Welcome to Liner Notes – an exclusive look at the making of the long-awaited conclusion of the Expanded And Remastered series, Corinne Morgan, Corbie #4!
Issue #4: The Cairns of Auld Tamiragh
Original release date: February 1, 2020
Remastered edition release date: April 25, 2025
The last edition of Liner Notes concluded with me suggesting that Corinne Morgan, Corbie‘s #4 remaster would be out in October. In all fairness, I did say “hopefully!”, but to say my prediction was a little off would be an understatement.
Any hopes that the conclusion of the remaster series would have a quick turnaround were soon dashed. Around the time that I’d predicted issue #4 would be out already, I posted an early comparison of panels in the old and new versions, thinking folks would enjoy the glow-up. When that sank like a stone on every social media platform where it was posted, I was despondent. From that point on, I decided I would get this comic done, but given what I viewed as total disinterest, I was in no hurry. At the same time, I decided my health was my first priority, and that I didn’t want to spend all day, every day tethered to my computer. Issue #4 would be done when it was done.
Which isn’t to say that I wasn’t working hard behind the scenes. I continued to chip away slowly, as October became November, and November became December, and December became OKAY, SERIOUSLY, WHAT IS GOING ON? Somewhere along the line, what should have been a simple reworking of an old comic became a gargantuan task. Granted, to some degree every issue has felt like that, but… this one was exceptionally difficult. The good news is that I think of the four original issues to get redone, #4 turned out to be the best one. Much of that is down to the abundance of all-new material that was added to it, which allowed me to experiment with the direction I want the series to head in with future issues. Here’s a collection of trivia, notes, secrets and things you may not have noticed while reading the comic!
Issue #4’s title, “The Cairns of Auld Tamiragh”, is the latest in a long line of Steely Dan references in the pages of Corbie. This one is a nod to the track “The Caves of Altamira” from the album “Pretzel Logic”. In a 2000 chatroom interview on the BBC’s website, Donald Fagen explained the song’s backstory:
It’s a pretty straightforward story about a guy who visits the caves of Altamira which have famous drawings by prehistoric men or women as the case may be, and he registers his astonishment.
Okay, but wasn’t it a bit weird that in the 2020 version of The Cairns of Auld Tamiragh, we rushed through that whole part of the story en route to the rematch with Neamhain and Macha? In the remastered edition this section is expanded upon with all-new material. But it was only recently, after the new edition was all but finished, that I stumbled upon a printed-out copy of the original version’s script buried in my desk drawer. I had zero recollection of writing it, but in this version Corbie enters the cairns and sees the primitive etchings on the walls, and is astonished by what she sees, in much the same fashion as the protagonist in the Steely Dan song. Morrigan then passes through the wall and pulls Corbie in with her, before we transition to the two in Tamiragh. From there things continue more or less as they were originally presented. I can’t say for sure why this was trimmed, but I suspect it was down to a combination of streamlining the story and actually getting it out the door in a timely fashion. (A novel concept, to be sure!)
In the 2025 version, things play out in a way that’s slightly different: Corbie struggles to get the entrance to the cairns to budge, and once inside, she finds a secondary set of doors that open for her as she approaches. Morrigan then prompts Corbie to enter the portal that appears, and in the next panel our heroine lands, painfully, on the floors of the palace of Tamiragh.
If I’d remembered that there was unused material from the original script before I commenced work on the remaster, would I have simply restored it? Maybe! I like the idea of Corbie viewing the etchings on the walls, which aren’t visible in the new issue #4, but the new version is a little more fun, mostly by way of putting her through the wringer yet again.
After finding the printout pages of the script for this adventure, I did some poking through my digital files to find the screengrabs for this edition of Liner Notes. It took some work, but eventually I hit paydirt: a folder full of files dated September 2017. It’s hard to believe it’s really been that long since I wrote the initial versions of these issues, especially given that it would take another couple of years to get to the end of that initial run of comics out into the world; I suspect there might have been an earlier draft that would have been written a few months earlier than that.
I’ve mentioned in the past that issues #1 and #2 of Corbie were originally intended to be one comic, which got split into two because the first half had been such a mess, and I wanted to have a clean start with a new, more coherent art style. What I’d long forgotten until I set eyes upon the script for The Cairns of Auld Tamiragh was that issues #3 and #4 were also written with the intent that they would have been a single issue – theoretically, #2 – before that script was split in half as well. At the time, I never could have envisioned that I would have ended up reworking these issues down the line, much less that I’d be adding all-new scenes to all of them. It’s funny how things turn out!
