Comic Book / Pinky and Pepper Forever

our father who art in heaven art in heaven in heaven holy mother if i die before i wake i pray for us sinners at the hour of our death and forgive me pinky pinky pinky pinky

— Pepper's suicide note

Pinky and Pepper Forever is a Black Comedy Fan Works graphic novel by Eddy Atoms, based on the short-lived fashion doll line Pinkie Cooper and the Jet Set Pets.

The comic follows Pinky (spelled with a "y" to differentiate from the doll) and her girlfriend Pepper, college art students in a World of Funny Animals who are very in love but whose relationship is frequently strained by Pinky's erratic behavior and desperate craving for people to understand her art. When Pinky's behavior becomes too much and drives Pepper away (in part when she's careless with Pepper's BDSM outfit), Pinky decides that she has had enough of other people not taking her seriously and she leaves their school and the mortal coil in a blaze of glory by encasing her body in a bathtub full of resin as her final piece.

She goes straight to Hell for killing herself, but it turns out that she's actually pretty suited for it. When Pepper also ends her life in despair over the loss of Pinky, the two are reunited, and Pinky takes Pepper under her wing as a grim reaper in training.

The comic can be read in full and purchased physically on Silver Sprocket's website here.

A new Special Edition, featuring a foreword by Eddy Atoms and new extra comics is planned to release in October of 2024.

Given the short length and the story starting with the characters already dead and in hell before going back to How We Got Here, all spoilers are unmarked.

This work contains examples of:

