundamental principle of the whole operation. In theory, capitalism is fair and we’re all equal. In theory, the worker and the boss meet one another ‘in the marketplace’ (wherever that is) on a basis of complete equality. They agree to a contract which is satisfactory to both: I work for you, and you pay me. The law says these two people are completely equal. The law says this contract is voluntary.
But the reality is very different from the theory, and from what the law says. That reality is illustrated in every episode of Squid Game.
When we first see Gi-hun, we are invited to see him as a waster and a messer. Then in mid-series we hear about the auto workers’ strike Gi-hun was involved in ten years ago and about the lethal police violence. This sacking was a catastrophe from which his life has never recovered. He got into debt with failed business ventures (Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do? Isn’t that what they tell us to do? Be an entrepreneur?). His family has broken down. No wonder he’s in the situation he’s in. It could happen to you or me.
Another contestant has decades of experience as a glassmaker. We can assume he’s got a similar story to tell. And we see with our own eyes how Ali was scammed by his boss.
The final episode hammers home the point. A TV or radio playing in the background of a scene reminds us about the crisis in household debt. Early on in the series, we might think, ‘OK, these contestants are people in extreme situations – gambling addicts, refugees, gangsters.’ But the final episode insists: this situation is general.
For all its brutality, Squid Game is written with compassion and humanity. These games are not a public spectacle or a reality TV show. They are secret. The public at large do not enjoy the games. They would be sickened if they knew the games were happening. The audience, lapping up other people’s suffering for entertainment, are the handful of billionaires who bankroll the whole operation – and who got rich making everyone’s lives so desperate and precarious in the first place. The indebted and desperate Gi-hun lives on a different planet from these ‘VIPs.’ To claim they are equal is a vicious lie designed to keep Gi-hun in his place – and, perhaps, to soothe the consciences of the wealthy.
People are drawing parallels with Money Heist, another series on Netflix. Like Squid Game, it has won a colossal audience in spite of the fact that it’s not in English. This Spanish crime series is knee-deep in socialism. A miner from Asturias who calls himself ‘Moscow’ sings ‘Bella Ciao,’ talks about the 15M movement and supports his trans comrade; in a fierce battle in the ruins of the national Bank of Spain, the robbers denounce the forces of the state as fascists and draw inspiration from the Battle of Stalingrad. But what’s more important than any of these Easter eggs is what this guy said: that what makes Money Heist popular is the class rage it channels.
What is it about red jumpsuits and masks? Money Heist (above, image from Dress Like That) and Squid Game (Image from Insider.com).
Money Heist and Squid Game tap into our despair and anger at the brutal and unfair system we live under. Hundreds of people being gunned down in a scene that’s part Red Light, Green Light and part Amritsar Massacre – that’s not a fantasy. That’s what it feels like to live in this society. If a story can tap into such a feeling, language is not a barrier. We live under the same system and even if we speak different languages we can relate to common problems and struggles.
We live in a time of mass protest movements against the wealthy and the state on every continent (Colombia, Sudan, Lebanon, Myanmar, and the list goes on and on). It would be strange if this mood was not reflected in some way in popular culture. But it’s a sign of the times that the entertainment industry – and maybe to an extent audiences – are not ready for a story that is simply about class struggle (with surprising exceptions like Superstore). Politics is a dirty word. It has to be smuggled in, disguised in more wholesome and palatable fare, such as a story about the origin of a mass murderer, about a bank robbery, or about a game show in which four hundred people die horrible deaths. In cynical times, the earnest and compassionate stories we secretly crave can only be packaged in the trappings of cynical and pessimistic genres.
The lyrics to this fine song get tangled up in apparent non-sequiturs, making you ask questions, making your imagination work overtime. The whole story is short on details, but we feel like the narrator has told us more than he really has. The lyrics are heavy with suggestion like branches bent under the weight of fruit. Dylan makes us work to extract the meaning, and we are grateful for it.
