What Lurks Beneath - Blog Posts

hazyirbis-blog

1 year ago

Amazing and Heartbreaking

WHAT LURKS BENEATH Comic

It's the spooky season...! To celebrate, please enjoy this 7-page horror comic featuring Brook that I made for "WHAT LURKS BENEATH", a One Piece horror zine full of incredible talent. After sales are only open until the end of October so please consider checking it out and grabbing a digital copy absolutely PACKED with amazing art & stories, and some of the nicest merch I've seen from a zine!

The Thousand Sunny is silhouetted against a stormy sea. Brook: "Stormy seas and dark clouds are no cause to frown - come pick your noise-maker and let's boogie down!" Usopp with a banjo: "Be real with us Brook, something doesn't make sense!" Chopper with a flute: "Do you swear you can play all these wild instruments?" Brook: "Cross my heart hope to die, were there one to be found- though it's not half as hard as you're making it sound. Given time any bonehead can learn any part, and time did I have on that grim Thriller Bark; Always gloomy, no sun, nor a moon, scarcely rain, so! To mark passing days I decided I'd train. I pledged I would master the tools of my crew-!" He stage-whispers to the boys: "Though step number one was divining who's who." In a flashback, Brook plays a wind instrument by a skeleton. "Clarinet means it's Charlie; Oboe, and it's Chet." He plays a note. "An old English horn? But that means..." He shakes the skeleton and yells, "Bernadette!?"

Brook borrows Chopper's flute. "I practiced and practiced, and practiced some more! Every tune I knew soon back to front without flaw." He dances while playing the flute. "Fingers worked to the bone til I couldn't deny;" he pauses, arms lowering. Fog has started to enter his frame. "I had learned all I could. It was time for goodbye." He looks down at a long-haired skeleton in a tattered dress. "I'd retire each piece with its player below." Brook's words appear on a sheet of music paper along with shadows of his bony hands tying strings around a wide variety of instruments. He has now tied the flute to the skeleton with a red string and carries her through the fog and drops her over the side of the ship into the ocean. In the present day, Sanji and Robin watch in perturbed silence. Brook continues - "Though it seemed to these eyes not all wanted to go." A haunted long-haired face blending skeleton and flesh takes one last fearful look at Brook as it sinks below the waves.

Brook gazes emptily down against a foggy sky. "As captain, I ought to have joined them." Several bony hands appear to claw at him from the choppy sea. "I stayed. Like the piper in convoy of rats, on I played, and prayed to the devil whose fruit I'd dared eat, 'If I'm never to wake from this dream, may I sleep?'" He imagines himself as a human again, trapped on the ocean floor, straddled by the skeleton of his old captain Yorki who taunts him with his own violin, other skeletan crewmates and band members dancing behind them amongst coral and seaweed like orange licking flames. "But I feared I would pay tenfold more if I tried it, in the dark, and the deep, and the deafening..."

"Quiet." Brook alone is in the same position as before, now a skeleton pinned to the ocean floor by his devil fruit, his tattered violin resting on his chest. The seaweed is inky black around him and the darkness of the composition surrounds the singular word "quiet", emphasising how utterly alone he is. The panel fades into his tattered shoes and legs standing on the railing of his old ship, violin held loosely in his hand, the torn sails flapping amidst the fog surrounding him and obscuring almost everything. "But I waited. And waited. For what, I can't say."

Technicolour panels overlay different sections of Brook's skull, showing what expressions he might be showing if he still had a face; a forehead wrinkled in agony, eyes wide in a thousand yard stare, cheeks split in laughter, a chin dimpled and streaked with tears; "In that miserable twilight between night and day. No world beyond fog, nothing left that could prove -" A singular panel cutting back to the present day shows Nami, Luffy, Usopp, and Zoro all watching him with varying looks of apprehension and horror, but Brook continues unbothered - "If I wasn't some needle left spun in its groove!" In Brook's memory he turns around and sees a figure emerging through the fog; as he recognises it as Yorki his flesh seems to return and he jumps down from the railing back to the deck, running towards him with joy; "Words heard on the wind, in an endless refrain."

Brook breaks through the fog on the ghost ship into a clearing of rain that immediately soaks through his clothes and breaks his illusion, returning him to a skeleton. In the present day, too, Brook is also silent, contemplative, everyone else watching him. He remembers looking up at the drops pouring from the sky under the torn sails of the Dutchman, and looks out the Thousand Sunny's port hole at the storm, tapping the flute against the glass. "Forgive me, I err," he says.

A double-page spread finishes the comic on a single shot of Brook soaked in the storm back on the Dutchman and he finishes his poem - "On occasion, it rained." Water is pooling and spilling from his empty eye sockets and down his skull to give the impression that he's crying, even though he has lost the ability to actually emote as such.