By Ariel Baska — I was lucky enough to sit down recently with Paul Bolger — writer, artist and animator, known for working on everything from Cool World to All Dogs Go to Heaven and The Land Before Time — to chat about his new beautifully bound book from Dark Horse, HOUND.

Due out March 9 in comic shops, the book tells of the indigenous tribes of Ireland and the UK in a thrillingly bloody action story of the Irish folk hero, Cuchulain, or the Hound of Cullan. You can check out conversation — edited throughout for clarity — below.

Enjoy!

INTERVIEW: Paul Bolger talks HOUND

ARIEL BASKA: I look at this book as a beautiful retelling of this mythic story of the indigenous peoples of Ireland and England that isn’t often depicted. I love what you’ve done with this book. It’s just incredible.

PAUL BOLGER: So thanks, Ariel. I started doing animation too long ago to think about, and I worked on a couple of movies and Dublin cartoons, like All Dogs Go To Heaven and Land Before Time. When I was a kid and I was a kind of a junior animator just starting out with Don Bluth and, I was in a studio in Dublin, and there's 400 people. I'd say four or five of those were Irish. There were probably 50 Americans and 50 from various other countries.

After a couple of years there, I figured out how to do animation a bit, but I was wondering why there were no Irish stories ever adopted because it was a culture I wasn't aware of. I was into comics and as a kid —like everybody back in the 80s. When I was in school in Ireland, we had the American comics and we had the British comics, but there are few Irish comics, really. Then I discovered a guy called Jim Fitzpatrick, who is still around actually, but he did a few books in the early 80s, which were more like illustrated, storybooks, I suppose.

They were kind of riffing on Barry Windsor Smith and all that early ‘70s Conan stuff. But the question never seemed to get answered, and as I got more and more into animation, becoming a director and designer and all this other stuff; I traveled around the world and went to the States a few times, on business. I didn't work there actually, funnily enough, but I worked on a ton of American movies. In the late ‘90s I started to develop myself, but I always wanted to make it more like how I suppose an Irish person might think Irish stories were like, not how another countries see it, because you know yourself. The victors always write history. Right? And it's the same with the culture wars — the dominant culture will always portray the culture next door as what they wanted to be portrayed as.

So I got into the idea of trying to tell the story. It's a myth, and it's a fantasy. It's not real in any way. But I did follow some of the traditional tropes, setting it around the time of Cleopatra, like 100 BC to 100 AD, that kind of time. Then I had a bit of fun with it, but I still felt it should have some authenticity. I like doing comics. I wanted to try and do a comic version of this, but I wanted to do it in a way that not just people from here might be into it. People abroad may never have seen our culture portrayed this way before…(read an extensive discussion of the background of Irish culture, names and linguistics here)

ARIEL: I did want to ask you about the imagery in the book. Like, how exactly did your workflow work with you co-writer Barry Devlin when you guys were creating this world and this imagery? What did that process look like? 

PAUL: Well, he won't like me saying it, but he didn't have anything to do with visuals as such, right. Okay, he came in. He came in at a point where I had a sort of the equivalent of a film treatment written, which would be, I suppose, a collection of scenes, which would be like a timeline paragraph, like a short paragraph for each sequence or scene chapter, and I might have had 30 or 40 of those.

I would have a starting point in mind. There was a point where we consider starting in the middle and working forward back and kind of doing a flashback, but it just didn't sit right so I pulled back. So what he did then, I wrote a draft of a script that is equally usable as a comic or a film script, and the formatting is a bit different. We had that document and then I suppose I just went and I was working on a movie at the time in Germany. During my spare time, I would have set it to block out, you know, that text I would assign it to visualize.

Now I had a lot of work done on an animated version of this that never happened. And those designs. I knew what everybody looked like. I kind of knew the rough shape of the world and it's quite almost a cartoon. He was kind of animated like, mixed with maybe it was 2-D, and it was kind of that kind of feeling and it was but not as soft as Disney and not quite as realistic animation as anime. So it was somewhere in the middle. But I kind of knew that I wanted the world to reflect the archaeology, but probably 10 times bigger than it really was. So like some of those round houses. For example, we didn't change the design of them. We just made them bigger. Things like the chariots for example. The Greeks and the Persians. You know they live in a country (and the Egyptians too) full of sun and flat land. The grassy plains are not like that. It's quite hilly.