For example:
But he started in to dealing with slaves/ And something inside of him died/ She had to sell everything she owned and froze up inside/ And by the time the bottom fell out I became withdrawn…
What does that mean? How does one thing lead to the next? Things are skated over in vague terms, as if the narrator is wary of the legal implications, doesn’t want to open a can of worms, or just doesn’t want to think about it all.
It’s not just the usual obscurity and symbolism of Bob Dylan lyrics. It feels as if someone drunk and a little maddened by hardships, charismatic in his way, has sat down beside you on the bus and begun to tell you their history with a red-haired woman you’ve never met. Or maybe you’re overhearing one half of a stranger’s phone conversation – you missed the start, you’ll miss the end and you’re only hearing the answers, not the questions.
The song has a consistent thread. It tells the story of a relationship between the narrator and a woman. They get separated, but they drift back together, get separated again, but maybe they’ll be reunited… Is her nickname Blue? Does she have blue eyes? Or is it a reference to Joni Mitchell?
She was married; he ‘helped her out of a jam, I guess/ But I used a little too much force.’ The narrator probably didn’t kill the husband but he must have beat him up or something. They headed off on a journey together but ‘split up on a dark sad night, both agreeing it was best.’ The narrator is lying; he was devastated by the separation, but he doesn’t tell us that directly, or why they split up.
They meet again in Louisiana years later. She is working at a strip club and reading Italian Renaissance poetry; she lives in a basement with the narrator and another man, the one who ‘started in to dealing with slaves,’ whatever that means.
On rare moments we get detail. The ‘dark sad night’ when they split up is seared into the narrator’s memory and when he tells us about it he is not summing up and skipping over, but quoting her in real time. ‘I heard her say over my shoulder/ ‘We’ll meet again someday on the avenue.’
Then we skip ahead years and thousands of miles, until the narrator and the woman who ‘never escaped his mind’ are by chance reunited. We get verse after verse, describing the reunion almost iin real time.
He’s not an expressive or emotive guy – ‘you look like the silent type;’ ‘I muttered something underneath my breath.’ But we can tell how he’s feeling. He hints and summarises and skims over most of his life but then gets drawn into fine detail when he’s talking about her. The specifics he gives us are not the ones lawyers or cops or journalists might want to know. They are the things that matter to him.
I think in that speech Dylan threw a sidelight on ‘Tangled up in Blue’ when he talked about Homer’s Odyssey and how he relates to it:
In a lot of ways, some of these same things have happened to you. You too have had drugs dropped into your wine. You too have shared a bed with the wrong woman. You too have been spellbound by magical voices, sweet voices with strange melodies. You too have come so far and have been so far blown back. And you’ve had close calls as well. You have angered people you should not have. And you too have rambled this country all around. And you’ve also felt that ill wind, the one that blows you no good.
The parallel lies not at all in the specifics – but in how he can find and bring out the epic and the immortal in the mundane, how he elevates his narrator to the status of a hero.
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This is Part Two of a three-part series on 2000AD’s Sláine. You’ll find Part 1 here.
This part is going to be a live commentary as I re-read Demon Killer. I’ll be typing my responses to things as I see them. The point of this is to show how the writer Pat Mills integrated a huge amount of myth and history into these stories without sacrificing fun, pacing or clarity. Sláine is pure fantasy, even – perhaps especially – when it purports to be dealing with real people like Boudicca or William Wallace. But even as we know it’s fantasy, we know it’s not just pulled out of someone’s arse either; it feels authentic and possesses a certain integrity.
Demon Killer was written by Pat Mills and drawn by Dermot Power, Greg Staples, Glenn Fabry and David Lloyd. All images are from that.
So here goes.
Right from the start we see ‘the triple death’ – Celts carried out ‘triple killings’ on their kings.
