2000AD - Slaine - The Horned God

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I'm very sorry I wasn't able to finish this off yesterday (or depending on where you are in the world the day before that). Hopefully there's still some interest.

Slaine is set in a very ancient version of Britain before the water released from melting glaciers and ice sheets completely divided the land-mass - there's a map here >>49758154.

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SOTH!

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It was revealed very early on in the series that the Drunes planned to deliberately melt the ice in order to flood the territories of their enemies. Cathbad, the chief druid of Slaine's tribe, believes that in this they are doing the work of the Earth Goddess, but surely that cannot be true?

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The Warp Spasm, where Earth Power flows into a warrior and transforms them into hideously strong abominations, is based on the Irish mythological hero Cú Chulainn's ríastrad. It in turn inspired a Gift in Werewolf the Forsaken 2e.

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>Sometimes I am your mother and hold you...
>Sometimes I am your sister and befriend you...

Just want to say that you haven't been making these threads in vain. I've been enjoying it atleast.

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>and sometimes your lover who will stick one in your back.

Strictly speaking, she said nothing of the sort Slaine. >>49758610 >>49758619

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>>49834307
Thank you, that's genuinely good to hear. I know these other 2000AD stories are never as popular as Dredd, but I they are well worth reading. Probably more useful for tabletop too, given how most games are fantasy related.

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*I THINK they're worth reading, damn ham hands.

>>49834345
Yeah. thanks for doing these. Still reading through all of them.

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There was a good thread about Druids earlier too, would have been good if I'd been able to start posting while it was live.

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A recurring call back to one of Slaine's earliest adventures. His rescue of Medb has had probably the most consequences of anything in the strip.

As the first thread appears to have dropped out of the archive
https://archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/49711205/#49712793

The same period of stories has Medb's first meeting with Feg as a child which goes more into their peculiar religion.

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Also forgot to mention, the nature of Macrobes like Crom and some other bizarre concepts were explored in much more detail in Time Killer. Although most of the more sci-fi concepts from that series of stories were quietly dropped soon after, bits and pieces do still come up from time to time to this day.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bOKsOveYD0

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Crap man, look at that. That's like his stomach plug, on the ground back there. You don't see that every day. I mean that doesn't even seem possible if you think about it, with body organs and cartilage and bones. I mean I'm no doctor or nothin' but that was like one clean chunk.

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Slaine's had some fantastic boasts over the course of these stories, but I love Slough Feg's longer speeches with all their wonky syntax.

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And I bet you thought that belt buckle was impractical.

Totally not symbolic either, nope.

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Foreshadowing >>49812129

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This conversation is very similar to the one Slaine has with Ragall, his immediate predecessor as king of his tribe, as he lay dying here >>49755044

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BY CROM!

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I thought I was missing a few pages here, but apparently not. This is a dream sequence Ukko has which he apparently wakes from before the next page.

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As previously mentioned, these pages with Nest and Ukko are probably inspired by Pat Mills' real world conversations with his editors at 2000AD. Probably his artist as well - Mills aimed to revitalise the fantasy genre by adding a strong streak of feminism, environmentalism, Celtic mythology and neo-paganism, while Simon Bisley has built his entire career on "big hairy men, big naked women, and big bloody weapons!"

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sator_Square

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Oh no

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This part draws more on the real myths which Mills was drawing on for Slaine in general and this story in particular. If I can work out which version he was using I'll reference it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Treasures_of_the_Tuatha_D%C3%A9_Danann

>>49834823
F

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>>49834879
᚛ᚃ᚜

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These are pleasing pages to me!

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Bisley's last cover for the Horned God.

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Gann was the big nosed turnip eating king who originally owned the Screaming Spear of the Sun.

>>49834916
Ukko, you little shit.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPoWBX4MnWc

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~The End~

>>49834999
Thanks, man.

Solid trips to end it all on.

