The Pirates of Coney Island #1, Poster and Plot

The Pirates of Coney Island is an 8-part comic book published by Image Comics, first released in 2007. It is written by Rick Spears and penciled and inked by Vasilis Lolos.

Pirates of Coney Island #1Pirates of Coney Island is the natural inheritor of the title “best angry anti-establishment youth comic” from Rick Spears’ previous effort, Teenagers From Mars. Spears brings together a gritty, realistic look at the life of young juvenile delinquents, but he flavors it with heavy doses of crazy characters, outrageous car chases and style that most real young punks probably can’t muster. Spears’ wild ideas have already found a natural mate in the anarchic art of Rob G, but Vasilis Lolos is just as simpatico, with an edgy punk look reminiscent of Becky Cloonan and Amazing Joy Buzzards‘ Dan Hipp and flashy, gorgeous colors that remind me of the work of Supermarket’s Kristian. Pirates of Coney Island is a burst of pure pop entertainment with a darkly compelling and violent mean streak underlying it.

The pacing on Pirates of Coney Island can be a bit off-putting at first, as the entire first issue goes by without even introducing the titular characters. Instead, our point-of-view character, a runaway new to the New York area, has a nasty run-in with rival female gang The Cherries, and it isn’t until issue two that he joins up with the Pirates. It’s a questionable pacing choice, but by the time issue two rolls in and Spears and Lolos are introducing us to the Pirates, or issue three features a kickass act of roadway piracy, all is forgiven. Pirates may start rolling a little slow, but once it gets going, it doesn’t let up. It’s also clear that everything introduced in the first issue, from the Cherries to the mysterious enforcer driving a “Cadillacula,” will show up again before the miniseries is done.

Interior page from Pirates of Coney Island #1From the start, I fell in love with the artwork on this book. Vasilis Lolos has a great storytelling style, making terrific use of long horizontal panels, several pages of 8-10 panels to cram a lot of small moments into one page and then busting out a big two-panel page that serves as almost a splash for effect. He doesn’t use full- or two-page splash panels at all in the first three issues, and the result is room for a whole lot of story and action. Lolos also does the kind of thing you see more often in manga and European comics, tossing in panels of background detail that give a good sense of place, like the “slow pan” over Coney Island in mid-issue one, the atmospheric opening page of issue two or a shot of street signs in issue three.

Plot summary

Patch, a young runaway boy, stumbles his way into Coney Island, where he is met by the Cherries, an all-girl gang, who wants to mug him. As he tries to fight back, the leader of the gang cuts out his eye, and he is left unconscious. The next day he gets up and starts walking, but faints.

He awakes in the apartment of a young man who has sewn him up and helped him. Patch then goes to pickpocket, but is nearly caught by the police, when he is saved by the Pirates, a Coney Island gang who boards cars and sells them.

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