As king Sláine is forbidden from fighting – in contrast to other cultures, early Irish kingship institutions placed far less emphasis on violence and more on generosity, kinship and wealth
Geasa – taboos – yes, Irish kings had these taboos placed on them. Great mythical examples to be found in ‘The Burning of Derga’s Hostel’
Reading animals’ entrails to see the future – a Roman practise, as far as I know
Dead bodies getting up and speaking – a recurring motif in ancient Irish myths, though usually it’s a severed head
Sláine is to be killed at the end of his reign – plenty of evidence that this was done in Ireland – eg the bog bodies
The flashback to the battle of Clontarf – needless to say there was no warp-spasming warrior and no demon at that battle
Sláine has four wives – yes, polygamy was legally recognised is the old Irish laws, and was widely practised right up to the 17th Century
The magical cauldron comes from the tales of the Tuatha Dé Danann – see Gods and Fighting Men by Lady Gregory
Gold thrown into sacred rivers and lakes – yes, this was done in ancient Ireland, Britain and Gaul – but it seems to have stopped by 800-600 BCE whereas Boudicca’s rebellion was in 60 or 61 CE (Alice Roberts, The Celts, p 92).
This comic way overstates the ‘sacred gold’ angle – they dumped all kinds of artefacts of all substances in the rivers and lakes
When Sláine rises from the pool and Ukko introduces him – Ukko’s eloquence is very typical of Irish mythology: ‘A bone-splitter, a reddener of swords, a pruner of limbs who delights in red-frothed, glorious carnage… Your lives would be prolonged for getting out of his way.’
Sláine is in nothing but a loincloth, slaughtering guys in armour – this image of the wild reckless Celtic warrior is complicated by the fact that real Celtic warriors hid behind massive shields and specialised in hit-and-run attacks
Explanation for how the rebellion began: for the Romans, gold is tax; for the Celts, it’s sacred – no basis in history, of course, but it’s creative and fun
Boudicca says the Romans aren’t real men because they ‘bathe in warm water… anoint themselves in myrhh… and sleep on soft couches with boys… like their emperor who behaves like a woman… as is proved by the beautification of his person’ – OOF – this is the kind of ‘noble savage’/ ‘Fremen mirage’ stuff Sláine usually avoids. Based on what we know, the Celts were very proud of their appearance, adorning themselves with jewellery and dressing in bright colours. We know that the Gauls of Caesar’s time had make-up and fragrant soaps. Irish mythology is full of men describing each other as beautiful. ‘Personal adornments of bronze were abundant’ even among the prehistoric proto-Celts. (Nora Chadwick, The Celts, p 30.)And the casual 1990s homophobia is wide of the mark too – I’ve never come across evidence that the Celts looked down on gay sex or thought the Romans were somehow weird for doing it. Hmmm – and didn’t we see a gay couple in The Horned God?
It is true that Roman soldiers flogged Boudicca and raped her daughters.
Mona (Anglesey) was the druid stronghold but not ‘island of the witches.’ Women as well as men were druids so that detail is fair enough. The idea of them being naked in the cold of north Wales, the idea of them fighting naked, the idea of them playing with human organs, that’s what we call artistic license. But in the very same year as Boudicca’s rebellion, it is true, Suetonius Paulinus led a legion to Anglesey where he fought an arduous battle against the druids, massacred them and then for superstitious reasons set about uprooting their oak groves. Before battle the Romans were ‘paralysed with fear’ by ‘women dressed like Furies in funereal attire, their hair dishevelled, rushing about amongst the warriors…’ So there – they were dressed. In attire, no less. (The Ancient Paths by Graham Robb, p 250-257)
Elfric is clearly supposed to represent the luxury and licentiousness of the Romans – the old ‘noble savage’ theme again. Enjoying yourself in any way makes you weak, you see. But this goes against the theology explained in The Horned God.
Yes, Colchester was where the retired legionaries lived
‘Do not heed warriors who need to protect themselves with helmets and breastplates – such men are full of fear!’ – The Celts were brilliant metalworkers and never had any aversion to armour, though there are accounts of people who went into battle naked.
The druids’ magical herbs that cause hallucinations – a recent Blindboy podcast with Manchán Magan went into this, among other things. Very interesting.
