A few words on process:
There’s no question that the Tabasco Lang story came about as something of a Frank Miller Sin City spoof. The problem was that at the time, I hadn’t read much of Sin City, and to be honest, I was never that interested in drawing outright sex or violence given my far more cartoony drawing style. So I figured I had to ratchet up my drawing style in the general direction of realism: I might have to draw hands with four fingers and a thumb; I might have to draw cars, buildings… you know, things with straight lines.
So when planning out the look and feel of the story, I purposely set out to be heavily influenced by old gangster movies. Every Sunday, I would walk down to the local video store and rent three tapes (yes, VHS tapes) of different gangster movies, most from the 1940s. While watching them, if any shot intrigued me, I would pause the tape and sketch the image in my notebook. This gave me a lot of ideas about using shadows and drawing the most “realistic” comic I’ve ever drawn.
Some of the character designs were directly influenced by characters in specific films, including Tabasco Lang (Burt Lancaster in “The Killers”) and the Cuckoo (Peter Lorre in “M”) and of course Pinky (the more recent Quentin Tarantino from “Reservoir Dogs”).