West Clare goes graphic for Zaucer of Zilk

The creator of a new, internationally-released graphic novel The Zaucer of Zilk has given new life to some of Clare’s streetscapes in this popular comic strip.
The Zaucer of Zilk creator Brendan McCarthy, whose parents hail from Mullagh in West Clare, spent last summer in the family home. Needing some photographic locations for the story’s opening scenes, he headed for Miltown Malbay and Ennis with his ideas and a digital camera.
“I was living back in West Clare last summer and that’s when I started drawing the comic artwork, after the scripts had been approved. I needed some locations and I had decided to use treated photographic backgrounds for some of the pictures. Miltown Malbay was perfect for the look I was after, which is based on the opening Liverpool part of the Yellow Submarine film.
“Also, some of the shop fronts in Ennis were used and the interior of one of the old-style sweetshops that are still going strong in the town. The beautiful old shop fronts of these Clare towns were perfect for the design of the strip – after getting lots of digital Photoshop treatment to make them look rainy and forbidding,” he told The Clare Champion.
Brendan’s parents met and married in London in the 1950s. Although Brendan was brought up in London, he spent much of his childhood in Clare, playing amongst the haystacks and fairy forts where the local folklore and Celtic legends had a big impression on his young imagination.
The Zaucer of Zilk is Brendan’s latest creation and starts this week in the popular weekly UK comic book 2000AD, which is home for the famous Judge Dredd strip. It will also be republished as a comic series in the USA and then collected into a graphic novel later in the year.
Brendan showed a talent for drawing when he was a child and eventually ended up going to Art College in Chelsea in London where he studied painting and did a Fine Arts Degree in painting and then a further degree in film.
Speaking to The Clare Champion Brendan explained how he came to work in the industry and his hopes to create an Irish themed graphic novel.
“I was always interested in painting and drawing and folklore stories and the Celtic legends were always interesting to me. When I left college I needed to get some work and I spent a few years as a painter but that meant dire poverty. In order to make a living I got a job drawing comics and it just so happened that that industry really took off in the 1980s. Then you had the big British invasion of America where the big British comic book artists and writers took over the American industry for about a decade.
“Then you had The Sandman by Niel Gaiman and Alan Moore doing The Watchmen, these big multimillion comic books started happening and were mainly provided by British writers and artists with the exception of Garth Ennis, who is a very big writer from Ireland and myself and my co-writer at that time Peter Milligan. Milligan was also of Irish parents. As I got more work in America, I migrated over to Hollywood working on film and television where the major studios are over there for animation,” he outlined.
Brendan has been producing comics or graphic novels as they are now known for 30 years although he moved out of the industry for about 15 years to work in animation and films in Hollywood and elsewhere.
“I have worked for the famous British comic magazine 2000AD back in the 1980s and I had recently done some work for Marvel and DC Comics in the USA. So when I met the editor of 2000AD last year at a Comic Book Convention in the UK, I pitched him the basic idea for a new series and he liked it and wanted to see more. I had the loose idea for a comic called The Zaucer of Zilk as a kind of more fantastical Harry Potter type of story, with visuals along the line of The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine animated film,” he explained.
When he began pinning the story down he then approached the comic’s writer Al Ewing to work on it with him.
“That’s when we really got to grips with the storyline and got the characters working. Al is an upcoming writer who is highly regarded and so I knew we could come up with a good gripping yarn,” he said. 
It is among Brendan’s hopes that the comic series is picked up and developed into a film or television series. He explained comic and graphic novels are big business these days, with some of them selling millions of copies.
“The best thing that can happen is if you create a new character that takes off and it leads to an ongoing series of graphic novels. The Tin Tin books have sold many millions of copies all over the world in the last 40 years. In Japan, their comics, known as manga, are massive sellers. In France it’s a huge industry too. The graphic novels you see in bookshops these days are a big success story in publishing, having gone through a huge boom in sales in the last decade,” he said.
Brendan is also planning on putting together an Irish-themed graphic novel, where he hopes to feature the Famine and the coffin ships that took press-ganged Irish men off to America and to the penal colony now known as Australia.
“I’m interested in what an Irish country man of that historical era would have made of the nomadic Aboriginal tribal sorcerers that he may have encountered in the Outback deserts,” he revealed.
Brendan is also looking forward to a new film that he co-wrote being released next year called Mad Max: Fury Road, a new installment of the famous 1980s movie series that starred a young Mel Gibson.