This is a provisional entry for the next Bata Neart after the baby break.
If this text isn’t modified, it might mean that things are a little crazy. I’ll keep you updated, and thank you again for your unending patience!
Bata Neart
Irish Magical Girls!
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I guess we should be glad she’s not Greek. Then Aoife could mess with Áine by telling her to give the coins to Charon. 😛
Welcome back!
@Azrael lol that’s great.
@Azreal: Thankfully she isn’t. Otherwise things would start to get all ‘Percy Jackson’y on us…which would please no-one…at all! 😀
@Henry: Thanks 😀 Is good to be back.
FYI, we’re about 8 pages away from the end of Book 1. There-after my plan is to share the one-shot Bata Neart manga that I’m being trained to draw with Nao Yazawa and Manga School Nakano! It’ll be a 16-page non-cannon story and will read in the Japanese Right-to-left format. After that, I’m going to use what I have learned to bring us into Book 2 & Chapter 6!
I’d be willing to bet the driver has heard people saying far stranger things while getting on his bus. For that matter, judging by his expression, the girls don’t seem to be registering on his weird meter at all. I’m thinking he must have spent some time driving Saturday night routes…
Yet again you mirror my thoughts exactly, Kessy 🙂
It would seem that things are a little crazy today? I hope it is the good kind of crazy (oh, you should all go read Head Trip) and I wish you good if short sleep. Anyways, nice page! Good that she is equally amazed by the receipt! 😀
@Kessy: He must just think they’re drunk. XD I would what with some of them half dresses. *coughAoifecough*
Awww. The faces! 😀
@Kessy: Nothing compared to a weekend night-bus in Dublin…..trust me on that….
@O8h7w: Things have gotten fairly stable now and I’ve started to update the post text 😀 Most of the craziness now is due to my course at Manga School Nakano 😀
@Jen: Aoife acts barely sober half the time anyway, so he’d likely think that. (Aoife rarely drinks since she gets drunk easily. Drunk Aoife is….interesting).
Glad you like the faces 🙂
@ Rawr: Really glad to hear that things are settling down. ^_^ As for weekend nights in Dublin, you don’t have to convince me. I used to live in a town called State College, Pennsylvania. You’ll never guess what the most prominent feature of the town is. 😉 Penn State’s campus there has about as many students as the population of the town. (both about 40,000) It’s also in the middle of nowhere, several hours drive from the nearest cities, so there’s not much to do there. Weekends there could be interesting. Especially when there’s a home (American) football game, since the population doubles from all the people coming for the game. (The seating capacity of the stadium is 100,000.) So yeah, I could tell you a tale or two of alcohol fueled craziness.
Yay, comic! And so begins Aine’s “deluge of the new”!
Um, so she gave the driver the correct change on the first try? I don’t think I could do that. ^^
(Or did someone count them out for her, off-page?)
(
@Delta: She was given the change off-page. There was a plan to show Aoife counting-out & handing Aine some coins from her pouch before the bus arrives (much to her amazement), but I had to cut that to keep the scene moving.
Instead of the coins I substituted Aine being amazed by the printed bus-ticket, that way I still got a similar scene while getting them onto the bus, and onto the next part 🙂
@Kessy: What a refreshingly descriptive town name, I love it 😀
Drunking college antics are pretty similar to what you would encounter on the streets of Dublin on a weekend night. Dublin Bus run a nightly service called the NiteLink which is essentially designed to empty the city and deposit the typically young drunks back into their respective suburbs. Travel on this bus can be…interesting sometimes.
Although I would use it myself back in the day to return home from drinking, and therefore wouldn’t mind as much, sometimes I’d end up having to take it sober. Dublin Bus oddly enough stop their regular services at 23:30. Leaving the NiteLink to be the only option after a late-shift, or returning home on a late flight at the airport. Sober Nitelink ride ain’t fun 😀 Although now, it’s been many years since I’ve done that 🙂
Hmm, yeah, the paper would be an unfamiliar material to Aine. She might have seen parchment or papyrus, but I tend to doubt it. Pre-christian Ireland wasn’t really a literate society, right? Ogham was mainly used for things like grave markers and that sort of thing?
A bit of trivia about ogham you probably don’t know. There’s a bit of a fad in the US of people theorizing about various Old World cultures making it to the Americas before Columbus. Everyone from the Chinese to the Minoans to the lost tribes of Isreal. One of the favorites is actually the ancient Irish. Has something to do with a legend about an Irish monk named St. Brendan the Navigator, I think. so pretty much any rock with a bunch of parallel scratches is supposed to be an ogham inscription. It’s pretty funny some of the things people claim are ogham.
