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.
October is upon us!
To celebrate, here is an old-ish comic I made about Brook for a #OnePiece horror zine called "What Lurks Beneath".
It was a hell of a project but I was (and am) pleased with how it turned out and what I could capture of Brook's backstory.
Enter at your own peril 🌊💀🧵[1/4]
