Pibgorn
Pibgorn is a web comic by Brooke McEldowney, creator of 9 Chickweed Lane and is more or less a spin-off of the earlier strip. It follows the life of the eponymous fairy as she reacts to demigods who act like petty bureaucrats, her rival Drusilla the succubus, blustering loon Thorax, demonic game show hosts, idiotic robots and angels of death who act like bike couriers. It allows McEldowney more latitude to use large words and engage in the double entendre and good girl art that is his forte. Unlike his other strip 9 Chickweed Lane, Pibgorn is highly sexualized, and frequently features nudity, violence, and gratuitous sexual liaisons involving the main cast.
Tropes used in Pibgorn include:
- Alien Sky
- All Animals Are Dogs
- All Girls Want Bad Boys
- All Women Are Lustful: Since most of the early strips were dedicated to seeing which of the two female leads would get the right to service Author Avatar Geoff, it's sort of easy to see that the author is marching merrily on with the same theme he propounded in the parent strip. Indeed, virtually every single female character introduced invariably beds an Author Avatar of some variety or another. Frequent motifs include BDSM, demon mind-rape, and sight gags involving nudity of the titular character.
- All Trolls Are Different
- Alt Text / Author Tract / Wall of Text: The "commentary" added into a rerun arc, apparently triggered after The Other Wiki told him he couldn't edit pages on his own work (he didn't like that someone described a scene as "the sexualization of music" but that's precisely what's going on: in the next scene Geoff tells Dru that he gets the impression she's pimping the music and in the commentary Brooke admits that Dru can't not do anything in a supernaturally sexy manner, not to mention all those other scenes of passionate piano playing). Let it also be known that in refute of his argument against the "fetish fuel" theory, that Drusilla employs hip grinds and pelvic thrusts as part of her "performance" during her concerto.
- Animated Armor
- Antiheroine: Drusilla the succubus.
- Author Appeal: Even worse than 9 Chickweed Lane, if such a thing can be imagined. Every manner of bizarre, disturbing fetish turns up in Pibgorn.
- Author Avatar: and Geoff from Pibgorn is a nerdy musician as well.
- Because Destiny Says So
- Blackmail Is Such an Ugly Word
- Bolt of Divine Retribution
- Breakout Character: Drusilla. In the beginning, she was strictly a supporting character--Geoff's Disposable Fiance and a bit of a Butt Monkey. Then, Drusilla revealed to Pibgorn that she was a succubus and promptly moved to the forefront as a main character.
- Chiaroscuro
- Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: Pibgorn's intellectual Talking Animal friends and (probably) the Obstructive Bureaucrats in charge of fairydom.
- Cliché Storm: In-universe
- Cold-Blooded Torture
- Cold Opening: How most arcs of Pibgorn begin (at least the ones I've read); the latest one about aliens accidentally targeting a vampire/rapist was particularly incomprehensible.
- Color Coded for Your Convenience: Pibgorn the fairy is mottled green over a human flesh tone; Drusilla the succubus is red and black; Drusilla's "daughter" is blue...
- Constantly Curious
- Cool Sword
- Deadpan Snarker: Drucilla, lately Pibgorn, and especially the disdainful Grim Reaper Mildred.
- Deal with the Devil: A guy who hated Drusilla around the Elizabethan Era made such a deal in order to torture her and the playwright she was in love with (I think) due to her being the playwright's muse.
- Defanged Horrors: What Drusilla did to the vampire rapist.
- Deliberately Monochrome
- Dreaming of Times Gone By
- Due to the Dead
- Early Installment Weirdness: In Drusilla's first story arc, Pibgorn rallies some friendly beasts to scare her away -- and she looks genuinely frightened. Granted, this is before the readers learn she isn't human.
- Everybody Has Lots of Sex
- Evil Gloating
- The Fair Folk
- Genre Blind
- Genre Savvy
- Get It Over With
- Godiva Hair: Drusilla and more recently Pibgorn; ironically the hair fairy has shoulder-length hair -- all over her body.
- Gorn: When Oognat, the hair fairy, got chopped to bits, it disturbed a lot of people; sure, she got better but by then, the damage was done.
