Bruce Lee is one of my idols. I’ve been a serious Bruce Lee fan ever since I was 7 or 8 and my Aunt brought me a copy of “The Chinese Connection”. As a super skinny kid growing up, an only child also, I identified totally with Bruce and I idolized him. Bruce was a skinny (or lean) fighting machine. He could walk into a Japanese dojo and whip every man in the joint, without breaking a sweat. Bruce was hard. And I wanted to be him.

Oh and I can’t forget those nunchucks. When I first saw Bruce wielding his nunchucks, it blew my mind. It was like the world stopped moving. The man was a total master; he was a mystic and an artist. He created his own martial art for crying out loud. He was hard. You can google Bruce Lee right now and see him playing ping pong without paddles, he just used his nunchucks. That’s a bad dude right there. Unrivaled. Untouchable.

He remains an icon to this day. So much so that nobody can really touch him. Nobody can hold a candle to the guy. He was truly larger than life.

So for all those reasons Bruce Lee has always stood apart in my mind from any other fighter or would be action star. But the only time I felt even an inkling of the thrill I felt watching Bruce for the first time was in college, when my friend Maceo Wiggins (aka Space Dizzy), introduced me to Gordon Liu’s “Master Killer”. That was when I saw three piece nunchucks for the very first time. I thought those three piece nunchucks were beautiful.  Admittedly they are not as dynamic or deadly as traditional nunchucks, but those three piece nunchucks were mesmerizing and thrilling.

I was so taken by them in fact, that I immediately began thinking about creating a character whose signature tool were three piece nunchucks. I began considering what such a hero would look like and I quickly determined this character would be someone with no power greater than their skill with this weapon. 

That was the genesis for what would later become this comic called ”Pinkertons”. It really started with a concept for one central character, the three piece nunchuck wielding heroine, but it quickly became apparent that other characters were needed to make the main character’s lack of true powers all the more special by contrast.

This concept kept evolving however. I choose a pink theme because the contrarian in me thought it would be cool to make a color that was so strongly identified with frivolity be made to evince power and strength. Nunchucks. Swords. Muscle cars. Jeet kune do. In my mind I saw all these elements coming together under a pink umbrella to create a new kind of superhero team. Then the concept continued to evolve and pretty soon it encompassed pink mansions and pink diamonds. Pink helicopters and pink skylines. Everything became pink in the blink of an eye and the story seemed to take on a life of its own.

-Skip 2 My Loop