A friend of mine does a hell of a job with ink. He’s drawn friends, enemies, mercenaries, detectives, tribesmen, squids, fish-people, mad scientists, and they’re evocative! I can’t stop looking at his work.
When I pitched the idea of Tommy Eighty-Eight as his next subject, he asked (and rightly so) for a bit of a description; something visual-clicky that’s more than the dialogue, more than the action. I drew up what came to mind in my head. Let’s see what it turned out like.
Tommy Eighty-Eight has got the look of a pre-apocalyptic rocker if he was being eaten by Twitter.
He’s in the alley at the start of the book, Friday morning, the Bastille. Listening to the sounds of the dying city.
Thin, hungry, blood pumping on ketone vapors, hiding his sockets behind Ferris Bueller glasses. Hair goes between Keith Richards Platoon-jungle look and slicked down on one side. A black, asymmetrical jacket with one tux tail and epaulets, like Sgt. Pepper if he’d spent a week on an oil derrick.
Headphones – fat, anechoic Clapton-looking things, half-on and half-off his head, the headband between the cans around his neck, one can up to cover just one ear, the other ear dangling a tribal feather earring, the headphone cord wrapped around his left arm like tefellin, all plugged in to the sticky, disc-shaped pancake computer he’s got slapped up against the nearest building as he uses its hyper-sensitive microphone to hear the groaning building in its centuries-long collapse.
He’s leaning on the wall for stability as much as he is to keep the flapjack against the concrete. Defensive truncheon hanging off his hip like a samurai sword scabbard. He’s got motorcycle cargoes, ballistic pad inserts plenty ripped, a few showing the dull ceramic poking through, zippers long gone, tears darned up with safety parachute orange and a bumper sticker.
He’s practical, not pretty, but there’s style to spare when the whole world’s a salvation army. Whatever works, right?