I LOVED pirates as a kid (and I do mean LOVE. Like. I was obsessed, and I'm pretty sure it's because of the first Pirate of the Caribbean movie)(which is still pretty baller). When I was brainstorming comic ideas for my art school diploma, I of course could not not entertain a pirate story. Sadly it needed a lot more time in the brain incubator, so I went with SCAPEGOATS instead.
Anyway, more details about the plot down there. This isn't meant to be a comic project so you get the whole story babyyy
I'll refer to the pirate boy as the boy, and the other one as the son.
The boy was 'adopted' as a child by an all female pirate crew (called 'the sirens') after the ship he was on as a stow away got pillaged by them. He stood up to the captain despite weighing about as much as two bunches of grapes and being as dangerous as a kitten, which made her laugh, so she took him in. He's basically her son, and he sees her and the crew as his family.
One day many years later, the crew learns that some aristocrat is offering a lot of money to whoever will marry their youngest son, because none of the local aristocrats want to (for some reason ;) ) from a girl on a ship they just pillaged.
Being pirates and seeing an easy opportunity to scam money out of the rich, the crew decide to send one of their own, who would pretend to be the daughter of one of the admiral they just killed. But since all the ladies on the ship are out of the age range for this marriage, they choose the boy to play the bachelorette.
Note that he doesn't mind, to him there's nothing shameful in pretending to be a woman, though he is not happy to have to mingle with the aristocracy. But the mission is simple enough: all he has to do is go there, meet the groom, and rob them blind when they have their guards down.
On his side of the story, the youngest son of the family has always stood out from his two siblings: he was born with a mysterious medical condition that makes him weak to pretty much anything and especially hot weather (which is too bad since they live in a port city), with difficulty walking without aids, and most of all he really does not look like his father.
His mother once fell off a ship into the sea, and after she was found (alive), she was never the same, and became pregnant shortly after. She became totally entranced by the sea, extremely melancholic, to the point where, shortly after giving birth, she was admitted into a sanitarium.
She managed to get out of her room one night and, since the sanitarium overlooks the sea on top of a cliff, fell to her presumed death, never to be seen again.
The day after their extremely awkward first meeting, the son simply disappears, and neither his father nor his step-mother seem to care too terribly, simply stating that he must have been scared and fled the marriage. Even if it's not his business, the boy finds their reaction so strange that instead of going back to the ship, he sets out to find the son.
In his investigation, he is helped by the son's personal doctor, a young bachelor of medicine who actually cares about him beyond his strange condition, and one of the son's chidlhood friend, another aristocrat with a chronic health condition that she treats by drinking the local miracle medicine: a dark red bourbon distilled in the city itself.
The boy also slowly uncovers the town obsession with old mariners' tales about mermaid flesh and immortality, as the streets become less and less safe. Over the course of the last few months, several prostitutes have been killed or injured by locals believing they are mermaids in disguise…
The boy learns about these recent attacks from the son's older sibling, who was disgraced after bringing dishonor to the family by 'crossdressing' (the son has two older siblings, twins, who both fucked up in the eyes of their family. The 'daughter' became and admiral in the marine and the 'son' a disgrace who likes to hang out in the red light district)(there's a lot of themes of gender roles/identity in this story and I do use daughter/son lightly there)
All these informations combined lead the boy to believe that there's something up with the local distillery, which obviously ends up being true once they uncover that they're putting blood in the bourbon, mermaid blood. Hence the miraculous medicinal effects.
And the blood comes from none other than the son himself.
His father had always suspected something was off with 'his' son, and he quickly discovered that something otherworldly was flowing through his veins instead of his blood. At first, he simply was making money by ordering bloodletting, disguising it as being for the health of his son, and selling the blood to the distillery. That's what tipped off the young doctor, because he had always argued with the father that this was not helping, and yet the bloodletting would continue.
But the father still wanted an heir, and his two older children were not going to give him one. So, wether his son was his blood or not, he put the call for bachelorettes after being rejected by all the other aristocrats who didn't want to marry their daughters to a sickly boy. But with the bourbon selling so well, the head of the distillery wanted to be able to produce more, and seeing how much the father was offering for the hand of his son, he offered much more to simply buy his son.
Having mermaid blood means that despite his health seeming poor, the son actually heals exceptionally well, so he could be bled to near death one day, and then the next, again and again, day after day with no one coming to look for him.
But ever since he disappeared, the weather had been getting worst and worst, first being simple rain growing to a huge thunderstorm and sea levels rising to the point of flooding the lower districts. By the time the boy gets to the distillery, it's already getting flooded, and he has to fight against time and the head of the distillery to get the son out of there.
A good time as ever to say that the boy does not know how to swim, but, surprisingly, if the son is rubbish at walking on land, he quickly discovers that he swims very well. So he's able to save the boy, after the boy come to save him (aww).
He also gets a glimpse of his 'other' mother while under the water, who is a huge (I do mean huge like. Enormous. Whale sized) mermaid. Making eye contact with her, and with everything the head of distillery has been mocking him for during those past days, all the pieces of the puzzle click in his mind, and he understands that there was never anything wrong with him.
The huge mermaid also fucking destroys the distillery and eats the crook.
In the end, the two boys decide to elope together on the sea far away from the aristocracy and they get to grow up to be gay old pirates, the end.
That's my cheesy pirate story. As I said, there aren't any plans to actually make this a comic, but who knows, it's been marinating in my head for so long that maybe I'll manage to iron out the kinks and make something out of it, but in the meantime I hope you enjoyed reading it in full !
Here are a few more doodles:
At the distillery and after.
Also the captain of the sirens has a monkey named lychee who is there during the story. Yes she is the only one named so far, and she wears clothes.
I really want to draw the sirens, the twins, the giant mermaid, the bachelor and the childhood friend, so ! Hopefully there will be more of this story at some point.
