Brush with Peril, page 017 – Commentary

The List of Qualities:

INSPIRATION: DOC SAVAGE

Doc Savage pulp stories of the 1930’s and 1940’s featured a seemingly super-human man, always described as the strongest and most dexterous, and also a master scientist and doctor and everything else you could coincidentally come up with that might be needed for each next adventure. His assistants were all the greatest in their respective fields of law, archaeology, electronics, and so on – but their skills paled in comparison to Doc’s, whose own skills far surpassed these experts. That cracked me up, this idea of someone with a LONG resume of skills, all of which he ranked “number one in the world,” putting experts to shame for their comparatively pathetic abilities, compared to Doc Savage.

INSPIRATION:  JAMES BOND LICENSED 1980’s ROLE PLAYING GAME

As a kid, I owned this James Bond role playing game from the 1980’s, which I loved even though I didn’t really ever have any friends to play it with me.  In this game, like Dungeons and Dragons, you created your own spy who earned skills in all manner of sports and physical activity, gambling, fighting techniques, weapons mastery, various sciences that are potentially helpful to a spy, disguise, weapon-using, and on and on.  I loved all the possibilities, and the game manual gave a list of all these skills that could become necessary or helpful on your adventure, and you chose the ones that suited you. As combined with the above Doc Savage, I decided my spy must be a master of EVERY possible skill that a spy could possibly possess, and so that’s how his list of attributes came about as an introduction to him, on this page of my comic.

The Look

THE SKI MASK AND TUXEDO

The costume element sprouted out from a project I was doing back in 2007, “The Spider Twins,” in which I drew an encyclopedia full of professional wrestler-looking high school students who went around in masks trying to right the wrongs they felt were being committed all around them.  While researching different masks and shoe wear to make each character unique, I stumbled onto a photo of someone in a tuxedo who was wearing a mask, and I thought, that’s a brilliant look.  But the imagery didn’t fit with the Spider Twins.  However, I realized now, it would fit perfectly for a spy.

James Bond wore many costumes, depending on the situaion – horse jockey, race car driver, suave dinner party goer, scuba diver, astronaut, golfer, cat burgler. It crossed my mind to do the same with my character, but I ultimately decided one costume is plenty, like a super hero might have.

That put in the back of my head this idea for a character in a tuxedo with a ski mask.  In designing the character, there was a conscious decision to make the character all black, and to make the black of his suit impenetrable to light, so that there are no visible wrinkles or folds in the cloth, no shininess in the light.  It’s just black. 

When I was around seventh grade, there was a comic by DC called Vigilante, and he was a Batman/Punisher character type, but unlike other characters with “black” costumes at this time (whose costumes were blue), his costume was all black, and the black was in this fashion where you saw no reflection of light or muscle definition as you would in the other black-costumed characters (like Black Bolt or Black Panther or Black Widow or the Punisher).  There was (other than a few stripes) no definition of the character’s form except the outline of all the black. 

Mike Mignola defines shapes by solid blacks, and even so, they are fully realized and three dimensional, and I wanted to use this same style of all-black.

I sent some preliminary pages of my comic to my best friend, Dave Gibbons, way back on 9/5/12, and he wrote back in an email, “Graphically speaking, it’s a masterstroke to have the spy in flat black and white: really “pops” him out amongst the hatching and tonal work.”

INSPIRATION:  LUCHA LIBRE and SANTO

A masked character walking around amongst the population and performing everyday tasks was a mainstay of famed Mexican professional wrestler and icon, Santo (The Saint), who was as big a star in Mexico as the biggest sports or movie stars of the U.S.  He wrestled for five decades, and starred in 52 films, where he wrestled mad scientists, crooks, secret agents, and monsters like Dracula, the Werewolf, Frankenstein, and the Cyclops.  He wore a mask with holes for his eyes, nose, and mouth, and in the films, he would body slam and elbow the villains, but also just walk around fully masked, anywahere in public he needed to go – Through the airport, playing chess, driving cars – and no one seemed to notice or make a google-eyed second take, or mind or show any sign that they thought it odd that this enormous guy is walking around with this ridiculous mask on.  I loved that, and decided my spy should do the same.

Looking at Van Gogh’s Self-Portraits, I feel like he didn’t have the skill or interest to accurately convey actual proportions of his own face measurements, which creates for him a series of portraits that might have facial similarities, but to me they look less like a bunch of self-portraits of one person, and more like several portraits of several different similar-looking people, such as brothers or relatives.

It reminds me of The Simpsons Season 9, Episode 17, “Lisa the Simpson,” where we meet a bunch of Homer Simpson’s relatives, who all have a strong resemblance to Homer, but one is thinner, and one has a thicker head of hair, they’re different ages, and one has a mustache, and they have different fashion senses, and so on.

With this in mind, I thought it made for a fun joke, AND was a no-brainer that if I used Van Gogh’s self-portraits, they would need to be, not one character, but each portrait a different person – a family of brothers who were all vicious, sadistic, brutal, and slightly unhinged – a gang of violent thugs for hire.