Burning people alive in wicker cages – not the first time we’ve seen this in Sláine – which is apparently based on accounts by Caesar (Gallic Wars) and Strabo (Roberts, the Celts, p 182).
Women as well as men appear among the Celtic troops on the battlefield. I think this is a reasonable interpretation of the evidence of grave goods, history and mythology, which suggests women as prestigious leaders on the Continent, in Britain and in Ireland. I’ve read (I can’t remember where) that in early medieval Ireland women took part in fighting, perhaps a survival of the older custom. But earlier at Colchester Boudicca made a speech that seemed entirely addressed to the men in her army, so that’s odd.
‘You heard the boss!’ – the shield-boss, that is. Brilliant little touch. Classic Sláine.
So this comic, towards the latter half, goes into a bit of a warp-spasm with the killing and the slaughter. This is getting as mad as the ‘Volgan’ occupation of Britain in another Mills classic, Invasion. The craziest part is when Sláine and Boudicca build ‘the bone prison of oeth,’ a prison made of the bones of Roman soldiers. This is based on a story made up by the 18th century Welsh antiquarian Iolo Morganwg. According to Sam Lansman: ‘One of the most evocative of Iolo Morganwg’s forgeries was his description of Caer Oeth ac Anoeth as a dungeon built from the bones of slaughtered Roman legionnaires. This gruesome if impractical prison, the antiquarian claimed, was destroyed and rebuilt several times during the wars between the Romans and the Britons.’ But the 18th-century bluffer didn’t entirely make it up; it’s an interpretation of source material that is all catalogued here on Jones’ Celtic Encyclopedia.
‘The point is the Caesarian Empire provided a role model for future empires to rob and enslave native peoples… No empire ever gets away with it. … Countries built on blood cost the descendants… the injustice leaves a psychic scar… A sickness in their souls…’ You tell em, Nest. Excellent.
A detail I forgot. The gruesome prison of bones is so morbid it opens a portal for Elfric to return – suggesting that all this fury and slaughter is the ultimate cause of the rebellion’s undoing
All this slaughter is not just a trope of comic books. It’s also, to be fair, a trope of old Celtic legends. Read ‘The Battle of the White Strand’ – incredible numbers die left, right and centre.
‘The Omphallos – the Navel of Britain!’ – this is another motif that’s explored in Robb’s The Ancient Paths
‘Your majesty’ – hmmm… I don’t think Britons would have referred to their rather down-to-earth kings and queens by such exalted titles.
The battle is amazing – a mad mixture of the sort-of plausible with pure unabashed fantasy. Tremendous fun. Nothing really to say except that there were plenty of women as well as men among the Britons, who also had loads of trumpets like we see here, which terrified the Romans. I don’t think there’s any evidence the Britons were goaded into battle in the way we see here, but Graham Robb has a theory about how Boudica chose the battle site for scientific-religious-geographical reasons (Robb, The Ancient Paths, p 263)
Yes, the Britons’ retreat was impeded by their wagons; yes, even according to the Roman Tacitus the civilians were not spared. The cruel reprisals afterwards are accurate. ‘Hostile’ tribes had their lands laid waste.
The lament ‘Ochone’ is real, it’s Irish
The interior of the burial mound resembles real-life continental burials like that of the ‘Hochdorf prince’ – right down to the ‘bronze couch’
I don’t know if this claim about a planned conquest of Ireland is based on anything, but that could be my own ignorance. I will say that Suetonius Paulinus’ maps look way too accurate – the Romans didn’t have such technique in cartography. Their maps were terrible.
There is a little epilogue where Sláine returns to Ireland to find that his whole world has vanished with the passing of the years. This is brilliant, based on the myth ‘Oisín and St Patrick’ (In Gods and Fighting Men but also online here). In this story a legendary Celtic warrior argues with a Christian saint. It’s absolutely brilliant. The debate between Sláine and the priest is a faithful and creative interpretation of such ancient stories. There’s real authenticity in this little epilogue.