There's evidence of road building in Ireland. So I thought, okay, I can use chariots, but I'm going to make them a bit chunky and a bit heavier because we're a wet country and it's colder. But for me, it was more about how these guys would hack down an old tree and just, you know, put it together, and I call them war wagons. I didn't even call them chariots. So all this kind of stuff, I would have started laying out the book, and I would have done these pages rough like anybody doing a comic. You start thinking about what's the structure of the page and I might have run it past Barry now and then and say, Look, this is what I'm thinking for the way you wrote this. And he went, Oh, yeah, cool, but how about you go closer here, pull up there go a bit wider, but this kind of stuff. But the biggest breakthrough for me was because I decided to do it digitally. So it's all drawn in a really old version of Photoshop.

I had really old equipment which is all gone now but again, still not traditionally because I had tried some of the normal drawing, you know, you put it on board and all that. It would take me too long. There was too much black. I had hit upon this though. I couldn't afford to hire somebody to do all the black stuff. So I was gonna do it myself. And that was one consideration that ironically came because I got a Chinese brush one day and I started to do it with Chinese ink. A very quick sketch to see if I could get the shapes across but there wasn't enough expression in the artwork in the faces. So then I started to adopt that into this other thing. And it became a case then some of the book was laid out quickly in the digital setup on the wagon thing, the drawing tablet and some of that was done in coffee breaks or in lunch times on paper and how to scan it. So, I ended up with the whole thing laid out and it came to about 480 pages. 

The visual plan was worked out. I knew where I wanted to go with the style. I decided not to go too cartoony. I decided I would go out to some of my favorite comics, which were all these old Italian and like Hugo Pratt and people like that. I love all those old Adventure Comics. I went more classic adventure old school, but then I brought in my own visual ability into it. Meaning that I could get it done fast but not really, because how am I going to do this and how am I going to eat? Am I going to draw this? It was crazy because I had it all in rough form that I did in my spare time. That's easy, but it's a 24/7 job to draw something as big as that. So we had all this material again. There's another fellow I should mention, which is Hugh Welchman. And he is a producer director in animation, and me and him were working together on a version of this trying to get it going in live action, actually. We got close. It's all there. We even got some really world class concept artists to do some amazing artwork, which I've never shown in public, but it's all there. And I said to him, he made this movie. Loving Vincent. I don't know if you've seen it?

ARIEL: Yeah, of course. It's a beautiful film. I saw that you had worked on that.

PAUL: I helped him with the script, and I helped him with storyboarding. At the start I kind of played like devil's advocate. Him and his wife made it in their studio in Poland with this huge team of international painters, and it was amazing. But they brought me into almost be like the bad guy in the room, to ask the hard questions, you know? I don't know how much of what I did they used, but it was good fun. But anyway, then I suggested we should do a comic. Look, you're busy. I'm getting busy. I've moved back to art and I'm going to start developing my own projects. Why don't we do this as a book?

And he said, What does that mean? And I said, Well, it means first of all, it won't cost as much as a movie. It'll allow me to tell the story exactly as I want. I can work with Barry a bit, and we can flesh out any little difficult parts that don't translate from one medium to another. And because I've worked around a lot of different stuff, I'm kind of used to jumping between film or music or illustration. So we said how are we going to fund that? How are we going to do it? I need to take some time. We tried Kickstarter to raise money. And he had raised a certain amount of money to do some development. He said well, let's try a Kickstarter. So we did but we broke my layout into three volumes, 160-page volumes.

That's why the book could never be serialized, and I didn't want to serialize it, and it's not written or structured or designed to be done as a monthly comic. And it's almost like it's in three thirds. And it's not quite Act One, Act Two and Act Three, it's more like three even splits. But it was designed to be read. Now that the new edition’s come out, it's all collected, which is the way I really wanted to do it. So the original plan was, I'm going to do it as a 500-page monster, but do it in a way that if we have to release it in sections, it still will work. Yeah, so we ran three Kickstarters. And we only ever printed 750 of each, so they're gone.

We spent a lot of time on the productions, and in fairness, Dark Horse has been amazing doing the book with them. They instinctively gravitated towards the same production value that we did hardback, blah, blah, blah, you know, because it kind of deserves it in a way. So we did these three volumes. I have an old friend of mine from college who’s a brilliant graphic designer. He did the logo. We got Dee Cunniffe, who's a very well known colorist. He was really starting to break into that world four or five years ago, but he jumped on and helped me with the lettering, and he did a lot of the preparation for print. I wouldn't be that experienced in that world. So we really put a good little team together.

Running the three Kickstarters was hard. We raised enough money for me to take a little bit of time out to draw the books, then we had to do all the rewards and all that stuff. But luckily, he was making Vincent so we had access to edit suites and editors, and we had access to production assistants, we had access to a film crew, which was brilliant because I think anybody who did a Kickstarter without that support must be a nightmare.

ARIEL: I've done a Kickstarter without that support, and it is a nightmare.

