Thursday Art Walk 23

It's been a while since I showed you guys an original character on here, so I've decided to go back to the first picture I drew and show you three parts of his life. The character's name is Yokai, and he's a pro-wrestler in Japan. Gee, I wonder where the inspiration for him came from. I'm trying to work on a two-part project with him - his life and career as a wrestler, and then his life after wrestling. I won't be covering much of his pre-wrestling time, because he doesn't really want to talk about that (it's not that I don't know what happened, it's that the character literally never discusses it with anyone ever).

Without further ado, I present Yokai: a tryptich.

"Training"; pencil sketch; 2018

"In-Ring"; pencil sketch; 2018

"Retirement"; pencil sketch; 2018

For "Training", I went with a young Yokai, before the name, before his many real masks, wearing a balaclava and lifting weights. I want to go back and clean all of these up, but I'm pretty happy with this pose, since I didn't have any references for it. Why the balaclava? Well, he's always tried to hide his face from people. A balaclava made the most sense at the time. It's probably about 1990 in this picture.

"In-Ring" is based off of one of my Lewiston photos - specifically Christopher Daniels vs Juice Robinson. I put Yokai in Daniels' place, getting ready to take a suplex from another wrestler. I think this is pretty early in Yokai's in-ring career. It's certainly from before a plane accident that changes his character and style - which mean's it's also before he was Outed by another wrestler. That's not Carney. Yokai is a gay man wrestling in the 1990s. Once someone Outs him, he becomes a charismatic heel and that's when his career really takes off. It's also when he decides to move to Japan.

"Retirement" shows Yokai sitting on a sofa with his partner, Dave, and one of the many stray cats they feed near the Izakaya Yokai runs (it's technically owned by an old tag-team partner of his, since Gaijin have a harder time opening and running businesses in rural Japan). Dave has some serious brain damage from a head injury he got right before he met Yokai, who was suffering a major concussion in the same hospital. They became friends because Yokai was Dave's translator, and eventually, they moved in together. Years of in-ring injuries eventually piled up, leaving Yokai with no choice but to retire from the ring entirely. This wasn't such a bad thing, really, since it meant that he and Dave could just settle down and have a life of their own. By this point, it's about 2006 or 2007, I think.

So that's what I worked on today!

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