Heart Beats

Acclaimed British author and illustrator Bryan Talbot presents a sample of the in-depth annotations from the CD-ROM version of his superb political fantasy series HEART OF EMPIRE, including his musings on Princess Diana, magic mushrooms and why rats are better than pigeons.
30 July 2001

In a pioneering move for the comics industry, Dark Horse is releasing Bryan Talbot's excellent HEART OF EMPIRE on CD-ROM this month, complete with original pencilled artwork and expansive annotations by Bryan himself. In a Ninth Art exclusive, we're reprinting just a few of those annotations to give you a taste of Bryan's observations on history, religion, royalty and rats. If you enjoy these, inquire about the CD-ROM at your local comic store.

Britannia

The Latin name for Britain. The personification of the country as Britannia dates from the time of the Roman colonisation, her image first appearing on a Roman coin circa 142 - 139 AD. The Romans often adopted native deities as aspects of their own and it is quite likely that Britannia was based on Brigantia, a version of the Great Mother Brigit and the goddess of the Celtic Brigantes and linked by the Romans with Minerva and Cybele.

The first reference to her in literature is in Samuel Pepys' Diary in 1665, and he only mentions it because of the outrageous choice of model for Britannia on a new coin: Frances Stewart.

"La Belle Stewart" was famous for being about the only woman at court that Charles II failed to shag. He had a passionate crush on her and did all he could to get into her skirts, including organising lavish balls in her honour and writing poems designed to win her over, to no avail. He had it so bad that his aristocratic cronies even formed "The Committee for the Getting of Mistress Stewart for the King" and arranged a huge banquet with the sordid aim of getting her so drunk that he could whisk her off to bed with no resistance. This is now called date-rape. The dastardly plot was foiled when the Queen turned up after getting wind of it.

Deciding to make do with a pin-up, Charles commissioned a painting of her as Britannia, in which role she has appeared on British coins to this very day, currently adorning our 50p piece. It would have amused him greatly to see his unattainable beauty in the role of a virgin goddess. The coins bearing Britannia (with the attributes of Minerva) began in his reign, based on the Roman design and using Stewart's profile.

Albion

Albion is the oldest acknowledged name for Britain and one used by William Blake as part of his peculiar religious mythology as an idealised version of the country. The name goes back far into antiquity when, according to myth, these islands were populated by giants, descendants of Noah, who settled around 2000BC. The king of the giants was called Albion and was the son of Poseidon/Neptune - presumably the land took on his name.

Another tradition has it that the name comes from the Princess Albina , head of a boatload of fifty women, all of whom were sisters and all of whom had been banished from Syria for killing their husbands! It gets better. Presumably horny from months at sea, these protofeminists set about conjuring up demons for a bit of sexual R & R, there being no native men as, with the exception of themselves, the island was unpopulated. The result of their wicked couplings was the aforementioned race of giants. You can see we Brits got off to a good start.

Another theory is that it comes from Alba - The White Isle. Approaching Britain by crossing the channel at its narrowest point, the first thing you see is the white cliffs of Dover.

The race of giants dwindled after a defeat at the hands of Hercules, but lingered on for a good few hundred years, mostly in Cornwall where they spawned legends such as Jack the Giant Killer and Gogmagog. By the time the Trojans arrived, they were all but gone.

Albion as the first name for Britain is certainly well documented, as early as the 3rd Century BC by the Greeks. Supposedly this was before the land link to the rest of Europe sank beneath the sea, "Britain" itself deriving from the word "brit", meaning a "separated place".

Pagan Festivals

In England, every November 5th there are fireworks and bonfires instigated to celebrate the demise of the "Gunpowder Plot" of 1605, when a conspiracy by Catholic gentry to blow up King James the First and the English Houses of Parliament was foiled when Guy Fawkes, the planter of the explosives, was arrested and spilled the beans. Effigies of Guy Fawkes are still burned on the bonfires every year, an amazing propaganda coup by James' government.

Actually, the bonfires existed before, a European tradition that goes way back into antiquity, and were appropriated, in much the same way that Christianity appropriated the pagan celebrations of the vernal equinox (as Easter) and the winter solstice (as Christmas). The two great Celtic feasts were May Day (Beltaine or Beltane) and November 1 (Samain or Samhain), marking the beginning of summer and the start of winter: important events to a people bound to the land and reliant on the seasonal cycle. Beltane was a time of fertility rituals and mass fucking in the fields to encourage better crops. Samain was a much darker feast involving terrifying rituals and human sacrifice in the hope of surviving winter by appeasing their gods.

The eve of these feasts were occasions of great Magick when supernatural beings and otherworldly forces could enter and move in the world of mortals (May Day eve/Walpurgis Night and All Souls' Eve or Hallow'een) and, because of this, later became the dates of the most important Witch sabbats of the year.