@Kessy: Ogham is a tricky one alright. I’ve actually been trying to research its origin and since the Bata Neart has Ogham on it, this is important for its back-story.
We are taught about Brendan in Irish schools, and for many of us the argument of Columbus finding the Americas is completely moot. The main argument now is between the Irish and the Scandinavians on who was first: Ancient Irish, or the Vikings. The Vikings were most-likely at Canada before Columbus, and there’s a lot of evidence to support this.
Early Irish settlement in Canada is the stuff of legend and most records may have been lost to time. Some 12th Century records mention a “Great Ireland” settlement in the vicinity of Iceland, which may have actually been Irish settlement in Greenland. Later in “Eric The Red’s Saga”, he describes encountering what may have been Irish people at “Markland” which is probably Labrador, Canada. Other’s place the Irish pre-Viking settlements on Newfoundland. But there is no evidence to support any of this.
Interestingly enough though, there is a small community on Newfoundland who’s accent is the same as an Irish accent, despite few of them ever being to Ireland.
The Norse settlement of North America is quite certain and uncontroversial. One of the settlements has been found at an archaeological site called L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, Canada. there’s some evidence to suggest they got considerably farther south than that, quite possibly as far as New England. There’s also several inscriptions and artifacts that suggest the Norse may have gotten *much* farther, but these are generally of disputed authenticity. Probably the most famous is the Kensington Runestone, found in Minnesota. Personally, I think the academic community should probably take a serious second look at some of those.
Beyond the Norse, there’s a lot of theories about possible pre-Columbian contact by all sorts of cultures, which range from being on the verge of being accepted as fact to pretty fantastical. It’s becoming more and more likely that the Polynesians reached South America, and there’s a definite possibility that the Chinese reached the west coast of North America. The Mandan tribe of American Indians was historically believed to have been descendants of a Welsh colony led by Prince Madoc, although the academic community generally regards that as purely legendary. My understanding is that Brendan is generally regarded as most likely being in the legendary category.
Regardless, it’s certainly true that there are a bunch of stone structures in the US Northeast that are rather mysterious. The American Indians in this region are not known to have built in stone, but a lot of these structures really don’t look like colonial architecture. I’ve been to two of them myself. The academic community tends to ignore these sites. I suspect that has to do with politics, a bit like sasquatch. Because some of these subjects attract people who are a bit, shall we say, overenthusiastic, most academics are reluctant to have their names associated with the topic.
@Kessy: It is interesting to crack open the more widely accepted viewpoints of history to find new mysterious possibilities. It feel that it is far too boring and ‘safe’ to accept that Columbus was the guy who discovered America for the Europeans. As-the-bird-flies Ireland and Norway appear to be the closest centers of European population to North America, with multiple island hops available on-route. The fact that both Irish and Viking civilizations spread out to Iceland also indicated a desire to explore that direction.
Since there is little proof of what the Irish did back then, it brings a wonderful air of mystery to the story. It’s the likes of this that I use to create the universe of Bata Neart. I fill in the gaps of knowledge with my own imagination to create a new history for this story. The mysteries across the ocean play into the Bata Neart’s mysterious and dark origin…
Like I said, no one disputes that the Vikings were in North America centuries before Columbus. I vaguely remember being taught about Lief Erickson and Vinland in elementary school.
I really love poking into the dark corners of what we know, looking for alternate theories, strange artifacts, observations that can’t really be accounted for, mysteries in general. I think that sometimes people forget that conventional history is sometimes based on pretty shaky evidence, and that the academic community should be more open to investigating these sorts of things. But at the same time I always try to keep in mind how much evidence there actually is, and that this stuff is often pure speculation. And I know better than to form solid conclusions based on accounts in the popular press on topics that I have little or no expertise in.
My bottom line is that true skepticism is coming at every new topic with no preconceived conclusions either way. Jumping to a conclusion of disbelief because “It’s all just woo,” is as bad as seeing an alien mothership in every odd cloud or light in the sky.
It’s certainly true that many cultures have had the capacity to make an Atlantic crossing by the northern Iceland, Greenland, Newfoundland route since ancient times. For example, I have no problem with the idea that the Phoenicians could have made that crossing. It’s not a question of “could they,” it’s a question of “did they.” Although well established history does place some limitations on that. For example, it’s indisputable that the native population had no immunity at all to many European diseases when the Spanish arrived. They were decimated by those diseases, particularly smallpox. So you really can’t have *too* many expeditions arriving in the Americas or they would have almost certainly introduced those diseases.