#13 - the trip to kansas part ii. (02-97) 



i don't know if i pulled this image of a house out of my head, or if i actually found a picture to draw from . . . memory seems to indicate that i made this up, but if i did, i was doing pretty good.

the armadillo brothers are seen here for the first time; not particularly well-drawn. armadillos did not prove particularly easy to draw, especially in the context of luche libre. the brothers are, as you see, ernesto, emilio, and barracho; i believe that barracho translates loosely as 'a drunk,' and barracho is seen drinking a little more than the other hermanos armadillos--but they all drink like fish anyway, so who's to tell the difference?

when i was growing up, before the modern wrestling era began in the 80s, wrestling was a rather itinerent and small-scale sport; wrestlers were liable to appear in a small burg, rent space in an old high school gymnasium, set up a ring, and go to town on each other. year after year the posters would be plastered up in the dimesore windows, and you'd see familiar names. bulldog bob brown was one of them; bruiser bob, gama singh, and harley sweetan were others. i never saw these men battle--or perform, i suppose: but the tough looking bald guys glaring in grainy black and white out of the garish two-colored posters were something to behold; they usually showed up in the same season as the donkey basketball circuit, which i did see, once. if you haven't seen donkey basketball, i assure you that you will die in sorrow and shame, because it oughtn't be missed.

it's a strange world that they lived in, i guess, going from town to town duking it out in matches sometimes for real, other times prearranged. i suppose you'd never for certain what the other man intended to do. it's a long ways from the loud, obnoxious soap opera that ranges through middle america today, and when bulldog bob brown won, there was no notion that the other guy might have taken a fall. bob beat him, and that was that, and every kid in the elementary would eagerly discuss the results.

so i imagine los armadillos hermanos the same way in my comic: they go from match to match, big and small, and it's all real. their great enemy, who appears later, is el gringo loco, who, it turns out, was a CIA director in his former career. they are always struggling to overcome him, in matches from veracruz to kansas city, and never quite succeeding.

they are mexicans, of course, as well as armadillos, but they love tejano--you can see they wanted to listen to selena. she'd been dead less than two years at the time, and i had just discovered her music. another missed crossroads in our culture . . .

i've done worse layours than this one. i like the house,and the kitchen scene; zephyr is a brand of appliances that i made up, and you will see it often in sparrow's fall.

you may observe in the corner on the second page my old phone number. i don't know who you'll get if you call it now; it certainly won't be me. i started including it at this time in hopes that some pretty girl who loved my comics would call me up to talk to me about it, and then we'd go out. this happened less often than one might have expected it to.




 

Posted: Fri - April 9, 2004 at 08:39 AM             |

©