Phill from GCHQ - page 57

The wee bairn - Page 57 of the cartoon about Phill from GCHQ - a free comic that I have been working on since September 2016.

Introduction to this weeks page

First - sorry for the long delay.

It is quite some time since we heard from your protagonist, Phill, and we are deep into a flashback that is taking place in the late seventies and mid eighties: the tragic and Gothic story about Eleanor Knight, the insane grandmother of Gwendolyn (the high priestess of a small pagan sect) and the first known person to be chosen by the three evil Gods.

The story has taken a more grim and naturalist turn in this eighties detour. I have tried to create drawings of some highly emotional situations: a mother that nurses a child she is about to leave, a mother who realises that her own actions have driven her daughter to despair, and Eileen, who watches and slowly is dragged into the tragedy. If you look at this old post you can read a bit about how Eileen got to be more than just a caretaker (something about a heater) and how the story is created.

Some notes:

The ornaments in the upper part of the page is inspired by some real bronze age ornaments that I saw while Vincent @vcelier was visiting me and that I went to photograph Thursday <- see the photos in the link.
The gold necklace that Eleanor is wearing is a torc, a piece of jewellery worn by Celtic nobility.
Wee bairn - means small child in Scottish. Remember that both Eileen Fraser (who tells the story about Eleanor) and Judith Gunn (who listens... see page 55) are Scottish. I like the word because it derives from my own language. Barn means child in both Danish, Swedish and Norwegian, and was brought to Scotland and Northern England by the Vikings.
The strange sentence: "... the eye of sauron painted red on the petrol-tank ..." is taken directly from the Scottish author Iain Banks' first novel, The Wasp Factory. In that story another mother, a hippie (hence the Tolkien reference), leaves her child just like Badb does. Why a punk rocker in 1985 has it on her motorcycle is up to the readers imagination. I just knew she had to have it too.

Happy reading.

Translations

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