"THE BLACK CREEP OF THE FAMILY"
or
"HOW DONNY BECAME AN AIR PIRATE"
Don Karnage was born on the poop deck of an old pirate ship named the LEE KEE TUBB. The name is self-explanitory. This ship belonged to his parents, who were considered the Last of the Big-Time Plunderers. His father, Long Johns Karnage, was the captain. His mother, Anita Karnage, was navigator. There was a time when Long Johns did both jobs. Unfortunatly, whenever he got lost, he refused to ask for directions. He rarely even admitted to being lost. This resulted in sailing in circles and missing cargo ships. One day Anita simply stole all the maps and that was the end of their problems.
Even as a child, Don Karnage considered himself more manly than his two siblings. For once he was right. He had two sisters, Juanita and Tequila. Donny spent only five years in reform school before he quit to work full-time on his folks' ship. Juanita was kicked out of the school. Tequila was the only one who finished reform school.
Every year the whole piratical Karnage clan gathered on Shinbone Island for their annual reunion. They celebrated with such events as Loot Snatching, Plank Walking, Shark Wrestling, Boat Sinking, Mast Diving, Rum Chugging, and raiding every passing merchant ship they could find. Don had yet to develop a distaste for water, and he loved life on the open sea.
The odd-pirate-out at the sea raiders' reunion was Donny's Great-Uncle Garbajo. Garbajo's ship was not the sailing variety, but an airship: a large, hydrogen-filled zeppelin, christened the PILLAGER QUEEN. Garbajo insisted that there was no future in raiding the high seas. "The future of piracy," he kept announcing to everyone within earshot, "is in the sky!" Garbajo believed that he was a visionary, the first of a new breed. Everyone else believed that he was a nut.
Long Johns laughed at his uncle every year. "There are hardly any targets in the sky. You will never have enough plunder to sink a rotten canoe," he smirked.
Only a few years later Long Johns was singing a different tune (namely "Yo Ho Ho and I Feel Like a Bum"). The world's governments had launched a campaign to end piracy in international waters. Long Johns had just about lost the longjohns off his back. However, airspace was as yet unprotected. Trans-Atlantic blimps and the increase in the odd flying machines known as airplanes made Garbajo rich. Donny took a good look at Garbajo's hijacked riches when the First Air Raider took him on a ride in the PILLAGER QUEEN. However, the young Karnage still planned to inherit command of the LEE KEE TUBB from his father.
One day Long Johns announced that he had accumulated enough plunder to take himself and Anita to live in Canada where they could retire and get rich on welfare fraud. "The command of the LEE KEE TUBB is now up for grabs between those three scurvy brats of mine."
Dona Tequila wanted no part of it. She hated stealing from helpless ships, she hated having rum on her cornflakes in the morning, and she especially hated her psychotic sister and brother. She didn't even want to think about the war for command and what they might do to her. So, that night, she packed her clothes, some food, and her diploma from reform school in a sea chest. She put the chest in a lifeboat, climbed in, lowered it, and paddled for the mainland. Tequila's dream was to earn an honest living. As she paddled away the fish could hear her sing, "Yo, ho, no, no, a pirate's life for me...NOT."
Now the competition was between Juanita and Don. Juanita had a plan to get rid of her pesty little brother the easy way. During a practice sword fight, she deliberately cut two nicks in his left ear. Donny went screaming to his cabin to look in the mirror.
Juanita smiled. She was sure her egotistic brother would be horrified to have his handsomely perfect ear mauled. He would leave without a fight for fear of being injured further. She went to his room to gloat over him. As she walked in Donny said, "Thanks, sister-type-of-person. This nick-nack in my ear makes me look so rakishly handsome! I am the perfectamundo example of a good-looking pirate captain now, yes-no?" Juanita was furious. She lost no time in inventing another scheme.
That night Juanita linked all the chains on the ship together into one very looooooooooooooooooooooooooong chain. She ordered the crew to set the ship on full sail ahead. It wasn't long before the LEE KEE TUBB was well over the 80 knots per hour speed limit on the seaway. Then she snuck into Donny's room, carried Don to the stern of the ship, attached one end of the very looooooooooooooooooooooooooong chain to the ship's railing and the other to the "trap door" on the back of her rother's pyjamas. She then proceeded to pitch little Donny overboard.
Donny had never awakened so fast in his life. The water was so salty, so cold, and so very, very WET too! Realizing that he was in the process of being keel-hauled (not to mention the process of drowning), he grabbed the end of the chain and attempted to pull himself, hand-over-hand, back onto the ship. Unfortunately, the chain had been lengthened by his slime-ball sister and he almost drowned before he reached the surface. As it was, he was most thouroughly wet, both inside and out, before he pulled himself over the railing.
