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A panel from Gary Moloney\u2019s comic When the Blood Has Dried, which landed him his big break in the U.S<\/p>\nFrom an early age, Wilton native Gary Moloney was captivated by stories and the world of comics.<\/p>\n
As a child, he could hardly have imagined that his life-long passion for writing would one day lead him to create stories for Marvel Comics – his childhood favourite. <\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve been writing and telling stories since I was very young, whether it was to entertain myself, my family, or my friends, whether that was making things up on the fly or writing things down on the back of a copybook,\u201d said Gary.<\/p>\n
It was a Cork City Library initiative that opened the door for Moloney\u2019s hobby to take shape. <\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I was in transition year in 2008, Cork City Library put on the first of its graphic novel projects, and this is something that they\u2019re doing to this day every year, where they get a group of teen writers and artists, and they bring a professional writer and artist in to coach them and show them how to put together a series of short comics.\u201d <\/p>\n
A panel from Gary Moloney\u2019s comic When the Blood Has Dried, which landed him his big break in the U.S<\/p>\n
Moloney says he had no idea what a comic book writer did or how they worked, and initially thought he might be a cartoon artist.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve been reading comics since I was young, but I didn\u2019t know how they came together. I drew my own comics as well, but my strength lay in writing; I had no idea how a comic script came together. I didn\u2019t understand the formula.\u201d <\/p>\n
Thanks to Cork City Library, he started to understand what it would be like to be a writer. <\/p>\n
\u201cI saw what a comic strip looked like, and I loved the storytelling mechanisms that you can only really do in comics, because it\u2019s that mix of the words and pictures. In terms of the pacing of it, in terms of being able to pause, and for the reader to be able to control how long they stay on a particular image, it fascinated me. I decided I really wanted to write comics in some shape or form.\u201d <\/p>\n
Moloney says there was something in the water in his school, Col\u00e1iste an Spioraid Naoimh in Bishopstown.<\/p>\n
\u201cOf the comic writers who are writing professionally from Ireland, two of us come from that school.<\/p>\n
\n \u201cRory McConville, who is a prolific professional comic writer, was a year ahead of me in school, so there was something in the water there. They really encouraged writing, and the school took part in another Cork City Library writing project called the Unfinished Book Project.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
Once the door was open, Moloney wrote consistently and co-founded the small-press collective Limit Break Comics in 2017, which led to his big U.S break. <\/p>\n
\u201cI got a break in the U.S with my own book, When The Blood Has Dried. It is a fantasy spaghetti western about an adventurer who committed terrible acts in her past and tries to escape that life. While she manages to escape for a while, eventually, years later, that life comes knocking on the door again.<\/p>\n
\u201cI had spent many years self-publishing comics, short stories, and larger anthologies, so breaking into the U.S comic world means a lot.\u201d <\/p>\n
Moloney was then hired to put an Irish twist on an old icon, Flash Gordon. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe year I was hired, they were doing a reboot for the character\u2019s 90th anniversary. I studied law and Irish at UCC, and it always bugged me that comics, like Asterix, were being translated, but there was nothing with flair, like Batman or Spider-Man.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen the opportunity to translate the modern Flash Gordon strip into Irish arose, I was so delighted.\u201d <\/p>\n
When Marvel contacted Moloney, he says he could not believe that he was getting to be part of a world he had been reading for so long. <\/p>\n
\n \u201cWhen I got the email from Marvel, I had to step outside to compose myself and figure out what was happening.\n <\/p>\n
\u201cI got into comics to tell stories; it didn\u2019t matter whether I was telling my own or someone else\u2019s, but some part of you always wants to play with the characters you grew up with, and that meant so much to you.\u201d <\/p>\n
Marvel is a large entity with many characters that together form a tapestry of stories. Did Moloney have much creative freedom? He says Marvel was collaborative from day one. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe editors came to me because they had read When The Blood Has Dried, and they wanted me to bring that sensibility to their characters.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou are playing within a shared universe, but they came to me with a character, Hit-Monkey, who hasn\u2019t had as many comics as, say Spider-Man, so there was a lot of scope there to do my own thing. We were reintroducing him after he\u2019d been out of comics for a while, but had had this successful TV show on Disney Plus. The comic gives fans the chance to spend more time with him.\u201d <\/p>\n
Moloney, who works in the legal profession alongside his comic work, admits that he may have been inspired to enter law by Marvel\u2019s iconic fighting lawyer, Matt Murdock. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt is not untrue to say Matt Murdock was an influence; everyone knows that Daredevil is one of my favourite characters. Anyone who reads Hit-Monkey will see that the villains he goes up against have a connection to Daredevil.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf it was the only chance I got to work in the Marvel Universe, I wasn\u2019t going to not touch on that.\u201d <\/p>\n