With an impending TV series that follows real pirate hunters hunting real pirates, Gabe Bullard ponders Terry and the Pirates and the need to redefine our fictional swashbucklers.

Spike TV is planning a reality television series called Pirate Hunters. With all the subtlety expected of the Spike network, the show will be just that: people hunting pirates. I like the idea that the fight against pirates will be televised. I don't like the idea that it will feature real people doing real things.

Reality TV preceded our current economic recession by nearly a decade. The shows generally need a smaller staff and crew than narrative fiction programs, thus putting writers and others out of work. I think it's a fair stretch to say that reality TV helped get us into this mess.

If you buy that, then you have to believe it won't get us out.

If America is going to fight pirates, we need to do it from all sides. Not just on the sea and shore, but in our imaginations. Winning the war against freebooters will require a united front of fiction. If the actual war on pirates is going to be a boring battle of statesmanship (kind of like the original Star Trek), then the American people need an escape. No more romanticized buccaneers clouding our ideations of real pirates. We need tales of vicious swashbucklers to match reality. What's more, we need real fictional heroes to fight them. We need a bailout for brawn.

In 2007, I spent a few weeks with the definitive catalog of exaggerated heroism and piracy: Terry and the Pirates, Volume One. It's a collection of the first two years of Milton Caniff's legendary newspaper comic strip. It follows the wisecracking scamp Terry and his chiseled pal Pat as they travel through 1930s China. Along the way, they pick up an affable but clumsy Asian stereotype named Connie and battle nautical foes with names like The Dragon Lady.

Like so many adventure comics of the time, Terry and the Pirates has sharp lines between right and wrong and good and bad. The only thing more defined is Pat's jawline. Pat isn't one of the modern anti-heroes. Sure, he gets a little conflicted, but only in matters of love. And when the chips fall, he's ready to sock a faceless bad guy, no questions asked, emotions be damned.

Richard Phillips, the American captain of the captured ship, is kind of like Pat; he tried to swim away and escape his captors. It didn't work, but he tried. Maybe there could be a newspaper strip based on his quest for revenge in Somalia. But we'd need a crafty wisecracker to go with him. How about Sully Sullenberger, the pilot who landed saved all of his passengers' lives by crash landing his plane into the Hudson River? Talk about badass. With him and Captain Phillips on our comic book pages, no pirate could escape the swift sock in the nose of American justice.

It is therefore my theory that a series of comics, TV shows and computer animated movies starring Richard Phillips and Sully Sullenberger fighting pirates off the coast of Somalia would not only cheer up a depressed America, but would prompt a buying spree of newspapers, adventure novels, t-shirts, direct-to-DVD movies and breakfast cereals that would pull us right out of recession and back on the fast track to recovery. Yes, a pulpy adventure series starring the two most unreal heroes our country has today would give the falling red lines on economists' charts a swift uppercut.

Too bad about reality, though.

Since piracy is a problem caused by myriad socioeconomic hornets' nests, it will most likely win against any amount of force. I see Pirate Hunters failing and Spike filling its timeslot with reruns of Married...With Children and Manswers. And, according to the news, many of the pirates are young mercenaries, and I don't want to see two older white guys punching poor teenagers, no matter how good the CG version of Connie looks.

I guess I'm wrong. We don't need a bailout for brawn; we need a simpler world and better pirates. | Gabe Bullard

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