Panels 1 and 2: For firearm enthusiasts, I pretty sure that Thugboy’s revolver was based on a friend’s .44 Magnum “mountain revolver”—that is, a lightweight, alloy-framed handgun meant to be carried on hikes and the like for defense against a reenactment of The Revenant’s bear encounter. (As you might guess, you’d need to be a strapping buck like Thugboy to fire the g-d thing, as the recoil of such a large caliber in a lightweight gun was seriously unpleasant.) Either that, or it might’ve been based on the even more impressive .500 Smith & Wesson snubnose revolver, though the cylinder looks a bit short for that—not that I knock myself out with extreme artistic accuracy in my depictions of firearms, though. In any event, the idea here was that, dating back to the days of his “cell,” Thugboy had to use the largest possible caliber when dealing with suprahumans.
Panel 3: “BKAM” is a gunfire sound FX that my late friend Toren Smith created when he was doing the English rewrite end of the translation on Kenichi Sonoda’s manga Gunsmith Cats. Side note: I did the same “English rewrite” bit for Toren’s company Studio Proteus on Sonoda’s manga Cannon God Exaxxion and Hiroyuri Utatane’s Seraphic Feather, polishing and rewriting a base translation from Japanese into idiomatic English, so the final version’s dialogue would read as strongly as I could make it without, I hope, compromising too much accuracy. To be honest, I prioritized clarity and distinct character voices over strict accuracy to the original translation, which made it an interesting dialogue exercise for me as a writer. Of course, that was back in a much, much different time for the translation of manga; I probably earned as much per each monthly installment of those manga—serialized in the long-defunct Dark Horse Comics anthology Super Manga Blast!—as most translators get per entire volume nowadays. Modern manga translators, you have my sincerest condolences.
Panel 4: So, apparently, the Witless Minions were riding around in a minivan, not a Hummer or HumVee. Not sure if I had this in mind (or not) when drawing the earlier sequences inside the cavernously spacious vehicle, though.
-Adam Warren
