It has been found! Here is my very first comics adaptation of a work of classic poetry, created in 1989, when I was ten years old. It features Yerp the crocodile, the star of almost all my comics from those years. The poem is “Scots Wa Hae,” written by Robbie Burns in 1793. It imagines a speech given by Robert the Bruce, King of the Scots, to his soldiers before the Battle of Bannockburn (1314). The Scots won a resounding victory against the invading English forces of Edward II, thus avenging William Wallace (of Braveheart fame). Yerp’s reactions to Burns’s stirring lines may seem somewhat defeatist, but I like to think they reflect a nascent form of the pacifism that has always accompanied my lifelong fascination with military history.


















