Yes, there are ways in which the Crew are questionable. But they did as my One Commandment says.
On this page myself, and my relationship with my characters, are discussed.
I have made imaginary friends out of certain Pirates of the Caribbean protagonists, whom I call the Black Pearl Crew. I stand over them in a position called the cartoonist.
Related to one of the Crew is a tragic figure known as Bootstrap Bill Turner, whom I view as a possible friend if he could be himself again. Responsible for his predicament is Captain Davy Jones, and he and I clearly do not like each other, but it gets complicated, as you can see here.
Davy, Bill and I have all met on some battlefield of the imagination, but all have used some of that time to escape from being at the mercy (or, rather, mercilessness) of a group of caricatures we hated. At least we can all agree on that. Their name was the Comic Five, and they were based on the playable characters in the Lego Pirates of the Caribbean video game, which meant everything they did had to be right, no matter what it was. They lied about absolutely everything, except the fact that they believed everyone else (including me) should do as they said, ignored facts, did everything in their power to convince others they were things they were not when it probably would have been easier to actually be those things, and refused to do anything they believed was technically unnecessary (e.g. be careful that their works could be understandable to more people than just the individuals who were guaranteed to read it). According to the Five, the only thing that was its own reward was attention, and getting it was a job that left little time to talk and no time to experiment.
Thankfully, I now have the Crew, who love things for their own sake, understand all kinds of things the Five did not, and always listen to me. Forever intent on doing the best thing, not just the fastest or most obvious, they are not afraid of short-term losses.
This begins a story about what it took for me to get things the way I wanted. You can, if you wish, skip ahead to the next major section.
I let a video game get the better of me. It was only years after the fact that I realized these things had been happening.
The Comic Five did little behind the scenes, and it it involved the terriblest secrets. They started by declaring, Let every character the readers might rather pay attention to rather than us be gone from the strip!
The only actual characters left after that were the Five and Davy. The latter was not happy about his crew being gone. All they had left him with was one individual who would play the part of everyone on his ship, never actually being seen, only heard.
Who dares do this to someone whom everyone knows may kill you, or worse?
Davy demanded.
The cartoonist will not allow anything to happen to us,
the Five claimed. Now what are you carrying there?
A locket.
You never had one in the Lego game! Give us that. You will not see it again for as long as we live, as it is one of the reasons we will live, getting rid of things the readers would not recognize!
Then they set about making everyone take blocky, toy-like forms that might have been cute and innocuous from someone else, but coming from the Five were more like straitjackets. It appealed to me at the time, but I would have to realize that I was just being an excuse for foolhardy things. That, and being used to do all of their dirty work.
There were moments of clarity, when the Five had little power over me. These allowed me to come up with my own plans, starting with the one to parody the Styx albums that were new to me and my readers. They were easy to learn, and therefore, a counterexample to the teaching by the Five that anything unfamiliar to the readers was dangerous.
Eventually, I came up with enough loopholes to turn their own franchise against them. Davy, Bill, and I got caught up when I decided I had an excellent excuse to hire Bill to my cast of characters.
They would keep casting the spell on anyone susceptible. They were trying to keep it up when I found the loopholes surrounding sad old fathers and mandolins, but they could not have a meltdown and have me controlled well at the same time.
You like all this? All right, take to the old fashioned, bring Bootstrap Bill, but it is still about us and changing things,
the Lego pirates would say. And then, from the audience:
You’ll sail eternally?
That could be something to be manipulated.
What is she on about? You would not know that from the Lego game!
Lego pirates screamed.
That was it. Increasingly, I became clear headed, and intended to stay that way. Because, in the time I had my mind back, I realized something. There was no way I was ever going to improve my work without the eviction of those obnoxious Lego pirates! And that became the purpose of what I was doing.
But then, see Why did you bother to change father? and other stories. It was like, Get the Lego pirates! The audience is still possessed!
I reflect that a cartoonist has to pick influences, both on oneself and the readers, carefully. I was no longer helping to control the readers, but that at first merely meant that the power Lego protagonists
had over them was less precise and now they just wanted to slap attacks on Squidbeard (as the Five called him) into every song - including the ones they knew I was going to use.
Everybody is on the same page now, but it took a while. There are the failed attempts to predict, and then there were various other moments of calling Davy an idiot, attempting to parody about Squidbeard on the fly, and things like that.
I am not known as much as the cartoonist now that none of my characters are obsessed with me and the parody can be separated from the strip. I have continued to do strips, but not necessarily every day, thanks to having characters who allow me to take breaks. What I am has become more complicated, but I seem to like it that way.