• Adaptation Dye-Job: Pepper has dark brown hair in the doll line. In the comic, it's a deep blue color. It's based on an outfit set for Pepper that came with blue-streaked ponytails.◊
• Adaptational Name Change: The spelling of Pinky's name is different from the doll (the brand spells it with an "-ie" on the end), possibly to avoid legal trademark issues.
• Adaptational Sexuality: The Pinkie Cooper doll line never had much of anything in the way of indicating the characters' sexual or romantic orientations; the dolls have no boyfriends or indications of their romantic leanings. In the comic, Pinky and Pepper are lesbians in a relationship with each other.
• Adapted Out: Ginger Jones, the third main doll from the toyline, does not appear in the comic, nor do any of the pets (other than a brief Shout-Out at the end with Pepper chasing a puppy-like Pinky on a leash).
• Affably Evil: Pinky and Pepper, after becoming reapers. Pepper more so than Pinky.
• Arc Number: The number six appears multiple times throughout the comic. The comic flashes back to six months ago after the opening in hell, showing How We Got Here. Pinky appeared to Pepper in her dream and tempted her to die six weeks after Pinky's own death. Pepper has to endure six years of torture at Pinky's hands before being able to join her as a trainee grim reaper, and they are finally released back into the mortal realm to begin reaping 666 years later, if the subtitle is meant to be taken literally.
• Armor-Piercing Question: "Pepper! Are you happy to be here?" Immediately after Pinky asks this in Pepper's dream, she's on a one-way mission to the afterlife.
• Art Imitates Art: Pepper's art tends to place Pinky in various art references. The one that got her the homophobic insult was a Burlesque of Venus with Pinky as Venus in a grubby apartment standing on a mattress. Some of the paintings she does after Pinky's death reference The Scream, Satan Devouring His Son, and Ophelia by Sir John Millais.
• Art Shift: The comic shifts between colored pencil and marker scribbles, MS paint drawings, actual art pieces in watercolor and acrylic, and, in the case of the "Final Piece", a photograph of a real, modified Pinkie Cooper doll encased in resin in a molded bathtub.
• Bath Suicide: Combined with Deadly Bath; Pinky kills herself by encasing her body in resin in the bathtub.
• Big "SHUT UP!": “SILENCE SINNERS!” from the moon, while Pepper and Pinky are in cages being tortured. Not that they heed it at all.
• Bittersweet Ending: Pinky and Pepper are dead and doomed to the fires of hell eternal, admitting that what they killed themselves over was silly, but they've at least risen in the ranks as grim reapers and can spend the rest of their afterlives with one another.
• Black Comedy: While the subject matter of the comic is dark it gets so over-the-top it can become amusing, and yet the art style remains cutesy, bright, and colorful. Pinky and Pepper's torture in Hell is horrific, but Pinky is merely annoyed by most of it since she's Too Kinky to Torture. And when another animal being tortured asking Pepper what got her sent to Hell, she awkwardly answers, "Um, lesbianism."
• Blatant Lies:
  • After Pinky and Pepper have reunited in Hell, Pinky excitedly asks if people liked her final work—the public display of her own dead body in resin. Pepper nervously assures her that everyone loved it. In reality, we see Pinky's classmates looking either horrified or morbidly entertained by it, Pepper crying over her girlfriend's death, and a news article on Pepper's phone revealing that Pinky's family are already engaged in legal battles in order to reclaim Pinky's body and keep it out of the hands of private art collectors—though her will leaves it to the art school.
  • When asked by a fellow resident of Hell what she's in for, Pepper lies and says "Um, lesbianism." She'd just been told by the ferryman escorting her across that she would have just had to wait out in Purgatory for the "gay shit" but by committing suicide she's damned to hell.
• Bondage Is Bad: Pinky and Pepper indulge in intense BDSM scenarios in their sex life, which they both enjoy. But Pinky also refers to it as self-harm, and there is some indication that she wants to be hurt due to her mental instability.
• The Burlesque of Venus: Pepper presents an art piece with Pinky as Venus, standing in their dirty apartment on a mattress with her hair covering her. She tries to explain it is a statement on the pearl forming from sand inside a clam, but gets a homophobic insult from a classmate.
• Capitalism Is Bad: Within hours after Pinky has killed herself, investors are bidding on her corpse. Her family is understandably peeved about this. Her will states that it must stay at the Art School.
• Creator Breakdown: In-Universe. Pinky's breakdown overnight over her fellow art student calling her work trite and tacky, combined with her fight with Pepper over the misuse of Pepper's bondage gear (and Pepper staying the night at her parents) have her tweet how she's going to kill herself. She does so that night and encases her dead body in resin as her Final Piece.
• Christianity is Catholic: Pepper is a devoted Catholic; her suicide note includes the Hail Mary prayer, and of the two "versions" she imagines when she wants to be redeemed, one is "First Communion Pepper."
• Corrupt the Cutie: Pepper starts out as a sweet artist and devout Christian who loves her girlfriend and takes inspiration from their relationship. Pinky's volatility and death, and the prospect of only being able to reunite with her in Hell, leads Pepper to kill herself and gradually embrace her anger and frustration towards Pinky as they become grim reapers. Eventually she admits that she's okay with being evil if it means that they get to stay together.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Pinky and Pepper's deaths both employ this.
  • We only see the aftermath of Pinky's and don't know how it's actually performed. Her head is still above the resin in the tub, but she could have asphyxiated from the resin curing. She may have also tried to drown herself in the resin and, given the foreshadowing of her sinking under the water's surface while bathing, popped up at the last minute reflexively. Also given the various sharp implements in the background, it's possible she slit her wrists, or took Pepper's pills. Regardless, she's still dead.
  • We don't see Pepper's actual death at all. We just see her praying to God to see Pinky again with a red overlay and her sweating violently, and then she wakes up in Hell. We do see several pill bottles just before her death, so it likely involved an overdose.
• Cute Is Evil: Most of the art is adorable, even when it's in Hell. The various Hell Hounds laying around the place stand out in particular.
• Dead Guy on Display: Pinky does this with her own body, encasing her corpse in resin as her final art piece and willing it to her art school.
• Don't Fear the Reaper: The skeletal ferryman who takes Pepper to Hell is perfectly friendly to her, if a bit casual about the fact that she would have been sentenced to Purgatory solely for being gay. They appear again to take the girls back to the world of the living when they graduate as grim reapers and congratulate the two of them for doing well.
• Driven to Suicide:
  • Pinky kills herself in a fit of emotional instability, in a mix of her frustrations at other people not understanding her art and not taking her seriously and Pepper being upset that she used her BDSM suit for one of her performances and stained it (which caused her to lash out at Pepper), throwing their relationship into turmoil. Pepper is only gone for the night but Pinky kills herself, encasing her body in resin in the bathtub.
