Cursed Pirate Girl: Jeremy Bastian's Gorgeous Comic Book Began Life on 26 Feet of Computer Paper

Images courtesy of Archaia

Jeremy Bastian, creator of Cursed Pirate Girl

It's easy to get lost inside the pages of Jeremy A. Bastian's comic book Cursed Pirate Girl. The Michigan-based artist works with ink and a very fine brush to create panels that overflow with tiny details. Look closely and you'll see faces carved into the sides of rocks, a buckled shoe hidden on the ocean floor, even a dinner party turned upside down. It's these intricacies that make a young heroine's quest to find her pirate father all the more magical.

Cursed Pirate Girl has been making the rounds throughout the independent comic book world for several years now. Bastian self-published his first issue before it was picked up by Olympian Publishing. Two years ago, Olympian launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a hefty trade paperback. Their goal was $2500, but they raised over $36000. Recently, L.A.-based publisher Archaia, who brought Jim Henson's A Tale of Sand script to life as a graphic novel last year, picked up the book for a hardcover edition. This latest incarnation of Cursed Pirate Girl will be released on Dec. 12 and comes complete with new pages, a guest artist section (Hellboy creator Mike Mignola is amongst the contributors) and more.

Bastian and his art appeared Saturday night at Century Guild. The event marked both the opening of the Culver City gallery -- a Chicago transplant focusing on Art Nouveau and Symbolist work -- and the forthcoming Cursed Pirate Girl release. Below, Bastian answers our questions about his book and his art.

Images courtesy of Archaia

About 7 years ago, I drew up a pirate woman in a more tattoo art inspired style for the art store I was working at one day and that was really the beginning of Cursed Pirate Girl.  I came up with the idea for the story while in line for a San Diego Comic Con Hall H panel presentation of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez's Grindhouse a year later. The book I had drawn, a supernatural G.I. Joe type of story with werewolves and zombies called Phantom Corp, didn't live up to my expectations and I was a little bummed. I thought, why don't I take that pirate woman and make her a girl and try my hand at a more all ages book? I remember I was in the line for Hall H and jotting down the idea of a bird climbing into a fish's mouth and then asking the little girl he was with, "How do you know you don't breath underwater, have you tried?" I also remember thinking that I should probably rewrite that a bit because I was afraid some kid might actually ask themselves the same question one day. 

When I got home from that SDCC I sat down and pieced together the story.  I wrote it on tractor feed computer paper -- which I did not separate and measured it out to be about 26 feet of story -- and the story just started pouring out.  It took three weeks to write this first story arc.

What's your process for creating the illustrations in Cursed Pirate Girl?

Well, when I started writing the script there were certain images that popped into my head that I knew were going to be really fun to draw.  In fact that's pretty much how I wrote it, by coming up with really fun parts and just connecting them as logically as I could. When it comes to the individual ingredients though, that's where I have a lot of fun. 

I start with the basic idea, whether it is a character or object or setting, and then brainstorm ideas to really set it apart. For instance, the cage Captain Holly puts her into to await her demise the following day, I wanted the cage to be unusual. So I took a stroll around the house asking myself would that make a good cage? How about that? And since Captain Holly is the most like something from Alice in Wonderland (my male version of the Queen of Hearts) I decided it would be a tea pot shaped cage. And then the final ingredient to finishing an interesting image for me is the ornamentation, so all around the cage you will see bizarrely tea-themed adornment. I try to challenge myself with every page to out-create what I've done on the previous page.

Up next: How the art show came together

Location Info

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Century Guild

6150 Washington Blvd., Culver City, CA

Category: General

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