As I said, the English Hallow'een bonfire was hijacked and became Guy Fawkes Night (moved to the date of the plot, November 5) but the traditional Hallow'een fires still go on in villages all over Northern and Eastern Europe, where effigies of witches are burned to rid the countryside of them. This in itself is an attempt at sympathetic magic and therefore very hypocritical of the villagers!

For more information on the above festivals than you could possibly know what to do with, read the classic The Golden Bough by Sir James Gordon Frazer, a ripper source of all things folklorish. Funnily enough, the residents of St Bede's Terrace, the small private street in Sunderland I recently moved into, have bonfires. They had two last year, one on May Day Eve, the other on Hallow'een. I'm just waiting to hear the opening music from Rosemary's Baby...

Magic Mushrooms

The Amanita Muscaria or Fly Agaric mushroom has an hallucinogenic constituent that is similar in chemical composition to LSD, as opposed to Liberty Caps, (seen in the foreground of this and the next panel) which are similar to mescaline. This, and the fact that they induce initial vomiting leads them to be classed as"poisonous"in fungi identification manuals.

Ritualistic consumption of Fly Agaric for celebratory or shamanistic use is a centuries-old tradition in Northern Europe. In Lapland, the mother of the household would chew the things first before soggily handing them out to family or visitors partaking of the ritual, in the process of which removing the chemical that caused the vomiting, therefore spewing up on behalf of everybody else. Other Lap traditions include drinking the urine of reindeer that had previously been fed on the fungi. Reindeer stew, by the way, is excellent and I thoroughly recommend it to anyone visiting northern Finland.

Fly Agaric was also widely used in druidic ritual and later in medieval witchcraft. One theory is that this is where the tales of witches flying on broomsticks or with the aid of "flying ointment" came from - after gobbling a few of these buggers, or absorbing the ointment through contact with the vagina or anus, you could well believe you were flying. They're the toadstools always associated with visions of fairies and pixies and the distinctive red-cap-with-white-dots mushrooms still crop up in children's fairy story illustrations.

Rats

As many readers know, I'm particularly fond of rats, having kept them for over ten years. I couldn't have written THE TALE OF ONE BAD RAT without being familiar with their habits. They're sweet creatures if treated properly, very social and make excellent pets, especially for children. Whereas the stupid hamster or gerbil will bite indiscriminately, the superior intelligent rat won't. Biologist Professor Jack Cohen regularly gives talks at schools and would never take along mice and such, but has no qualms about taking along a basketful of rats, knowing that the kids can play with them, stroke them, drape them over their shoulders and so on, without them biting the children.

The worst thing about rats, though, is their life span. Whereas gerbils can live to 15 years (and toads can reach 25 or more), rats only live to a maximum of 3 years, though most only live to 2, having evolved to multiply fast in times of plenty and die off fast in times of drought. This is why I no longer keep them.

Rats, of course, have a bad rep after having taken the rap for spreading the Black Death, despite the fact that the fleas that actually did spread the plague could also be carried by people, cats and dogs, and could hibernate for months on end in the holds of ships etc. Still, we had to blame something other than ourselves, I suppose.

Rats are programmed by evolution to stop and give themselves a thorough wash about every twenty minutes, if there's nothing more pressing going on. The average street pigeon carries 500% more germs than the average sewer rat.

Lady Diana

Diana was a minor character in THE ADVENTURES OF LUTHER ARKWRIGHT and I cheerfully wrote her in here as a drooling, straitjacketed imbecile in the hellish mental institution of Bedlam following her embarrassing Panorama TV interview which clearly indicated that she was a couple of rubies short of a tiara. People now forget that the general British perception of Di before her tragic death was that of a well-meaning but batty jet-setting bimbo with dietary and mental problems, dating an international playboy (described on Radio 4 as "the last in a long line of unsuitable lovers").

Four days before I had to pencil the Bedlam sequence, I walked into a store and saw the headlines: "Diana Dead" (they stopped referring to her as "Di" for quite a while after). I was furious. How could she do this to me? Worse still, the whole nation, and indeed the world, went into what was described by someone at the time as "mob grief". She'd been instantly transmuted from a dotty millionaire aristo into a saint. For a few days I didn't know what to do, not wanting to upset this multitude of heartbroken adherents of "The Peoples' Princess", "The Queen of Hearts".

I thought of changing her name, which would have instantly removed a layer of depth from the character, but then I thought "Bugger it, I'm standing by the story." As it was, when I came to draw her, older and emaciated after her years in Bedlam and with a traumatised expression never documented in any photograph of the real Di, it didn't look much like her.

Of course, I've never had a single complaint, so I needn't have worried.

Bryan Talbot is the author and illustrator of HEART OF EMPIRE and THE TALE OF ONE BAD RAT.

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