Donny vowed to get his stinking sister for this. NOBODY keel-hauled the great Don Karnage, future captain of the dreaded pirate ship, the LEE KEE TUBB! But as he squelched to her cabin in search of revenge, he happened to look out to sea. The sight of being surrounded by so much WATER almost did him in. Right then and there he swore that he would never EVER be the Scurvy of the Seven Salty Seas. The LEE KEE TUBB looked so very LEAKY! "You win, Juanita, this ship is all yours. Just get me off of this very wet ocean!" he said. Then, in an attempt to save some of his piratical dignity, he added, "I mean, I am feeling generous today. You may have the LEE KEE TUBB as a token of my brotherly love as long as you put me off at the nearest port." Juanita was happy to oblige, as she wanted Donny to go with as little resistance as possible. So ended the first of many defeats for Donny Karnage.
Now Donny was alone and destitute. What job was open to an ex-pirate who was afraid of water and had only a fifth-grade education in reform school? Just then an airplane passed by overhead and Don remembered his Great- Uncle Garbajo, the Scourge of the Skyways. If you fell off an airship you might be flattened, but at least you would be dry. As long as you were over land, anyway. So Donny set off in search of his raiding relative.
"Why do you want to join my crew?" asked Garbajo.
Donny repeated his great-uncle's spiel about "the future is in the sky" (he had heard it often enough to memorize it) and Garbajo fell for it. "I will make you first mate of the PILLAGER QUEEN," Garbajo said. Donny also mentioned that he did not care for water very much. "You must have hydrophobia. I will give you a rabies shot." Donny's already over-sized ego prevented him from saying anything about keel-hauling.
The next summer, the Pillager Queen was caught in a blizzard in Thembria. It crashed into the side of Mount Koldernhec. (Several years later, Donny would confront Colonel Spigot , a mental-case mechanic known as Wildcat, one of his future crew members , and a rather fat pilot named Baloo, in a battle for Garbajo's treasure. This adventure, entitled "The Rise of the PILLAGER QUEEN", can be found in the October 1991 issue of Disney Adventures or Colossal Comics Collection #7. But it's another story.) Very few of the crew members survived the disaster. Garbajo was not among them.
Donny was not along on that fateful voyage. (Too bad, eh?) He was leading a raid on a transport plane carrying designs for a new upright propeller that could create lift in place of wings. After hearing the tragic news of his great-uncle's untimely demise, Donny realized the era of the great zeppelins was as kaput as the HINDENBURG. He used the upright propellers as the lift-providing equipment on a formidable new Pirate Ship of the Skies. This ship housed everything found on the average pirate ship, plus a hangar, runway on top, and an opening beak to snare cargo planes. It was like a flying aircraft carrier with a mouth, and Donny called it the IRON VULTURE. (Later, a businesswoman named Miz Rebecca Cunningham would re-name it the RUSTY TURKEY.) Karny also discovered a island, once known simply as the Island Of The Godforsaken Hunk Of Rock, renamed it Pirate Island (how original!) and used the cave on the island as a land base. Donny's room was in the island's center, as far from the water as possible.
Donny rebuilt his crummy crew by recruiting ex-pilots who had lost their jobs because of their piratical qualities and dockside toughs. Donny also adopted an orphaned young Air Hobo whom he hoped would become heir to his ship. But that was not to be. The boy stole a jewel from Don and escaped the flying fortress on a silver sky surfboard known as an airfoil. But Donny's clash with his ex-crew member known as Kit Cloudkicker is yet another story.
So what happened to the three children of Anita and Long Johns Karnage? Well, Dona Tequila reached the mainland, changed her name to Donna Tekil, and tried to settle down to an honest life. Unfortunately, there is an old pirate saying, "Once a greedy, lying thief, always a greedy, lying thief". She became a politician.
Don Juanita traded the LEE KEE TUBB for a motorboat called the LAMPREY. She built up an armada of high-speed, heavily-armed ships and is now the terror of Southeast Asian shipping lanes. Her hold is full of plundered money, jewelry, and electronic equipment. She makes a fortune selling black-market Sonys.
Don Karnage discovered a pirate's dream-come-true: a rich seaside city called Cape Suzette that has never been raided by pirates.. The large cannons on the cliffs and other heavy fortifications may have something to do with this fact. Despite this, Don Karnage made sacking Cape Suzette his lifelong obsession, for no other pirate could boast of such a feat. His frustrating, difficult and rather moist quest to realize his dream continues to this day.