I expected to find like ten bullet points, not thirty-six!
Good thing I chose Demon Killer rather than The Horned God, or I’d have been here all day. The sum of all these little details is a major part of what makes Sláine work. I think the series has lost this over the years – never entirely, but to a considerable extent. Anyway, we’ll get on to that next week with Sláine: Part 3.
Books:
The Celts, Nora Chadwick, Penguin, 1972
The Celts: Search for a Civilisation, Alice Roberts, Heron Books, 2015
Gods and Fighting Men, Lady Gregory, 1904 (1970, Colin Smythe Ltd)
Over the first year of Covid I went through the back catalogue of 2000AD’s Sláine, for the most part reading the digital graphic novels on my tablet. At first I dipped in out of curiosity, but found myself enjoying it so much that I read fifteen titles cover to cover.
And I did not think it too many.
This is the first part of a three-part commentary tracing the high points and low points of the comic over the forty years of its existence. I will comment on each title in the series. The high points are magnificent and the lows are pretty shocking. My opinions will not be popular.
Sláine. I’d imagine most British people pronounce it as ‘Slain’ and, you know what, that’s fine. But it’s Slaw-nyah. However you say his name, he’s a character in the British comic 2000AD. He is a warrior with an axe who roams around Celtic Europe, leaping, shouting and chopping up bad guys. Roughly once per graphic novel, when chopping and shouting does not suffice, the raw power of the Earth goddess surges through him in a raging ‘warp-spasm,’ and he transforms into a grotesque and unstoppable beast.
From Demon Killer, written by Pat Mills, art by Glenn Fabry, Greg Staples, Dermot Power
But (at its best) there’s a lot more to it than that. Sláine is not a Viking or a Spartan or a medieval knight; he is a Celtic warrior, and that means he doesn’t fit neatly into the macho mould you might expect. He’s difficult to pin down and he’s got a lot going on. The two sides of Sláine are captured in The Horned God, when in a flash-forward Sláine’s chroniclers debate his legacy:
Ukko: Nah… Readers aren’t interested in all that fancy stuff. What they want is plenty of hacking and slaying.
Mor Runne the Dung Collector: Yurrr… I like hacking and slaying.
Nest: But there’s always been more to Sláine than just some muscle-bound barbarian. It’s an attempt to redefine the hero. To convey the matriarchal origin of myth.
Ukko: Take a tip from an old hack, dear, and stick to Sláine chopping off brainballs!
Mor Runne the Dung Collector: Yurr! I don’t like the comp… comp… complicated bits. I only like it when he’s killing people.
There are plenty of violent battles in Sláine – with Fomorians, Skull-Swords, Trojans and all kinds of demons and monsters. But the battle between a basic barbarian action hero and a deep, obscure Celtic soul is the most interesting of all. Over the next three posts I will examine this struggle. Part 1 will look at the first twenty years or so, Part 2 will take a deep look at one particular graphic novel, and Part 3 will deal with the latter half of Sláine’s career (including the really controversial bits).
The early stories from the 80s are collected in the graphic novel Warrior’s Dawn.
Sláine is a wandering exile in a mythical Celtic Europe called the Land of the Young – so named because few live to grow old. It’s a place as chaotic and fun as 2000AD’s Mega-City One. Flying ships powered by standing-stones ply the skyways. Dark magic corrupts the fields and forests into sourland, where prehistoric and inter-dimensional monsters roam. A stinking corpse named Slough Feg is the leader of a death-cult which burns captives in tribute to the maggot god. Sláine seeks to return to his own people, the Tribes of the Earth Goddess, a strange but relatively wholesome crowd whom Slough Feg seeks to conquer.
Writer Pat Mills does his homework when it comes to the Celts; many elements of this setting are derived from real history or myth. Not just Cuchulain’s riastradh, or warp-spasm. Whenever Sláine kills some great number of people and boasts that he ‘did not think it too many,’ he is quoting from the stories of the Fianna cycle. Part 2 will give further examples.
