Cyril Ransome

Creation

Cyril was created by writer John Ney Rieber and artist Peter Gross in The Books of Magic issue 14 in 1995.

Major Story Arcs

Cyril’s father is unknown, but may be a man named Lloyd that Cyril’s mother, Holly, had an affair with. As he grew up, Cyril came to believe he was the result of an immaculate conception, like Jesus.

In any case, she raises Cyril on her own. He is incredibly needy and self-centered, and obsessed with his mother’s attention. He doesn’t care or even realize what other people are interested in, or what might cause them pain.

When he and his mother were walking down the street one day, he saw a man with bandages on his face, and started making obnoxious comments about how he looked like a mummy. It was Bill Hunter, father of Tim Hunter, and he was just recovering from surgery after being burned by magical fire.

Embarrassed by Cyril’s comments, Holly offered to share a taxi with Bill, and brought him to his home.

Mary later decides to ask Bill out, and they start a relationship. Cyril is not enthused about Bill or Tim, because they mean his mother doesn’t just pay attention to him anymore.

When Bill and Holly get a party ready for Tim’s 14^th birthday, Cyril shows his thoughtless greediness by trying to eat the cake while it’s still being iced. Bill and Tim’s friend Gwendolyn is the one who stops him, and Cyril clearly has it out for her because of this. However, he steals some of the cake and eats it under the table. Then he sneaks out of the house.

While in the park, Cyril is found by the Margrave, a supernatural being who finds unhappy children and turns them into bombs who explode their parents. They manipulate him conversationally, telling him how great Tim is, and how Holly must like Tim better than Cyril. They give him a token that will make him explode and kill her.

However, Tim intervenes, and Cyril runs off once he realizes how spooky the Margrave is.

Much later, Tim has run away to America, and has been replaced by a Changeling from Faerie, so his dad thinks he only left for a short time. Holly and Bill have now moved in together, in her fancy house. Cyril continues to want to be the center of attention and live a gluttonous life. Cyril does annoying things like sabotaging the house intercom system so Bill can’t call to be let in. He spends a lot of his time playing with action figures, where he can feel like he’s the one in charge.

Bill and Holly get married. At the ceremony, Cyril shows off his increasing obsession with Christianity and his fear of Tim, telling the Changeling that Tim can’t steal his soul because he’s been baptized. He thinks Jesus loves only him, not Tim, and laps up holy water out of the bowl. When the real Tim comes back, Cyril actually plays a productive part, splashing the holy water on the Changeling, turning him to his natural form. However, Cyril is jealous that Tim has an actual angel, Araquel, as a friend. Even Holly takes all the magical craziness somewhat in stride, dancing with Araquel at the reception, but Cyril sits under the table, pigging away on the food.

However, there is a war brewing between the angels and the devils over Earth, and Bill is turned into a monster by one of them. Another comes to Cyril and tells him he has been chosen to help—although the angel really despises the boy. He turns Cyril into a saint of sorts, giving his action figures powers. When Holly is more focused on her runaway monster-husband than her insane son, Cyril has one of his figures, Choczilla, turn her into a chocolate statue.

Blaming everything on Bill, he sets out to kill him in the name of god and in hopes of the coming apocalypse. However, one of his toys accidentally sets off an explosion, killing Cyril.

However, a mystical woman called the Queen of Wounds, who stands in for the devil, resurrects Cyril. From now on, Cyril becomes obsessed with death; he is also concerned that when he died, he went to hell, which is not what he expected as a “super saint.” Cyril then turns the nearby Bill, Araquel, and a demon named Vasuki into chocolate statues as well. However, Tim convinces Cyril to chill out temporarily so Tim can deal with the apocalypse.

Afterwards, when everything has returned to normal, Holly and Cyril see therapists in America to deal with their experiences.

Once they’re back, Cyril secretly starts collecting dead animals. Instead of wanting to be a saint, he now has other ideas about his destiny.