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http://www.mediafire.com/file/2dzgd06g4oyhr9o/2000AD_%23688-698_Sl%C3%A1ine_-_The_Horned_God_%28Book_III%29_%28Simon_Bisley%29.cbr

And Slaine did rule for seven years and at the end of his time was put to death, as was the custom of those times. But that was not the end of his tale, for the Goddess ever has need for heroes and it turns out that dwarves are surprisingly hard to kill....

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>>49835048
Danu clearly blesses this thread. Who wants to sacrifice themselves to celebrate it? Come on, don't be shy, its a huge honour!

It would be a year before Slaine returned to 2000AD with 1991's Demon Killer, this time without The Biz on art. He'd be back eventually though, with 2013's 30 year anniversary story "The Book of Scars" (which unfortunately makes no sense posting at this juncture because its a time travel story that puts the old Slaine into all his previous major adventures and the Horned God is only half way through!). Its interesting to see how Bisley's art changed in the intervening 20-odd years though.

Thanks senpai pai

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Just had a thought.

I had hoped that I'd be able to carry on with the next story here tomorrow, but given the problems at my end the last few days it might be prudent to link this in advance.

https://www.mediafire.com/folder/2pd2yme2c2uws/Demon_Killer

Be warned, Demon Killer can be absurdly violent at times. I mean, yeah, Durrr, It's a Slaine story, but seriously its very graphic in places. However, it does feature Slaine murdering thousands of Romans in a period setting, the return of one a certain three-eyed scamp and, despite quite a few call backs to the story, an absolute minimum of Time Killer's weird sci-fi mysticism.

>>49835627
No worries, glad people enjoyed it! A lot of people mark the Horned God as the high point of Slaine overall, and while there's a couple of stories I really like after it (particularly the one set in Arthurian England) there's a whole lot of iffy ones too. The ones from the 00s with Clint Langley's photomanipulated art are apparently much better, but I've never been a huge fan of the artwork.

>>49835768
I actually kinda prefer the non-Horned God good stuff to the Horned God. It's okay, but I think it gets a bit wanky at times.

>>49835704
Thanks man.

>>49835704
Shakaranon, you da man.

>>49835704
>https://www.mediafire.com/folder/2pd2yme2c2uws/Demon_Killer

Thank you for all of this based anon!

Bump for Danu

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>>49836251
I've got to level with you anon - the wankyness only gets worse from here on out. I don't know exactly what Pat Mills problem was during the 90s, but he really got up on his high horse about a lot of things and the quality does suffer. I wish I could find it now, but he said something along the lines of "readers who complain that my stories are too complex should find something else more to the their abilities, like Thomas the Tank Engine". He did lighten up towards the end of the 90s and into the 00s though, or at the very least channelled some of the crankiness back into delightful insanity.

I should be able to do Demon Killer and associated stories soon, I just have to go and edit quite a lot of pages. After all, nobody wants to see muscular naked ladies dancing and rubbing themselves, do they? That would be WEIRD.

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Just realised there were a couple of stories before the main event, give us a sec.

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Turns out Ukko is much more successful with the ladies then you might think. Especially when he's writing the accounts.

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I'm afraid I don't have a better quality version of this one, sorry.

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Celtic marriage counselling: powerful brainwashing or tied to a tree so you have to resolve your difficulties before you get eaten by monsters.

Such a wise people.

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Awwww. So sweet.

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We now return to our regularly scheduled psychotic violence.

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Well that was quick. Good night everyone!

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Nah, not really.

Nifty bit of loot there though.

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This is a recap of Slaine's first encounter with the... well, let's call him a demon for simplicity's sake... Elfric

https://archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/49715579/#49726725

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Some very subtle edits have been made to some of these pages so as not to offend any Druids. I'm sure you won't even notice.

Pssst...
http://i.imgur.com/G0kZHgS.jpg[/spoilers]

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I just spotted I missed a bit in that last pages. Oh Soth

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This story is based on real events rather than myths and legends. Kind of.

