since my last trip to New York I've been talking on and off with Kwaku about doing something web-based with my art. He seemed to get all excited when I told him I did an underground comic, and got more excited when I sent him some JPG's of my art. I'm not really sure what he has in mind, but I'm thinking it's going to be something like Broken Saints. This is interesting, mostly because I've never worked in this medium at all, but I can already see how much fun it can be.

He called me last week in a huff, and excitedly told me that he had registered the site www.masterofassassins.com for our project. The funny thing about this is that we, to that point, had not talked about the content or subject matter of this project at all. This got me to brainstorming ideas though, about what the story would be about. We've come up with a rough idea, and I wrote out this intro the other night. I think while it may be a little cliche it fits the feeling that we want.

MasterOf Assassins

Opening sequence



Setting: New York City. Winter. Night. A four star restaurant. The dining room is eloquent. Very top brass. Every seat in the place is filled with aged white men of immeasurable power, their beautifully surgically altered wives, and a vast assortment of bodyguards. The camera pans across the room and rests at the largest table.

Seated at the table is Carlos Mundos, head of a powerful drug cartel. Through the narration we find out that he has ties to the local and federal government, and that the justice department is unable to touch him. He is the kind of man that flaunts this, and he’s currently telling a story to the people at the table about how he kicked DEA agents out of his house while his men loaded millions of dollars worth of heroin out the back door. Everyone laughs. A waiter comes over to deliver their food, and Carlos goes off on him about something really inconsequential (something that only an old rich person would complain about). The camera follows the waiter, who’s taking Carlos’s plate back to the kitchen and muttering under his breath. The camera stops at the door and pans up to the vent in the wall above it. A thin green mist begins to billow out, filling the room. Everyone in the dining room falls asleep, their faces falling into their food. The waiter returns through the door to the kitchen, and falls over unconscious in the doorway. We can see past him to the kitchen, where all the staff has also fallen over.

Through the thick green fog a form emerges. He walks silently past the tables of sleeping millionaires and drooling women. It’s our character, his scarf wrapped around his face. Silently he scans the room and walks over to Mundos’ table. Reaching into the breast of his jacket, he produces a stethoscope. He places it on his ears. He stands behind Mundos, lifting the man’s head out of his soup. He tilts Carlos’s head slightly back, slightly to the left, and then with surgical precision he snaps his neck. He places the stethoscope on the victim’s chest, and we can hear the heartbeat fade to a stop. Our character looks at his watch, and speaking into the microphones inside the scarf he says “ Time of death, 9:45 PM. Dispatch secondary ops.”

A voice comes out through the scarf. “Roger that. Good work. I think you’ve broken the record. You better get out of there, the gas should wear off in thirty seconds.”

As quiet as when he arrived, our character disappears through the mist. The title of the series appears in the background, and as he fades into the fog it comes to the foreground.

MASTER OF ASSASSINS
PART 1: BEGINNINGS



I shouldn't be doing this. With the Plastic Farm work I have lined up, and the other work I have to do outside of that there's like 250 plus pages of art to accomplish over the next two years. This is, of course, not taking into account that I don't do this for a living, meaning that I have to balance a full time job and trying to raise two kids. I see a multitude of sleepless nights in my future. Why couldn't I just collect stamps?