Tonight, In This Very Ring

Tonight, In This Very Ring

Posted by Brian • March 30, 2017

Original Release Date: January 17, 2012

I took a few artistic shortcuts on this page. The guardrail looks more like a solid wall than a rail because I didn't want to take the time to draw all of the individual bars. In theory, I thought doing it the way I did would still allow it to resemble a guardrail, but it does not. I should have used a thicker stroke on the gaps between the rails, and it would have been much more convincing. I also neglected to draw cameramen or other ringside personnel, but I guess that's not the worst thing that could have happened.

The crowd is completely in silhouette, but considering the number of fans in attendance, I think that was excusable in this case. You'll also notice that several panels use a motion-line background, so as to avoid the need to draw the crowd in each panel.

The narration is modeled after a wrestling announcer's play-by-play. This particular play-by-play is modeled after longtime WCW announcer Tony Schiavone, whose work I like a lot. He gets a lot of flak for how often he exagerrates (he was known for hailing seemingly every event as "the greatest night in the history of our sport," and that sort of thing) and how he really biffed on his last couple of years of work in WCW, and yeah, those are fair critiques, but I still like him overall. The last line, "But whose side is he on," references Bobby "The Brain" Heenan's call the night Hulk Hogan joined the New World Order. A lot of people accuse Heenan of spoiling the moment by saying that, but it made total sense in the moment given that Heenan, a longtime adversary of Hogan, never trusted the man in the first place.