Seattle Coffee Pirates

[tealin]

My sister tried to get a sugar-free cinnamon dolce latte from Starbucks on Sunday only to discover that, according to the barista, there was no sugar-free cinnamon syrup in the entire city. Considering that the number of Starbuckses here would warrant a container ship specifically designated to keep this city stocked, that's quite something. We concluded that the syrup had been hijacked by the notoroius Seattle coffee pirates.

I think I'm going to go over this again and sort out some silhouette problems that I stumbled into when drawing them all separately. (That was a brilliant idea.)

Comments

[anathelen.livejournal.com]

Aah, I love the costumes! I don't know how much you intended this, but they're all a wonderfully wacky combination between 18th century and modern-day styles, like how the guy with the glasses has square-toed buckle shoes and breeches, but also has a very modern looking pocketed vest. Props for the shoeless street (?) kid in the too-big coat. You make me want to write a short story or tv script about them.

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

PLEASE DO! I drew this totally as a one-off joke but now I want to draw these guys a lot, and I'd like to work on making their designs more interesting and developing their personalities, especially because this is the first remotely original 'idea' I've come up with in .. hmm, five years. Unfortunately I'm really bad at coming up with stories, more just premises and vague atmospheres. I've been thinking about it all day (um ... at work...) and I think I've got a few names and some vague ideas, which I might post tomorrow if I can sort them out by then.

Yeah, I was going for a Grunge Pirate type look – I found the two surprisingly easy to meld. Who'da thunk?

[anathelen.livejournal.com]

(lawlz, I am thinking about them at work too)

The Puget Sound would make a wonderful backdrop for Coffee Pirates! They would have a secret base on a little island somewhere in the Sound, and sail a junky tug that keeps on breaking down, so they have to use their wooden sailboat sometimes.

Of course they are expert sailors... but why are they pirates? The best that I can come up with is that first they love coffee so they pirate shipments and stores (and probably have huge stashes of their favorite products), and for income they resell their loot on the black market. I could imagine a Starbucks (or a similar made-up megacoffee store) operative approaching them at one point and asking them to make an artificial shortage to drive up business, and they proudly throw him out of his butt. I wonder if any of them used to be baristas and are out for a little good-natured revenge?

I imagine the pirate crew could be a combination of Americans and Canadians (fake passports so they can pass as either?), with rivals in Vancouver if they're American-based, or Seattle competition if they're Canada-based.

I can get vague character ideas by looking at the characters - they're well-drawn and they just scream "I HAVE CERTAIN CHARACTER ARCHETYPE QUALITIES." After staring for a while I'm drawn to the grungy-looking guy holding the other end of the crate - I wonder if he's a musician... I absolutely dig the Grunge Pirate look and love all the costumes, with one exception: I feel like the girl is missing something in her outfit. The bluerbuss pistol and sandals are awesome, but maybe... a skirt or a more pirate-y top? I'm often not quite sure what to do with female characters.

[anathelen.livejournal.com]

PS: I think I may have grasped what makes piracy and coffee fit together so intuitively well: coffee shops are equivalent to taverns, and baristas are eqivalent to saucy barmaids.

[northerndwarf.livejournal.com]

Were there many saucy barmaids with names like Brad...?

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

It's frightening how much of that very closely resembles what's been going on in my head, especially the first couple of paragraphs. As for citizenship, I like the idea of false papers and such, but I suspect that as a mix of Americans and Canadians, and more importantly as pirates, they'd go for the complete disregard for international boundaries over territorialism. Why have rival pirates in Vancouver when you can be the pirates in Vancouver? And Victoria, for that matter... hmm, Victoria would probably be a better setting for the humming black market. In which case, there might need to be more than five pirates... hmm. I think mostly their conflict should be against The Man, rather than against rival factions, but if the occasional extra-rogue band of coffee privateers pops in now and again for excitement, I suppose that could work...

I love the idea of the old tug, visually, but an old fishing boat would have a cold storage area handy for keeping one's beans and milk fresh.

I'm glad you find the grungy one the most interesting because he's the one I've imagined the least on, aside from that he's the muscle of the group. Sure, he could be a musician. Kazoo? I'm changing the girl to a somewhat different girl, and the stout fellow at the end is going to become a portly Asian woman in a skirt, because I like drawing skirts on portly women and the significant Asian population in the Pacific Northwest needs to be represented.

An important question to consider is: when is this? Is this 'our' world, more or less? Pre- or post-9/11 and all the attendant border security issues? Or post-apocalyptic/alternate reality where there is no US or Canada but the Democratic Republic of Cascadia or some such thing?

Oh, and names so far, from left to right:
Pumpkin Spice (remember, she will be different), Perc[olator] (better suggestion, anyone?), Mocha or Cinnamon or Nakuru (depending how cliché I want to be), Frappuccino (usually called Frapp), and Matcha (the portly Asian woman in a skirt). I tried working on stand-alone poses of these guys last night but didn't get very far because they looked even more boring than they do already.

Well, there ya go, run with it! And if anyone else is still reading this far in the comments and wants a go at it, knock yourself out (not literally). It'd be fun to see if we could get some sort of big collaborative thing going on ...

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

P.S. Before going into too much depth on characters, perhaps we shoud ask ubiquitouspitt and copperbadge for their input on 'their' respective characters? And – hey, octaveleap, you wanna 'be' the portly Asian woman in the skirt? I think you'd fit in the mix quite well.