  • Pepper kills herself weeks after Pinky's death, unable to cope and after a vision of seeing Pinky in the ocean telling her that it doesn't even hurt to die.
• Easter Egg:
  • In the other tab to the side of Pinky's Twitter feed, there's a tab labeled "bulk resin." Which Pinky encases her dead body in.
  • In hell, Pepper imagines herself as two figures—"Technical Virgin Pepper" and "First Communion Pepper", with the latter confirming a Catholic upbringing. Both are a little nod to the extra outfits and dolls that were released with the toy line.
  • The line in Pepper's suicide note, "pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death" is from the Hail Mary prayer, confirming her being Catholic.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Subtle, but the Reaper bringing Pepper into Hell mentions that she could have just "waited it out in Purg" for the "gay shit"—implying that whatever bureaucracy Hell has, even they believe that being gay isn't a sin worthy of eternal damnation in itself.
• Fire and Brimstone Hell: Hell in this comic takes cues from the classic depictions, with flames, boiling rivers, and pitchfork-wielding devils. There are also touches of Greek myth, with the river that the ferryman traverses to bring souls to Hell explicitly called the Styx, and Bosch-esque surreal landscapes of torture.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: In reverse, chronologically. The first scene has Pinky and Pepper in hell, with Pinky eagerly eating human flesh at a local restaurant. Soon after, the flashback start six months ago shows Pinky asking if Pepper could love someone who ate people.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Pinky's love of baths; she's shown early on sinking under the surface of the water before coming up gasping for air. Her suicide involves encasing her dead body in resin in their apartment's bathtub, with her face just above the surface. (In the sculpture there's no gasp for air, but there is in the quick drawing.)
  • When the two are on a date, Pepper sings the lyrics to Prince's "i would die 4 u" while doing karaoke: "And if you're evil, I'll forgive you...cause you...I would die 4 u." She does both later on, but not in that order.
• How We Got Here: The comic starts with both Pinky and Pepper in hell, with Pinky asking if everyone liked her final piece: her dead body encased in resin. It then flashes back to six months ago, showing how things got to the point of them both in hell.
• Jerkass:
  • An unnamed kangaroo art student interrupts Pepper while she's presenting a painting of Pinky in a Burlesque Of Venus style painting — and explaining how it's about how sand in a clam makes a pearl — to make a homophobic comment, saying she "eats a lot of clams."
  • Pinky at one point brings a smelly can of tuna to a underwater themed party. Pepper asks if Pinky means to make people hate her.
  • Clarissa, a fellow art student, not only laughs at the homophobic joke against Pepper but later criticizes a painting Pinky did by calling it trite, tacky, and obvious. While the other students and teacher didn't get it either, Clarissa stands out as unnecessarily harsh. After Pinky's suicide art piece, she's prominently seen taking pictures of it casually.
• Meaningful Background Event: When Pepper is praying to God to see Pinky in her sleep, a few pill bottles can be seen on her dresser. Given it's followed by Pepper waking up in hell dizzy and out of breath, it isn't hard to guess how Pepper likely managed to kill herself in her sleep.
• Mysterious Past: Pepper admits in the narration that she and Pinky never really talked about their pasts with each other, even after getting together. While it's easy to garner that Pepper had an extremely Catholic religious upbringing with parents that are passive about her sexuality at best (Pepper has to remind her mother that Pinky is her girlfriend, not her roommate, but is on good enough terms with her to stay at her house after her fight with Pinky), Pepper knows nothing about Pinky, including the source of her feelings of inadequacy and a desire for self harm.
• Nipple and Dimed: Zigzagged. Pinky in the tub bathing is shown with nipples, and the real "sculpture" of Pinky encased in resin in a bathtub uses a doll that has Barbie Doll Anatomy and shows nothing. However, a quick drawing of Pinky's Final Piece after the sculpture shows her briefly in a white dress.
• Paint the Town Red: The first reaping the two go to together is a murder suicide. They're standing off to the side, but there's enough blood and guts on the floor for the two to paint with the blood.
• Reptiles Are Abhorrent:
  • The snake person Clarissa, who harshly calls Pinky's art trite, tacky, and obvious with a close up on her tongue. She also laughs at the homophobic joke one student makes against Pepper, and she's later taking a picture of Pinky's final art piece—her dead body in resin—with a blank look.
  • After Pinky's artistic suicide, there's a crodillian person smiling at her Final Piece.
  • One of the demons in Hell is a giant snake.
• Shout-Out:
  • When Pinky does performance art in Pepper's bondage suit by crushing peaches and letting them be thrown at her, the cat that she hands a peach to derisively thinks she's "pulling that Abramovic shit" before throwing a crushed peach at her, a reference to performance artist Marina Abramović.
  • Twilight Sparkle and Popplio plushies can be seen in Pepper's bed as she prays to Pinky for forgiveness. Twilight Sparkle also appears as an irritable centaur in Hell shooting an arrow through Pinky's chest.
  • One of the people in Pinky's art class looks like an anthropomorphic version of Applejack from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic; another resembles Mouscedes King from Monster High.
• Together in Death: Pepper kills herself in despair several weeks after Pinky's suicide and eventually joins her in Hell.
• Too Kinky to Torture: Pinky complains that the various forms of torture she is subjected to in Hell aren't intense enough, and that Pepper did a better job when they brought BDSM elements into their sex life. Her dissatisfaction with it leads her to rise through the ranks of Hell and become a grim reaper herself.
• True Art Is Incomprehensible: Pinky is constantly frustrated with people taking the wrong message from her art pieces—or worse, deriding them as basic or predictable. Her "final masterpiece" is her own dead body encased in resin in their apartment tub, which she presented as her final project for class in order to stick it to her classmates and teachers.
• Year Inside, Hour Outside: Time moves differently in Hell, resulting in scenarios such as Pepper's torture at Pinky's hands taking six years yet still somehow only lasting until Pinky's lunch break. The girls also spend 666 years in Hell before they are able to travel back to Earth as grim reapers, but the world that they return to looks much like the modern world they left, implying that not that much time has passed in the world of the living.
• You Are Worth Hell: A rather dark example, since Pepper commits suicide and literally condemns herself to Hell, choosing to embrace being evil for the sake of being with Pinky. Even when shown regretting her lot in the afterlife, she affirms that she still loves Pinky and is willing to suffer for her.

---

&EVER&EVER&EVER&EVER&EVER&EVER&EVER&EVER&EVER&EVER&EVER&EVER&EVER&EVER&EVER&EVER&EVER&EVER&EVER&EVER&EVER&EVER&EVER AMEN