Sláine is not a boy scout. He is governed by obscure drives, sometimes dark or shallow, sometimes profound and selfless. His enemies – the Guledig, Slough Feg – are those who despise human pleasure, and the natural and material world which Sláine champions. He succeeds not through domination and destruction, but through submitting to the sublime chaos of the pagan world.
Sláine’s anti-authoritarian tendencies are not founded on ‘noble savage’ tropes or ‘don’t tread on me’ hypocrisy, but in an egalitarian, feminist and ecological spirit. Later in The Horned God we see that among the tribes of the Earth Goddess, marriages last for one year. The land is shared out equally and some set aside for the old and the sick. Kings (Sláine included) are sacrificed after a seven-year term so that they don’t get too big for their boots. Empires are seen as barbaric. Sláine makes no pretense that it is historical, but this depiction of Celtic society has plenty of foundation in the sources.
It is a myth of its own time. The Celts dress like punks (in later numbers more like metalheads). Ukko the dwarfish thief hates the egalitarian ways of the Celts, which he criticises in distinctly Thatcherite terms. Keep in mind that it’s the late ’80s, early ’90s, and the main bad guys, the Fomorians, are ruthless, callous tax collectors; we are duly informed that they live in a place called Tory Island (a real island off the coast of Donegal where, yes, the Fomorians of myth had their base). The hunger strike is portrayed as a venerable and ancient custom – just a few years after the 1981 hunger strikes in Ireland.
A lot of the above comes later, especially in The Horned God. But even in early Sláine, not a single episode goes by without some cool element of Irish, Welsh or Gallic myth figuring into the story somehow or other.
I like Sláine because (again with the qualifier, ‘at its best’) it chimes with what Michael Moorcock wrote about the great novels of Henry Treece. It is able
to capture the sense of raw passion of adult men and women who are not always mystically inclined yet dwell in a world of mysticism… [magic] is as much a part of life as the wild landscapes… as the stones and hills, the forests and the seas, the fortified townships and isolated villages dwarfed by the great grey skies.
Sláine is at its strongest when character and setting have room to breathe. It is at its weakest when it becomes simply a story of a man chopping up a succession of ugly monsters.
His time as king of his people is up, so he must be killed. From Demon Killer, written by Pat Mills, art by Glenn Fabry, Greg Staples, Dermot Power
2 and 3: Time Killer and The King
The stories collected in the second and third graphic novels (Time Killer and The King) see Sláine journey home and become the leader of his people, but for a while the reader is taken away on a bizarre detour. Sláine encounters the Cyth, inter-dimensional aliens who secretly control the destiny of humanity… and there’s a temple, a temple of terror or something… *yawns* … where was I? To cut a very long and jarringly episodic story short, Sláine travels through alternate dimensions, encounters strange aliens and trades his axe for a leyser gun. Yes, leyser. Like ley-lines. Get it?
It probably responded to some editorial and/or commercial need at the time, but I found the detour tiresome, a grind with no connection to the character or the setting I had become invested in.
No doubt some are reading this post to find out what are the best Sláine comics, which to start with, which ones not to bother with, etc. They might ask, ‘Should I just skip Two and Three?’
Ah, I must warn against it. The people on the business end of 2000AD have gerrymandered the graphic novels in a fiendish way. The sci-fi stuff is split fifty-fifty between the second half of Two and the first half of Three. If you pass on Two, you miss, among other great episodes, Sláine’s time-travelling intervention at the Battle of Clontarf. If you pass on Three, you miss out on Sláine’s return to the Tribes of the Earth Goddess, the story of how he becomes king of his tribe and of the first battles with the Fomorian sea demons. So the publishers have us in a bind.
Edit: see here for a very different (perhaps fairer) take on Tomb of Terror:
Classic 1980s black–and-white Sláine. From Time Killer, Written by Pat Mills, art by Massimo Belardinelli, Glenn Fabry, David Pugh, Bryan Talbot
4: The Horned God
This brings us to the pinnacle of the whole saga. The Horned God is the story of how Sláine unites the Tribes of the Earth Goddess to resist Slough Feg. More than that, it is a spiritual journey for Sláine as he submits to the Earth Goddess and becomes her faithful champion. Simon Bisley’s full-colour art is really beautiful.
