YouTube’s Manny Man enters the history books

I've been drawing Manny Man since I was about 14 years old. I drew him on every page of my Junior Cert French book. I made a comic version of King Lear with Manny Man for my Leaving Cert. He kept me and my friends entertained during lectures in St Pat's as we trained to be primary school teachers. He helped me explore my budding entrepreneurial skills as I followed various paths such as web comics and Shakespeare study aids. He ultimately led me to YouTube, where in 2013 I uploaded my first history video, Irish History in 6 Minutes: Manny Man Does the History of Ireland.

The video instantly went viral throughout Ireland. Within one week, it had reached 70,000 views. I quickly got to grips with the world of Twitter and YouTube. I was curious to see how a video of more international appeal would perform, so at the beginning of 2014, I chose to do World War I in 6 Minutes. It reached 70,000 views in just one day! As the year went on and the centenary of the beginning of World War I arrived, the views continued to rise. Today, that video has had over 2 million views.

The first few videos helped me to grow a steady base of subscribers. These people receive a notification as soon as I upload a new video, allowing me to be less reliant on a video going viral. Naturally, I began to cover the big international topics such as the second World War and the Cold War. The two world wars and the Cold War acted almost like a trilogy of storytelling for me. The ends of the first two videos were teasers for the next, in the same way as history leads from one event to the next. The storytelling aspect of history has always appealed to me.

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The Battle of Clontarf

At the beginning of 2016, I chose the Easter Rising for my next video. In the wake of its success, I built on the momentum and began work on Manny Man Does the History of Ireland. How fitting that my first history video would become my first history book! It was an interesting process to develop it into a book. So often, the process we tend to see is a book being adapted for the screen: condensing, editing, cutting and so on. This was the complete opposite. I had my 2,000-word video script as a basis, but the book required expanding on the narrative flow of history, as well as structuring and rewriting the content with the page in mind. I now found myself writing in page-turners to urge the reader forward through the narrative.

The book allowed me the space to explore events I had either only briefly covered or skipped over entirely in the video. And while being neck-deep in Irish history, I was also ensuring to keep a wry, tongue-in-cheek sense of humour throughout. A 10-year-old or an 80-year-old could pick up this book and thoroughly enjoy it (I know my Granda did!).

The process of illustrating the book had its interesting challenges too. I was able to reuse some illustrations from my original video but I had to redo others, as they just didn’t hold up to scrutiny. It’s fine when an image will only be onscreen for three seconds, but when a reader has an image printed beautifully in front of them, it needs to be flawless, so I had to perfect the details of images such as The Shelling of the Four Courts, The Battle of the Boyne and The Siege of Drogheda. The book also contains lots of artwork produced especially for the publication, such as The Battle of Clontarf, Ice Age Ireland and Bloody Sunday in Croke Park.

Manny Man has been with me for years. He feels very much a part of me but also seems to exist as his own entity. The more he grows in popularity, both online and in books, the more like a proud parent I feel! Manny Man is some man for one man!

Manny Man Does the History of Ireland by John D Ruddy is published by The Collins Press, at €6.99. collinspress.ie