Right up to the last weekend prior to publication, I was frantically making changes to significant portions of the art in the issue #4 remaster. Some of this was expected – once I had my “editor” hat on, I was able to take another look at the pages with a fresh set of eyes and see tons of problems that hadn’t been apparent to me while I was in the mines, so to speak. Other panels that got hastily redrawn weren’t technically wrong, but I didn’t want to put the comic out there in a state that I wasn’t at least somewhat happy with, and I was convinced that if I tried a little harder, I could get the material to a point where I’d finally be at peace with it.
An example of this is the panel above. Some of the swordplay scenes in the original issue felt “off” to me: there were a few instances of characters holding their weapons in odd ways. I have no clue how that happened, or how it didn’t get corrected the first time around. It almost didn’t get corrected this time either, but ultimately I decided to roll up my sleeves and make the necessary fixes. In the case of the panel shown, not only did I have Corbie grip the sword (or what’s left of it) properly, I figured I’d amend her expression to have her look in the direction of the action, and adjust it to more closely match the current house style.
As is now tradition, when a new issue of Corbie drops, the soundtrack playlist expands with three new tracks to listen to while enjoying the unfolding storyline. For issue #4, the new additions are as follows:
- “Goddess’s Revival” – The Wilsons
- “Back Home” – China Crisis
- “Down Here On The Ground” – George Benson
These three songs cover Corbie and Mo-Mo’s continuing journey to Tamiragh, their return to California, and the conclusion of the story, respectively. For this issue I had a lot of trouble settling on which tracks I wanted to include, and in which order – there was a lot of chopping and changing before I settled on a selection I was happy with!
Concurrent with the finishing touches being applied to issue #4, I was able to check a side project off my to-do list, and created front and back cover art for the Corbie soundtrack playlist. You can’t own a physical copy of the OST, but you can stream it! Look for it on Spotify, YouTube Music and now Amazon Music. A full breakdown of the soundtrack can be found on its own dedicated page right here on the Corbie website.
Towards the end of my time working on this issue, and reflecting on how long it’s taken me to get it out the door, I started to wonder if this would end up being the last comic I ever complete. A lot of this is just the worst of my pessimistic tendencies bubbling to the surface – I might be getting older, but I’m middle-aged, not elderly. Nevertheless I started to reflect upon how the telling of this story has its roots in my earliest experiences reading comics, decades ago, at an age when I was so young that I couldn’t yet tie my own shoelaces, and deciding I wanted to try doing it myself. (Drawing comics, I mean, not tying my shoelaces.)
With that on my mind, and in an admittedly self-indulgent gesture, a character who was scripted to appear in a few panels near the end of this issue was replaced by… six year-old me? He’s sitting behind Corbie on the bus and is baffled as he watches her engage in conversation with an empty seat, as Morrigan isn’t visible to him. In a typical example of me incorporating excessively intricate details and in-jokes into the comic, kid John is reading Transformers UK #49 – not the first issue of the run that I encountered, but only a few months later. Without checking, I took a wild guess that the back cover would have the advertisement for the Dinobots on it, and drew that; in reality, this issue had an ad for the 1985 range of Autobot cars in that place. Well, I was close!
Wait, how does this work? Why is a six year-old Scottish child from 1986, who’s reading a comic from that very year, riding a Greyhound-type bus heading into California, unaccompanied, in the present day? We’ll never know, because he’s not showing up again. I feel like it’s an unwarranted act of hubris that he appeared at all!
So, yeah, we’ve come full circle. With the release of issue #4, the entire original run of Corinne Morgan, Corbie has been remastered. And it’s true that, towards the end of working on this issue, I was beginning to wonder if I had it in me to keep bringing comics into the world, if this would be my last go-around.
But this is not the end. If anything, I consider this to be the conclusion of a mini-era of Corbie, and I’m excited about what comes next, to finally be able to continue the story instead of feeling like I’m going around in circles. There are countless tales featuring our battling bird gal, her friends and enemies waiting to be told, but it’s dependent on me getting out of my own way and finding ways to turn around those issues quickly rather than in an agonising, pain-staking fashion. After today I’m taking a short break from being hunched over my laptop and squinting at pixels in Krita to recharge, reflect and figure things out.
With that in mind, this time around I’m not going to make the mistake of predicting when the next issue of Corbie will appear. For now, let’s just enjoy that The Cairns of Auld Tamiragh, against all odds, is somehow actually on-sale. Let me know what you think, and I’ll be back with new adventures soon!
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