[lareth.livejournal.com]

This is so cool. I'll send a spec script your way. ;)

Who's the captain? None of these folks strike me as the captain type, with the possible exception of Pumpkin, and she suggests more of a first mate. Fictional pirate captains as a rule tend to have the personality of a Mardi Gras parade, with a fashion sense to match.

[lareth.livejournal.com]

The exceptions, of course, are the exact opposite. I'm picturing a sort of renegade-corporate Vetinari who really likes his coffee.

[anathelen.livejournal.com]

The guy in the vest and glasses (Frapp, I believe) struck me as the leader, but it might just be because his shoes and breeches make me squee. I can absolutely imagine him as a renegade corporate exec - naturally, he knows all the ins and outs of the business. I figured Perc would play in the occasional coffee shop, maybe play his music too loud on the fishing boat radio, but he knows lots of people on the grunge circut that like their coffee and want him to supply them.

I'd imagined the world to be very close to ours but without the crazy border patrols caused by 9-11, but that's just me.

Yes to the old fishing boat. Ooh, it should have a malfunctioning GPS so we can sneek in a compass, sextant, and maps.

The corporate coffee companies will make the best main antagonists due to all the opportunities to utilize them, not only on sea, ship, and dock, but possibly even occasional land-based raids on shops or corporate offices, and their corporate vastness will give many individuals working for them for different reasons. With pirates comes black market buyers, and the occasional competition... more fun characters to people the world with.

[lareth.livejournal.com]

If Frapp's the captain then we're looking at a lot of in-over-their-head-making-it-up-as-they-go-along type hijinks. He's also going to need a counterpart -- a powerful, masculine recurring antagonist, like a rival pirate or a Coast Guard captain. Someone who likes his coffee hot, bitter and extra-chewy.

Captain Black.

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

HAHA - perfect.

I don't think Frapp's the captain, though - I think that as proper semi-socialist 'alternative lifestyle' residents of the Northwest they should be a cooperative collective (which could lead to all sorts of interesting power plays). Frapp would probably sit back and watch, avoiding authority or conflict, until he has to call the rest of the crew on their folly when their plans get a little too harebrained. Actually, he's quite a bit like Teach from Interesting Times in my head ...

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

The sextant amuses me ... they could keep it around on the odd chance the sun is actually visible. ;) Yes to the inoperative GPS. Or maybe sometimes it kicks into operation just long enough for them to remember they don't know how to use it, really. Maybe this could be a running background obsession for Frapp, tinkering with the GPS ... it seems like the sort of thing he'd be into. Maybe I just think this because he looks like Mad Al, who's always tinkering with the clacks mechanisms. Hmm. (for more on Frapp go a couple posts down ... before we get carried away with him, though, I'll have to email Copperbadge and see what sort of real claim he wants to stake on the character or if it was just rhetoric.)

I like your ideas on Perc, but let's take it a step further: perhaps he is simultaneously both the quietest and loudest person in the crew. He plays his music loud, goes to wild concerts, bangs away at repairs on the boat, etc., but on the rare occasion he says anything at all, it's just a mumble.

Ditto on the time period: this'll keep it flexible enough for fun but not too far removed from reality. After all, pre-9/11, if you weren't running drugs, who cared?

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

...erm ... one post up, not a couple posts down. Somewhere in this thread anyway.

[anathelen.livejournal.com]

I love that duality for Perc! I was thinking about locations last night and I can imagine Perc living in the loft above the boat garage (y'know, those shelters they build on docks that you can drive boats into to keep them from freezing). I figure his loud music playing habits might have gotten him booted out of the main ramshackle house, and this way he can have late-night jam sessions and also be close to the boat for tinkering with it. I wonder if Perc plays grunge pirate music, whatever it may be? (Some bizarre combination of electric guitars, fiddles, tinwhistles, and flannel)

Even if Frapp isn't the captain, a by-the-book authoritatian Coast Guard antagonist named Captain Black would be rather fantastic. I haven't read Interesting Times so I can't make the analogy, but I like the idea of an alternative lifestyle pirate group that doesn't have a pirate captain! It's beautifully contradictory, and I can imagine Frapp summoning his manager powers from his old exec days in pressing situations.

I have a few ideas for locations. I figure our pirate band lives on a small island with a dock and a collection of fishing boat, various sail boats (one of the characters could have been a sailing instructor?), rowboats, and a small rubber inflatable outboard motor boat. There's a boat garage by the water and a shed, and further up from the water is the main house, which was probably once a fishing shanty that's been greatly added onto. The best part is, since these are alternative lifestyle pirates they would probably have a good element of the back-to-nature and organic movements in them, and so their house can be old-fashioned without seeming out of place! So this means timber-framing, fireplaces, wood stoves, etc. if wanted.

Most of the island is wooded, but there's some sort of attempt at a garden and a hidden cellar/cave somewhere up the hill. The island must be reasonably close to a small inconspicious waterside town with a nice coffee shop and black market contacts, and also near to the shipping channels for raids and a big city for other business.

Puget Sound=perfect pirating fog. Bwahahaha.

I have a few episodic plot ideas if you're interested, though I don't actually work in the animation or television industry so I have no idea how to write them up.

[copperbadge.livejournal.com]

Is their ship the S.S. Presso?

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

Oh. OH. That is good.

[copperbadge.livejournal.com]

*bows* It's kind of what I do. :D

[copperbadge.livejournal.com]

but why are they pirates?

1. Because, have you SEEN how much a cup of good coffee now costs?

2. The rum was gone.