Succubi and Fairies and Kaniggits, oh my! (an online comic you ought to be reading)

Posted over 3 years ago

This started as a comment on a post by Anna and Got Bigger:

Hmmm - we did this {a sort of musical trivia game; check Anna's post for details} a couple of years ago, didn't we?

(Actually, i know we did, 'cos i was just looking back for one of my old MOG posts to include a link to it in the comments forum on Brooke McEldowney's daily Pibgorn on-line comic and came across my post about it...

(McEldowney also does the newspaper comic 9 Chickweed Lane, which is also Very Good, and, like Pibgorn, is also daily. One wonders when he sleeps...)

Pibgorn (the name of the central character, a renegade dewdrop fairy) has strong music connections: McEldowney is a Juilliard-graduate violist, and Geoff, Pib's boyfriend (and frequent target of the carnal schemes of Pib's succubus friend, Drusilla, whenever she gets bored) is a former church organist and now works as a cabaret pianist in a NYC club (with Pib and Dru as singers; they do Gershwin and Cole Porter and the like) - and a "pibgorn" is a Welsh hornpipe (the instrument, not the dance).

I cannot too highly recommend Pibgorn as a wonderful way to waste a few minutes daily

Here's the description from goComics' Pibgorn page (pretty obviously written by The Creator himself; the style is unmistakable):

A fantastic saga of adventure both high and low, of forbidden passion and iambic pentameter, of fays, fools, organists, demons, accordions, heaven, hell and Shakespeare, Pibgorn follows the whims and flights of its eponymous fairy heroine as she plies her conviction that there must be more to life than depositing dew drops on dandelions and sleeping under mushrooms

Pibgorn is an absolute hoot, edging so firmly into PG-13 territory that creator Brooke McEldowney moved it from the comics.com site to goComics.com when comics.com wanted too many changes.

Not all that surprising, given that one of the main characters is a beautiful succubus who really enjoys her work and that you wouldn't lose any money betting that the eponymous fairy heroine or Drusilla the succubus - or both - is going to wind up strung up on some kind of bondage device, dismembered or dead (they get better) at least once per story arc...

Oh - and that Pib and Dru spend a lot of time naked, though Brooke never shows any actual Naughty Bits... (Brooke's commentary on that question - and a large panel of two characters from 9CL, Edda and Seth, her gay ballet partner and roommate - can be found here, BTW.)

One of the regulars on the comment forum has prepared a page that gives background and such on the strip and characters - and a rich and strange history it has, indeed - and i, with McEldowney's permission - have done some 3D conversions of Pibgorn panels which you can see here.

One entire adventure revolved around the Borgia Cantus, an old manuscript of a plainsong setting of the Dies Irae (though nothing in this strip is ever so straightforward as that description implies).

Another story arc, involving time travel, body and identity swaps and a whole lot more revolved around Geoff and Pib being sent back in time and exchanged for Mozart (in the last month of his life) and soprano Anna Gottleib, while Mozart and Anna find themselves in modern New York City. Geoff finds himself trying to remember (and write down) Mozart's final work, the unfinished Requiem before he dies of the rheumatic fever that killed mozart, and Dru has to deal with a malevolent demon and the (incompetent, luckily) malice of Prince Crewth and Gaggot (the King of the fairies and his Chief Advisor).

This is two panels from a strip near the beginning of the current story arc, and, in fact, the last panel (and the changes comics.com wanted in it) was the proximate cause of Brooke moving to the other site.

Geoff has just fallen from Very High (he and Pib were smooching as she flew them up into the sky when she was struck by lightning, pixelised, and vanished); Dru shws up just in time to save him, but in the process, his swim trunks come off and...:

And another typical Drusilla moment:

(never mind just precisely why Dru is crashing through a skyscraper)

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