- Green-Eyed Monster
- Grim Reaper: "My name's Mildred. I'm death."
- Half-Human Hybrid: The king of the fairies has a humanoid upper body and a kangaroo-rat-esque lower body. Drucilla and her human subject's "daughter".
- He's Dead, Jim
- I Gave My Word
- Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Happens so often to the female protagonists it's practically Author Appeal.
- Informed Ability: Drusilla often states she is omnipotent, yet is hurt, foiled and defeated by other characters more often than anyone else in the strip.
- In the Back
- Journey to the Center of the Mind/Mental Time Travel: What Dru can do thanks to her succubus powers.
- Kneel Before Zod
- Lady in Red
- Laser-Guided Amnesia
- Last Request
- Les Yay: There seem to be a lot more pictures of Dru and Pib together than Pib and Geoff.
- A Magic Contract Comes with a Kiss (minus the contract): Pib needs to use the Baiser de la Fée in order to do magic. Actually she just needs a touch, but it's more fun with kisses.
- Mayfly-December Romance: Dru's past romances.
- Mixed Metaphor
- Murder the Hypotenuse
- Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot:
 |
Pib: I'm half fairy, half bimbesque android. |
 |
- She describes her sex organs as "turbocharged". Something Awful goon TheOneAndOnlyT comments, "I'm kind of morbidly curious about how one turbocharges a vagina."
- Noir Episode
- Non-Action Guy: Geoff, although less so after he met Pib.
- Odd-Shaped Panel
- Our Ghosts Are Different/Our Souls Are Different: Drusilla helped reunite two lost souls, a woman haunting Geoff's piano and a living Russian fighter pilot.
- Painting the Fourth Wall
- Parental Abandonment
- Planetary Romance
- Political Correctness Gone Mad
- Private Eye Monologue
- Pure Is Not Good
- Ragtag Band of Misfits
- Red Eyes, Take Warning
- Ridiculously-Human Robots: Cornelia is actually an alien android modeled on Pib sent to gather human sperm for some reason. Unfortunately vampire sperm is "dead seed" so the aliens decide to kindly Mercy Kill humanity.
- Rape Is Love: How the vampire rapist and "Pib"/Cornelia meet.
- Really Seven Hundred Years Old: The magical/demonic characters in Pibgorn; possibly possible interdimentional visitor Thorax and his Pap.
- Redheaded Heroine / Fiery Redhead: Pibgorn.
- Red Right Hand: Dru's forked ears, which are the only part of her that doesn't change regardless of her disguise.
- Rose-Haired Girl
- Sealed Evil in a Can: Apparently the common cold is/was an army of baby demons just waiting for "an incredibly stupid succubus" to mistakenly set them off.
- She's Got Legs: Everyone except the hair fairy, and who'd want to see hairy gams anyway.
- Shout-Out: Death/Mildred looks like Louise Brooks.
- Sizeshifter
- Stuff Blowing Up: Dru stopped an alien invasion by blowing up a volcano; unfortunately this happened when a real-life volcano was blowing up.
- Take That, Critics!: Dru took time off from her busy schedule of being sexy to fry a bridge-structure symbiont while Mildred, who does her work at the speed of thought, noted that most humans would rather brainlessly argue over minutia on the Internet then actually put their minds to work.
- Talking Animal
- Tender Tears
- There Are No Coincidences
- Think Nothing of It
- Thoroughly Mistaken Identity
- Treacherous Advisor
- Triang Relations: Pibgorn, Geoff, and Drusilla (to Dru's credit she was there first).
- True Love's Kiss
- Unwilling Suspension
- Who Wants to Live Forever?/I Just Want to Be Normal: A mysterious young woman who has been trying to kill herself for centuries is actually the daughter of Drusilla and a human man she was inspiring circa the Elizabethan Era, artificially created just to torture Dru.
- Whole-Plot Reference: Pibgorn's slightly Gender Flipped take on A Midsummer Night's Dream.
- You Fail Biology Forever: BUMBLEBEES DO NOT HUMP LEGS!
- Dicks don't work that way, even with robotic enhancement! And just how do you turbocharge a vagina anyway?