PAUL: Yeah, you know, I'm also providing all those rewards, having somebody to deal with a printer like to not just do the books, but we made T-shirts, and god, it was just this shop of stuff, you know.

ARIEL: And my advice to everyone now is just don't don't do physical rewards, just digital rewards.

PAUL: Well, look, I agree with you. Because some of the rewards that we offered, it's just me being silly. Like I said to people that, oh, I'll do a drawing of you in a handstand for $100. And 100 people wanted a bloody portrait, so I have to draw 100 portraits. What's 100 times 100? That's good, that's a lot of money, right? Yeah, that's right. I know my maths is terrible when telling you 10 hundreds is 10 grand. Yeah. So we raised 10 grand from me doing 100 drawings. That's not too bad.

ARIEL: No, no, it's not bad at all. It's just a lot of work.

PAUL: A lot of work. So I had the luxury of not having a deadline really. Yeah. So I could go back through all my folders, all my notes, all my stuff over the years. Look at all the different jewelry, for example. I didn't pay any attention to it when I was laying the book other than a quick sketch to say it's around when it's square one. Later, I started to fit all of these things I had designed or found to the thing. I separated the four, what we now call the four provinces of Ireland, north, south, east and west.

There were actually five originally, but I didn't include that because that's a medieval construct. So because this thing is set in the Iron Age, I went to the four regions and basically I made each of the four peoples look a bit different. And my reasoning there was again, even before I designed, I had this idea that the people living in the West of Ireland — then Connacht which is beyond Limerick, and overlay Galway, on the other side of the Shannon which kind of divides our river. They were like the Aboriginal indigenous Ice Age people. So they're descendants of the original Europeans. I don't know what they call themselves back then — they probably didn't call themselves anything. And the people in the North who, Cullan’s people would have been a mix of those guys and what the Romans called the Picts, the Scottish, which is a fight that's still going on. That's going on to this day.

The links between Northern Ireland and Scotland are huge. And then the southern people where I'm from, because there's a lot of Iberian influence. You can still see it in the food, which is interesting. And in the music. We're a mix again of those people, those indigenous people that would have come up here from Northwest Spain, which is in the legend. And then the people in the east which is Dublin and the east coast of Ireland would have been the refugees from Roman Europe. So I just made this up and then I thought okay, that's good. That's a good basis. Now, how do they look? Okay, the guys in the far west are a bit rougher. They're probably still slightly in the Bronze Age. They wore tanned hides. They look a bit older and they have shaved heads. They have that haircut that has been in Ireland forever. It's back in fashion now which is the shaved head and the little bit of hair at the front. Cullan’'s people all have long hair.

They look a bit different. They're a bit more, I suppose, finer dressed, they would probably be able to weave a bit better and maybe have more access to Rome and Europe through their situation. The people in the south are not even in the story that much actually. And when you do come across them they're more like a mix of those Western types. I stole some Celt-Iberian looks in the designs. They wore slightly different clothes. And then the people from the East are classic Gauls in Britain. So they're from the Julius Caesar description. They're like, more adventurous versions of Asterix.

ARIEL: Yeah, and I love that there was this infusion of what I felt was Asterix and Obelix in the book as well.

PAUL: That's my little nod to that. 

ARIEL: It's appropriate for another comic book that's kind of saying F.U.to the Romans…

PAUL: Oh, yeah. There's a few little digs. If you look when you read through the book again, I won't give spoilers but there's a few little, you know, uppercuts to the idea that the Romans were spreading themselves too thinly around us. People say they didn't make it over here, which is not quite true. They were in Ireland. They had a fort in Ireland but as a trading post.

ARIEL: I know — when I've been to Ireland — back then, I was a Latin teacher. And they were like, the Romans never made it, and I would think, well, yeah, they did, but that's okay.

PAUL: I had a great meeting with the keeper of antiquities in the museum in Dublin. And he wrote the afterword in the book, which is really nice. Yeah. And he gave me a tour around the place and around the museum and we were just chatting and he says that's where they think the midlands of Ireland lost all its trees. It became this floodplain because the Irish chiefs or leaders were sending cattle to Britain really to feed the legions. But there was a fort where they would have had a fort, but it's true that they never culturally conquered us. But they did it with Christianity. They came into the backdoor with the sneaky priests. Yeah, at least if the Imperial guys had come we might have had a chance to fight them off but you have no hope against the slimy priests you know? Sorry if you’re Christian, but I have my own problems with so-called Patrick you know, he's a sneaky guy.

ARIEL: But yeah, like a snake?