Holly wants Tim and Cyril to go to the same fancy school. She pays for it, hoping that it will give them both some discipline and perhaps some contacts for their future. Cyril loves the prancing suits and rules of Bardsey school, and takes the opportunity to lord it over other boys when he gets in possession of the corpse of a teacher, Mr. Gavin, who he keeps in the caves below the school. Gavin was exploring the caves when Cyril surprised him, and Gavin fell to his death. Cyril uses his social power to put down Tim. Cyril now calls himself the King of the Dead and wears a skull mask in the cave while talking to the dead body. Gavin accidentally touched him in his death spasms, unlike any living humans had done, and Cyril took that to mean that the dead were his flock, as the living belonged to Jesus.

When the new teacher, Mr. Currie (secretly a magician who wants to teach Tim magic to protect him from the Other), calls on Cyril, he tends to go on about his obsessions with being a saint, and loving chocolate. Once again, Cyril becomes frustrated that someone pays attention to Tim more than him. He starts a rumor that Tim and Mr. Currie are sleeping together, and that Currie killed Gavin. He eventually ups it so that Currie seduced Cyril himself, so he can testify directly to the headmaster.

Tim and Currie follow a magic trail down to the cave and find the body. They throw it in the river so it will eventually be found. Cyril is incensed.

Currie is fired, but Cyril’s rumor backfires on him, and now all the homophobic student body thinks he slept with Currie.

Tim drops out of school to study with Currie, and he and Cyril make a deal where neither of them tells their parents what’s going on. Cyril, who seems dumb but actually has some smarts, manipulates the records so it looks like Tim is still going to school. However, when Bill, Holl, and Cyril are driving the car one day, they see the Other, an otherdimensional version of Tim, and are so shocked to see him out of school that Bill crashes the car. Holly died, and Bill and Cyril are badly hurt.

It turns out that despite the fancy house and school tuition, Holly was almost broke, and her insurance money goes to Lloyd, the man she had an affair with before Bill (and possibly Cyril’s father) rather than to Cyril. Bill agrees to keep custody of Cyril. However, he discovers that the tuition money for Cyril has gone missing, so they owe the school, and they also get an eviction notice for the house. It seems that Holly was spending more than she had in an effort to fit in with the image of respectability she felt she needed.

Cyril is kicked out of school in an embarrassing, public manner. He can’t get in his house since they’ve been evicted and Bill has seemingly committed suicide, so he goes to Tim’s old house, where Currie and Tim have been working on magic. He finds Currie’s glamour stone, which allows Cyril to look like anyone else that he wants.

Tim finds him with the glamour stone, looking like a troll and sewing Tim’s Bardsey badge on his jacket, since he lost his when he was kicked out. Cyril says Tim has to take him with him now that Tim is on the run from the Other, and both of their parents (and Currie) are now dead.

They start walking, and Cyril gets his foot stuck in a train track with a train coming toward him. Tim, at one of his worst moments, stands and does nothing. Cyril manages to get his foot out but now knows that Tim would be happy if he was dead. He runs off with their bag with all their money and identification.

Some time later, when he’s visiting his mother’s grave, Cyril runs into the demon Barbatos, who’s selling ice cream. Cyril is actually the first one to call him Barbatos, mishearing his real name Barhbaetous. Barbatos gives him a cauldron that can raise the dead in exchange for information about Tim. Cyril tells Barbatos where Tim’s magic is hidden. Then he digs up his mother’s body.

He starts using the glamour stone to look like a strapping young man and again stalks through Bardsey, setting up camp in the cave. He puts Holly’s body in the cauldron and she comes back to life, but in a half-undead way. Cyril, now that he can control his mom, starts making sexual plans about her.

Tim and the Wild Hunt find Cyril, and Cyril, unnerved, accidentally falls into the cauldron, which destroys it and returns Holly to death. They think Cyril is dead too, but he just used his glamour stone to look like he had been burned.

Cyril still vows revenge, and still plans to find a way to revive his mother. However, after Tim resolves several issues, like destroying the Other and defeating Barbatos, we see that Cyril has chosen another path. He uses his stone to look like Tim—who famously preceded, but looks a lot like, Harry Potter—and runs through the brick wall at a train platform, number 9 3/4, after somehow receiving a letter of acceptance to a school of wizardry.