Blake, the drunken fist boxer

For a pin-up that I'm working on for The League of Sequential Storytellers, I'm making several friends and myself into old-age Japan characters. This is my friend Blake's character that I designed. Blake was one of the harder characters to do as far as concept goes. Most of my friends I could quickly come up with a theme/thing for their character, but I had a little more difficulty figuring out what his should be like. Then a while back I watched Jackie Chan's 'Drunken Master' and 'Legend of Drunken Master' for the first time, which gave me the inspiration I needed. Blake is one of those guys who likes the drinky-drinky as Jon Stewart from the Daily Show would say (Blake loves that show) so it seemed appropriate to make Blake's character a drunken boxer.

Then just yesterday I did a little digging around about the Eight Immortals in Taoism (which are also known as the Eight Drunken Gods that depict a drunk side of the traditional Eight Immortals and is a tale that goes along with drunken boxing) and came across one immortal named Li Tieguai who is also known as Iron-crutch Li. Blake has bad knees from a number of knee-related sports injuries and has been on crutches a number of times due to disregarding his bad knees. So I thought Li Tieguai would be an excellent model for Blake's character, giving him a crutch, cabalashes (gourd bottles), and clothes with the image of Iron-crutch Li on them.

Blake's character has quite a bit of Chinese influence since drunken boxing and Taoism originate from China. It still works, though. There are a lot of things from mainland Asia that made their way into the Japanese culture. But I still want to keep my characters as close to being Japanese as I can or else it would get confusing. Oh, as a side note I put the yin-yang symbol on his clothes because it has been used by Taoists to represent their path.