Meet the Cork man who became a World War I legend and a comic book hero

He was the Great War hero who came from his parents’ village. Now, after all these years, Conal Creedon has written a book about Michael O’Leary, says Niall Murray

A RANDOM flick through a boys’ war comic has set an established storyteller — almost 40 years later — on the exhilarating trail of a feted First World War soldier from the land of his own forefathers.

Cónal Creedon would often scribble the names of youngsters whose weekly Beano or Dandy was held aside for them at the family shop in Cork city’s Devonshire Street. But it was in a May 1979 issue of Victor that a barely-out-of-teenage Creedon stumbled on the story of Michael O’Leary in a weekly feature on real-life heroes called Into the Cannon’s Mouth.