A little known sci-fiction humor strip named "The Space Pirates", drawn by Eric Lindgren has suddenly found a whole new life for itself.

The trio of cartoon characters and their ship have suddenly found themselves being readied for logos, t-shirts and other merchandise as licensed characters for outdoor lasertag equipment manufacturer "Adventure Sports".

"The characters will be featured on the company's XM-22 taggers and various paraphanalia for our Youth's Lasertag Summer Camp," said Derek Petit, C.E.O. and founder of A.S, "We feel the characters really capture the fun spirit of the sport and the would match up perfectly with the 14 and under age-group we are dealing with."

Details of the agreement are confidential but the overall summary of the license included an upfront licensing fee as well as a percentage of retail merchandise to be sold.

"We really want to promote the artist and this work as well," confided Mr. Petit, "and we will be promoting his website information on several of the products we intend to make available."

In response, Eric Lindgren has since created an official dot com site for "The Space Pirates" ( http://thespacepirates.com )and intends to re-activate the strip from it's nearly year-long hiatus.

"The strip itself," says Mr. Lindgren, "had been put on semi-hiatus since I started doing "The Lousley Affair" (which includes them in the storyline) and my latest endeavor, "The FLOOR" (currently available at www.thefloor.spiderspawn.com ). As I am only a few pages out from finishing "Lousley" I can forsee a full reactivation of the "daily-style" Pirate strips by the summer of 2006. This may or may not impact my current work on "The FLOOR". We will see. I think this is a very exciting opportunity for Ray and the crew. I hope it really catches on."

The new site, thespacepirates.com , currently features his older "Pirates" strips as well as re-running his archive of other older titles and the latest from "The FLOOR". Additionally, the site has a selection of 8 colorful wallpaper downloads available and the standard forum and guestbook features. The Forum does have one unusual aspect to it. You can break out your best (or worst) pirate slang and grammer there and join in the community. It's a lot like "talk like a pirate day" turned into a permanent event on the forum.
Lindgren further confides, "I really do not expect much activity until the Adventure Sports summer camps swing into action in a couple of months. Right now, it has just opened up and the only 'new forum member' it 'testing', a product of the SiteRise (the site's host) support staff helping me to get the forum set up. New strips should start appearing around that time as well. I just hope I can adapt the site to be as fun and entertaining as possible, no matter what age a visitor is."

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