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Won't say any more than that for the moment because it does spoil how things turn out a bit.

Although that said, its been some 2000-odd years. Its not exactly hot off the presses.

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The historical Boudica was the queen of an Iron Age / early Roman British tribe called the Iceni who lived in the eastern part of England which in the present day is mostly Norfolk and bits of Suffolk. While her husband Prasutagus was alive the Iceni were nominally independent allies of Rome. When he died he left his kingdom jointly to his daughters and to the Emperor.

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Rome ignored his will.

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They seized his entire estate, confiscated the donations which had been made to influential Britons, and had Boudica flogged.

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Boudica and Prasutagus's daughters were also raped.

Folk music has also always been a sign of evil.

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You don't want to see any of this debauchery, trust me.

http://i.imgur.com/YDS0Dtx.jpg

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The "berries of the Golden Bough" are mistletoe, in case you were wondering. Some species are ridiculously toxic, and it has a long association with druidic rites.

The Golden Bough was also the name of a very influential anthropology book on magic and religion published at the turn of the 20th century.

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Tactics!

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Attacking Boudica and the Iceni proved to be a terrible mistake. Allying with another local tribe they moved to attack Camulodunum, present day Colchester, where a number of Legion veterans had settled. These veterans had a reputation for mistreating the local populace terribly, a reputation not helped by the raising of a temple to the former Emperor Claudius at the local's expense.

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I know I generally don't censor the horrendous violence these stories, but this page was a bit too much for me.

Elfric kills the centurion by embedding his knife through his head via the mouth and outlines his plan to draw Slaine into Colchester, where he and the inhabitants will be offered up to the Dark Gods of Cythrawl.

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This chamber exits in the real world, sort of. Large parts of the superstructure of the real temple of Claudius survived into the Saxon period a thousand years later, so much so that when the Normans invaded in 1066 they used it as the basis for a castle. 17th century excavators eventually found the underside of the concrete podium of the Temple on which the castle had been built, but not before they had created large vaults. Elfric's temple is based very closely on these vaults (which you can actually visit, if you're interested and / or want to sacrifice a loved one to the primordials beyond time).

>>49849478
This art makes it difficult for me to be disgusted by any violence.

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Diluvials appeared in Time Killler and are a servitor "root race" of mankind adapted/created by the Cyth to serve them. They're not terribly bright and they wear their skeletons on the outside.


>>49849700
Yeah, I'm like that most of the time. That particular page does bother me a bit though. Maybe because its a "still" murder rather than an action shot? Might be just me, this story was one of the first I ever read as a sproglet and it disturbed the crap out of me.

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Reference to The Tomb of Terror, where Slaine caused a creature called Grimnismal to go mad and warp itself to death.

>>49835704
Where the hell does he begin and end? I can't wrap my head around this picture.

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>>49849790
Best not to try and fathom the power of the Warp Spasm, its a really good excuse for the artist to throw basic anatomy out the window.

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This seems like a good point to pause and stop for the night as we're a little over half-way through the story and there's only space for about five pages left in this thread. Hopefully its all been of some use to someone.

If you've enjoyed the Roman setting, 2000AD recently developed a new character called Aquilla, a former slave who was condemned to death but is now an invulnerable champion of Ammit the Devourer. He travels the Roman world hunting for evil men to sate his new master, encountering all sorts of ancient nasties. "Britannia" by Peter Miligan and from Valiant Comics has also started recently and is a promising ancient Roman supernatural detective story.
http://www.avclub.com/article/valiant-exclusive-britannia-introduces-ancient-rom-236914

>>49849809
Basic, advanced and every other notes about anatomy that any person ever has ever made about drawing anatomy.

>>49849884
Thanks for dumping all of these.

I have an issue with a friend who just started trying to read through it, but some of the threads have archived. sup/tg/ doesn't seem to have it, any suggestions?

>>49851915

Try 4plebs?

archive.4plebs.org/tg/

>>49851953
Thanks, man. I'll let him know.