The Horned God is deliberately slow to start, laying a solid thematic basis. Nothing in this story feels unearned. The story explores the motivations of Slough Feg and his death-cult. There’s a kind-of feminist theme as Sláine triumphs through becoming the Horned God, the champion of the Earth Goddess.
This champion ‘sees the ridiculousness of life. He never takes its pressures too seriously… Whereas the sun god is so serious… is obsessed with authority… with conquering everything… those heroes who follow his path are usually mindless and violent.’
The ingredients are in the right balance: action and spectacle combined with thematic depth and character development. There are stories within the story – such as the return of the Avanc, last survivor of an indigenous people wiped out by one of the Tribes of the Earth Goddess. Some parts are laugh-out-loud funny, but there are moments of real pathos – like when Sláine says goodbye to his son.
The Horned God is amazing.Despite some elements which have not aged well (including the male gaze stuff that I will deal with next week) it rewards reading and re-reading.
5, 6 and 7: Demon Killer, Lord of Misrule and Treasures of Britain
Pat Mills appears to be deft at pleasing his editors while also remaining true to his creations. As noted above, for some reason Sláine became an inter-dimensional battler of aliens for a while in the 80s – but rather than retconning or pretending it never happened, Mills does a graceful job of integrating the silly alien stuff into the story while keeping the focus on the themes and characters we actually care about. This enriches the stories collected in the next few graphic novels. In Demon Killer, Lord of Misrule and Treasures of Britain, Sláine travels through history and myth and time. These stories feature Boudicca, Robin Hood and King Arthur. Along the way he battles with old enemies: the Guledig and the sadistic demon Elfric.
From Demon Killer, written by Pat Mills, art by Glenn Fabry, Greg Staples, Dermot Power
Demon Killer puts the moral ambiguity of Sláine to the fore. Alongside Boudicca, he loots and razes a Roman city, killing masses of innocent people. Mills justifies this in the introduction (justifies it as an artistic choice, I hasten to add) convincingly in my view:
In many comics he would have doubtless made an excuse and left or tried to stop the massacre with some appalling hindsight speech: “No! No! Spare the women and children!” Fortunately, on 2000 AD, we don’t make such unconvincing compromises. The reality is that, as a Celtic warrior, Sláine would have participated because his people were driven to a fury after the Romans ethnically cleansed their land. And I feel this uncomfortable truth is preferable to reassuring but bullshit fiction.
(Pat Mills, from the introduction to Demon Killer)
It is consistent with Sláine’s character and his motivations. I said he wasn’t a boy scout. He is compelling because he attracts and then alienates our sympathies. But we’ll be taking a closer look at Demon Killer next week.
Lord of Misrule contains a moment very characteristic of Mills’ writing:
From Lord of Misrule, written by Pat Mills, art by Clint Langley, Greg Staples, Jim Murray
I don’t know if this is true or just a myth, and I don’t care. I like these little asides, and how they are well-integrated into the story.
In Treasures of Britain I found the story a bit unfocused. But the artwork is the most beautiful of these three comics, and there are many astute comments on Arthurian legend.
These are fun adventures, beautifully drawn, with thematic depth and character. I heartily recommend them.
That’s it for this week. Subscribe by email to get a notification when Part Two goes up. Next week we’ll look in depth at Sláine: Demon Killer. We’re getting into darker material in Part 3: some of the dodgy shit that has made its way onto the pages of Sláine, and why I hated Book of Invasions. But we’re also going to appreciate the finest artwork of the whole saga and take a look at my recommendations for the top five Sláine comics.
Maybe you enjoy reading about Sláine, and you didn’t think that too many. You should check out this great blog where the author Alex compiles a full list and ranking of all Sláine stories: slaineranked.blogspot.com
