Sep 30 2008
Pirate Club #1 - #2
Greetings from your friendly neighborhood Searnold [Shár- Nŭhld]. Welcome to my comic book review blog - thanks for tuning in. Today is Tuesday, September 30th, 2008.
Today’s Issue:
As per your request, Pirate Club#1 - #2, published by SLG (Slave Labor Graphics) waaaaay back in 2004. Written by Elias Pate and Derek Hunter and illustrated by Derek Hunter. The book is in black and white formate with no ads. These are the first two issues of a 10 issue arc which has been collected into a trade available on Amazon.
Premise:
Pirate Club follows the adventures of a few boys who are trying to become pirates and thus go on corresponding adventures. The book starts out innocent enough, but leads to some serious craziness including a drowning kid and a fight with a bear. According to Comicvine, by the end of the series the children wind up saving Christmas from an evil Santa Claus. While that sounds odd - it also fits with the peculiarity of the book.
The Awesome Parts:
Pirate Club walks this odd line between reality and fiction. All of these kids’ adventures could be real. They could also all be inside their imaginations. If we take things at face value, it certainly requires suspension of disbelief to imagine ALL of these shenanigans are actually happening the way they are depicted. But it doesn’t require much imagination at all to imagine a 10 year old boy describing these as his interpretation of an adventure he had gone on. For me it was a lot of fun to go on this adventure with these kids while treading back and forth between possibly real and possibly imaginary. Also - who doesn’t relate to a group of boys who are trying to become pirates? If you didn’t yourself try to become a pirate, I bet you had a similar adventure when you were young (perhaps for you it was a ballerina - for me it was an alien hunter.)
The Un-Awesome Parts:
That odd balance between fantasy and reality can also be disconcerting at times. Sometimes I thought to myself, “Wait… am I supposed to believe that this ACTUALLY happened?” This brought me out of the story and forced me to stop and think before moving on. But who knows - maybe that was the authors’ intent. Also - while I recognize that pirates aren’t the nicest people in the world - these kids had more malice in their hearts than I prefer in my protagonists.
My Recommendation:
I enjoyed following these kids’ adventures. I certainly felt that I got my money’s worth as there was a lot of story packed into these pages. The black and white art was done well enough that I didn’t feel it distracted from the story. I definitely recommend this book to fans of adventure. But the book is definitely disconcerting. If you don’t like questioning conventions then I don’t imagine Pirate Club is for you. These kids are NOT innocent. People die. Weird stuff happens. I don’t think there’s a better way to describe it than disconcerting. Maybe just plain odd. For me - that’s a reason to recommend the book. But I recognize that it will make the book unenjoyable for some people.
That’s all for today. As always - thanks for reading - see you next time.
-Searnold
