Most of you reading this page probably know about our tendency to sneak Sesame Street characters into the comic. This is the second time I’ve looked at a page and hoped that the makers of G.I. Joe (Hasbro? IDW?) don’t read this comic and sue us. The first time, you might ask? 750 or so pages ago. Will likes his homages. (Also, an extra shout out to Jacob, who had to chop up and reorganize my dialogue so that it matched the image.)
We’ve always been unafraid of our influences and our homages here in the comic. Newcomers to the comic always cite the similarities to Samurai Jack in terms of the art style, a comment that we embrace; we very deliberately chose a style that evokes what you see in that cartoon. We’ve never shied away from the HUGE influence played by Darwyn Cooke’s graphic novel The Hunter, an adaptation of the crime novel by Richard Stark. (Some io9.com commenters felt the need to slam The Revenger’s similarities to Stormbringer from Michael Moorcock’s Elric series. I thought that vampiric weapons were enough of a staple in fantasy, but I’ll take the criticism. I read Elric when I was a kid. [The review itself seemed to find no fault with us.]) Hell, the simplest beats of the backstory are the same, an escaped criminal seeks revenge on the other criminals that betrayed him during a job. Without those things, there would be no Hunter Black, period. Almost 800 pages and who knows how many characters, locations, and monsters later, I think I can safely quote Heavy D: “We got our own thang.”
So we’re gonna keep on doing homages, and keep on sticking in character designs from things we loved as kids because that’ll make us laugh. Otherwise, what the hell are we doing this for?
