Heat: The Space Age of Pro Wrestling

And thus begins our fourth match in the Super Max Challenge first round, Rod Black (Prison Asteroid 17E) vs. El Gangster II (Prison Asteroid 56Q). And the most consistently difficult match to draw since Chapter Five. I’ll talk more about that towards the end of the match, but suffice to say that the lucha style, which emphasizes constant motion, doesn’t jive well with trying to draw things in a time-efficient manner. Neither does filling in the arena backgrounds so the page doesn’t have too much white space. Oof.

The beginning of this page was originally just Doc’s line about plans needing to be made, but just before I started drawing it I came up with the very bizarre “skin suit” exchange, which was too weird not to work into the strip.

I wrote “Mexican arm drag” into the script with a good idea in my head of what one looked like… until I sat down to draw it and realized that I really had no idea how to animate it. I found a YouTube clip of Mistico using the move for reference, which worked nicely except that I had to be pretty quick on the “pause” trigger. Dude is faaaast, is my point.

The commentary reflects a lot of the things I wonder when watching lucha libre since, compared to most other pro wrestling styles, it really doesn’t look like it’s doing all that much damage to the other guy. Lots and lots of arm drags, head scissors, and hurricanranas, then suddenly a big top rope dive or a powerbomb or something and it’s over. I watched a few episodes of CMLL on the Fight Network and found it tough to get into because it was so different from what I was used to (the North American style and, to a lesser extent, the Japanese strong style). Also, there was a fucking horn section constantly bleating out the same rhythm over and over again throughout the entire show. It was like someone had invented a more piercing version of a vuvuzela.

On Wednesday: Rod Black does not like arm drags.