PAUL: He didn't get rid of the snakes. He brought them in. But yeah, and that whole visual thing then fed into once the story was worked out. And the tempo and the pacing of the story and the size of characters in relation to each other. The different types of worlds they would have lived in, like Maeve lives on the West Coast and those hard cliffs. The Northern Irish live in the lush forests and the South. We never go to the South, we only really stay in the North. So the Southern and Eastern part, we only get a look in with the people but we never see it really in the book. It allowed me then to decide what kind of jewelry and what kind of weaponry and what kind of whatever these peoples would have because if I hadn't done that everybody would just look the same.

It would have been a bit like somebody making a Western, you know? I watched a lot of movies I hadn't seen in years, such as Dances with Wolves recently. What I liked was there was a decision made to make the Native Americans so visually different, that every time you saw them, you knew which was which, and even if you aren't aware of the culture, you know, and it's not your fault if you're from Johannesburg or from Delhi and you don't know much about Native America. So when you watch that film, you can immediately say, okay, so he's with the long haired guys. They're the nice ones, and those spiky haired guys out there are kind of bad ones. But what's great in the film is that, again, there's no good and bad between those Native Americans. The chief says they’re out for blood because we went after them last time. So they're always at it. Like humans are always killing each other. It doesn't matter where they are. Yeah, you know, but visually, the choice was made. I made the four peoples as distinct as I could even down to the weapons like the Western people were using these axes which are in the museum, the stone axe versus Cuchulain’s, people who were more obviously creating swords and spears and things.

AREIL: And you say that in the book though, our spirit of war is the one true enemy.

PAUL: Yeah, that's what it's all about. Yeah. As humans we have the inner desire to fight those we don't like or don't understand. And I think that's what we have to defeat. Now it's not the guy on the other side of the hill. So Morrigan is the enemy really, and what she stands for, that's the enemy. 

ARIEL: And I love the blood spattered black and white that the entire book is coated in and it's just such a lovely aesthetic choice for this story.

PAUL: Oh, thanks. Actually story drives everything because it's the reason the red is done. Well, the reason I did the book in black and white has nothing to do with story. It's just economics. We we could not have colored that in the time we had - just couldn't have done and so I decided to use the black and white as a you know, not just as a reason to get it done quicker, but also to help the story so it makes it feel a bit more dream-timey and the red is whenever the whenever the war spirit is around. It goes red and whenever Morrigan is there it has the craziness that comes on and goes. So not to give away too much to people but  there are choices made in the book, where the red comes and doesn't come. And it's all to do with her. It's all to do with that malevolent goddess.

ARIEL: Malevolent Morrigan…

PAUL: Yeah but it’s nothing to do with the figure of the woman. It's nothing to do with that. It's not to do with our gender or sex. It's just the fact that these tropes, these kind of archetypes, they represent ancient world stuff that sometimes we don't understand anymore and all I tried to do was my limited understanding, or talking to people who know more about it than me. I was trying to do a visual representation, but I was also trying to do it so that a modern audience might enjoy it. I didn't want to do I didn't want to do a very typical modern take on an ancient thing, you know, because Morrigan is really not that bad. It's that great line in Roger Rabbit when she says I'm not bad. I'm just drawn this way.

ARIEL: It's true. It's true. Jessica Rabbit. Yeah. Well, I want to thank you so very much for this interview. I just would love to just say  it is such a phenomenal achievement. And I hope that you are able to actually get something made film-wise with it.

PAUL: I'll be honest with you. I'm delighted the book is done, and what I love about Dark Horse - full credit to them - they did not change one comma, full stop or anything. They left it, even how we spell the word honour and colour is written the way we do it over here, not the way that you guys do it when you drop the “u”. And I said to Patrick, who's the editor, so do you want to — No, let's leave it, he said. It has a vibe, it has a feel. It's written the way we already speak. It's written the way the guys talk to each other in the story, the way the people interact. It has a flavor that myself and Barry tried to make sure that we didn't dilute it. 

We tried to make it a bit more accessible…You've been to Ireland, you said, so you know what I mean. When you come here, there's just the vibe in the way we are and the way we talk that I tried to put in the book, which probably is the only real modernization because the way Cullan talks with friends is more like sports players or soldiers or guys hanging out together. My talking, you know, I didn't want to do an opera. I didn't want these guys that would speak to each other like middle ages, like Ivanhoe. “We go to the place and we we will do it for the king.”  There’s none of that. To just sum it up, there's a certain healthy disrespect of authority in Ireland. We have a healthy disrespect for authority. Yeah, and our leaders don't get off light, a lot of the time. And I think that runs through the book that even the kings and queens even though they are kings and queens that people are like, yeah, not for long. Keep that up and you won't be for long.

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Ariel Baska has had many past lives, but right now she’s hosting Ride the Omnibus, parked at the intersection of pop culture and social justice.