About Hibernia.

My name is David McDonald and I am based in Co Mayo in the west of Ireland. I have always been a fan of comics - from the Beano to V for Vendetta, but 2000ad has always been my favourite. When I was younger, I read my brothers annuals from the seventies and as a result, I have also a keen interest in older british comics, for example, Valiant, Action, Battle, Scream etc.  This has lead to quite an extensive large collection of these in my comic collection. 

Last year Titan Books in London put feelers out through the web looking for anyone with a collection of Lion and Valiant comics, from which they wanted to scan the pages of the Steel Claw and The Spider to make collected editions (which are now available). A mutual aquaintaince referred Titan Books to me, and I agreed to loan out my copies of Lion and Valiant to them to scan the pages for their collections.    I also helped them with the page count, story lengths, and researched some details of the creators.

Being a collector, my dream has always been to work in comics, whether to write or draw, but having no proficiency in either of these, that was never going to be an option! When Titan borrowed the comics from me, i thought if Titan can do it so can I!

So the automatic choice was Doomlord, a 2000ad story trapped in the Eagle.  Dont get me wrong, Eagle was a good comic, and had some great one offs such as The Tower King, The Thirtheenth Floor and Comrad Bronski.  However, most of its continuing stories were well written and drawn but lacked the punch and originality of 2000ad, with the exception of Doomlord.  This is not surprising considering it was written by Wagner and Grant, the men responsible for most of 2000ad's big hitters.

So, once the decision was made, I contacted the copyright holder, the Dan Dare Corporation, and put my proposal to them.  The good news was, they indicated they were interested, but they wanted to see what I would come up with. 

When I got this news I took out my copies of Eagle and proceeded to scan and clean up the pages, which took a considerable amount of time.  I also used copies of the Best of Eagle monthly (when the pages were too hard to clean), but I preferred to use the original comic, just in case the reprint Best of Eagle pages were of inferior quailty.  The copyright holders were pleased with the results and gave the green light on the project.  I went ahead and got them printed locally and started selling!

The print run is  limited to 2000 copies, and I took the decision to distribute them myself due to costs. I am alway giving out at how expensive Graphic Novels are, so I wanted to keep the price of Doomlord as low as possible.  If I had chosen to go with a distributor it would have doubled the price of Doomlord, and since this my first publication, I was also hoping that the low cost would increase sales.

So, so far so good.  Forbidden Planet International, Ace Comics, Gosh, Travelling Man in the UK and Sub City in Ireland  are all stocking Doomlord - along with a few other comic shpos in the UK.  Also mail order sales have been strong.

This website is an opportunity to let people know what I am intending to do and give people an idea of the quailty and appeal of Doomlord.

I hope you enjoy visiting this site.  If you have any comments, or would like to discuss any comic related topics, please go to our discussion forum.  If you would like to contact me directly, you can do so at doomlord@eircom.net.  Enjoy! 

David