CSotD: If Ionesco had done a comic strip in college …
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I've been waiting for the right moment to feature "Pirate Cove" here, and it's been a long wait, because the convoluted storylines of this strip don't offer a lot of good entry points.
Yes, the artwork is horrible. You'll get used to it. You'll even start to like it. But let's skip the artwork for the moment. Better yet, skip it completely. You'll get used to it.
The characters in this strip are from a strange universe somewhere between "Doonesbury" and "Mary Worth." That is, they are complex and well-rounded but also ridiculous and cartoonish. Joe, the main character, the guy in the Jack-O-Lantern t-shirt, is the Everyman character, and everyone else exists to keep his life from making sense.
The storylines in Pirate Cove vary even within themselves, and can involve being threatened by Mafia hitmen or by bizarre science fiction villains or simply by an obnoxious, overbearing Hollywood producer. Or any combination of the above, perhaps with pirates, simultaneously.
And by Death, because Death is a main, recurring character in this comic. That's not him in today's strip. That's Randy, Joe's dead ex-roommate. Well, not ex, because he's still around. But Randy has been dead for quite a long time now and he's still a major character in the strip.
Death just left, having harvested the souls of Joe and Biff (yes, his SO is named "Biff") for some temporary purpose that was never quite explained because the obnoxious Janey got involved in the whole thing and Death simply tossed the souls back and took off.
Evidently, his aim was not true. Judging from the last panel, Biff's soul is in Joe and vice-versa. Now, in a normal comic strip, this would last a week or two, or maybe, if it were "Judge Parker," for six weeks or so, and then we'd all go back to normal.
But this ain't "Judge Parker" and the concept of "normal" in this strip is pretty fluid. This reversal could go on for another six months or it might even be permanent. Or it might be over in three weeks. A large part of the appeal of Pirate Cove is that you have no idea which of the absurd things that happen, or the absurd people who wander in, are going to become permanent features.
"Pirate Cove" is really what the web is for — an absurdist comic that a lot of people are just never going to "get," but that has used the reach of the Internet to assemble a core group of loyalists from around the globe, and to abuse them endlessly with silly characters, ridiculous plots and childish artwork that would get it kicked out of any newspaper in America at the very next comic survey or sooner.
This sample won't hook you. A week or two probably won't. But, if you give it time, it will become one of the highpoints of your daily surf.
(PS – The "McSlam" sound effect is free.)
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