I have written before about 9 Chickweed Lane’s slide into weirdness, but Brooke McEldowney’s other comic, the web-based Pibgorn has somehow slipped between the gaping cracks of this irregularly scheduled blog.

For those of you living under different rocks than I have the last five years, Pibgorn is a renegade fairy who believes “there must be more to life than depositing dew drops on dandelions and sleeping under mushrooms.” Her romance with a mortal human church organist becomes a triangle with a sultry succubus (is there any other kind?) who at first tries (and kind of succeeds) to kill her, but ultimately becomes reluctantly committed to protecting her. For almost four years, Pib bounced around various fantasy scenarios (as well as borrowing from such sci-fi as “Men in Black” and “Quantum Leap”) and even added as a cast member Chickweed’s otherworldly oddball Thorax, all the time pulling out all the stops with trippy, phantasmagorial and semi-erotic (as much as comics.com would allow) full-color comic art. Then, in early 2006, McEldowney took an extended detour into a 13-month-long re-creation of Shakespeare’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream” using the Bard’s original words, a 1920s-30s New York setting, and all the major characters of BOTH Pibgorn and 9 Chickweed Lane as the play’s cast, followed by a fourth-wall pulverizing series of ‘interviews’ with the cast and the temperamental director, Brooke McEldowney himself. After that, Pibgorn settled back into its fairy-mortal-succubus triangle, interrupted by yet another previously-unexplained otherworldly influence when the comic was suddenly and mid-cliffhangerly removed from the comics.com site.

The loyal fans of Pibgorn were up in arms. The more weary followers of the comic just saw it as another creative meltdown. McEldowney started a LiveJournal blog to assure his fans that Pib would return and later point out where: the rival newspaper-domnated comics portal gocomics.com.

The gocomics debut was a very-soft-reboot to the beginning of the new post-Shakespearean story, leaving the loyal audience waiting to get back to the point where it left off. But also raising the question “Why the switch?”

Some rather convincing circumstantial evidence appeared in that LiveJournal outlet between the exit from comics.com and the debut on gocomics.com… although, interestingly, those posts have since been deleted. Ah, but nothing ever really disappears from the Web, thanks to the Internet stalker’s best friend, the Google Cache.

McEldowney gave a demonstration about the ‘challenges’ of dealing with editors by showing three versions of the last frames of a recent strip. In it, the naked Geoff is being ‘attended to’ by the sexy/demonic Drusilla.

Geoff: Where are my swimming trunks?
Dru: Oh, hereabouts. But first, let me check you for broken bones.,, Now, does this hurt when I squeeze it?

Version #1 (which he was not surprised was rejected by the comics.com editor)

Geoff: Hey! There are no bones there!
Dru: Patience… Patience.

Version #2 (also rejected)

Geoff: Hey! There are no bones there!
Dru: Call me thorough…

Version #3 (what was weblished on comics.com)

(Also, the words “broken bones” in the previous frame were replaced with “fractures”)
Geoff: I think you need a copy of Grey’s Anatomy.
Dru: I’m not interested in Grey or his anatomy.
Obviously, a far inferior gag, especially considering the popularity of the Grey’s Anatomy TV show.

So, I waited with baited breath for that comic to come up in the gocomics.com stream. And this Wednesday it did… and…. it was Version #1for the win!

Now, this means one of two things. Either gocomics.com has promised and delivered Mr. McEldowney a much freer hand OR he slipped it in instead of the previously weblished #3 and the gocomics editors weren’t looking because, hey, comics.com already ran it. Which would explain why he pulled the blog entry… to hide the switch from the editors. If so, YOU’RE BUSTED! If not, I apologize for impugning your integrity.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 8th, 2007 at 12:55 am and is filed under blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.