The Littlest Pirate King back

"Why are you so different from me? And you smell funny, too... and you don't eat or drink as I do!"
"That is because you are in the kingdom of the dead. Aboard this ship we are all of us dead."
"What does it mean to be dead?"
"Mmm... you wouldn't understand."
"I want to be dead like you!"

Shiver me timbers, David B. is back with a dark and stormy swashbuckling adaptation of a Mac Orlan short story. Ah, this is a haunting little sea shanty to be sure, telling the tale of an orphaned baby who grows up on an undead pirate ship after his parents have been killed by the accursed crew. The quite literally skeleton crew long for release from their cruel fate of endlessly sailing the high seas, trying every means imaginable to die a second and final time without merciful success. So despite their best efforts to dash their ship upon razor-sharp rocks or be crushed by gargantuan leviathans of the deep, it seems they're going to have to wait for their date with Davey Jones and his locker a while longer yet.

Their cruelness really does know no bounds though, and they intend to rear the innocent child until the day of his first Communion, and then slay him to provide them with an undead cabin-boy to torment for all eternity. Of course the little boy grows up wanting nothing more than to be an undead pirate, and loves his creepy crew mates wholeheartedly. And they in turn grow to be rather fond of him, ransacking food from other ships to keep him alive. Over time the Captain begins to sense perhaps their only chance at redemption may in fact lie in sparing this most innocent of souls, and thus decides to take a rather different tack.

The author Mac Orlan, or Pierre Dumarchey to give him his real name, was famed as the Bohemian's Bohemian in the pre-WWI Parisian set. As well as being a prolific fictional writer he also composed many a song for French chanseurs who were popular at the time, and wrote well-regarded essays on a number of topics. This story is very different from his usually more sexualised output, but lends itself very well to graphic adaptation, particularly with David B.'s unique, stripped back style. You can almost hear the jangling of the bones of the crew as they chase the giggling little boy around their ship. David easily manages to convey the genuinely horrific crew of skeletal pirates rather comically without going overboard (sorry) on the darker elements of the tale. The end result therefore is something which has a real Brothers Grimm fairy tale flavour to it. It's certainly not a children's book per se but something which children, especially little boys, would be genuinely enchanted and probably more than a little bit scared by.