I had, for some reason, been wanting, for some time, to make a comic about Soutine’s painting. I’d dreamed about it and had touched on it in an earlier comic. I found a way in when reading Sam Shepherd’s early plays, which feature iconic characters, such as the hippie, the soldier, the cowboy, the alien. This appealed to me, and I decided to go with the magician, the gangster, and the cowboy, a hippie cowboy; brothers all. Cassandra is the punk rocker; also, to a degree, the femme fatale, cast against type. Shepherd’s plays also featured musical interludes and I decided I needed a couple of those, too. The father is another icon: the Terrible Father, a criminal boss inspired by Lawrence Tierney’s character in Reservoir Dogs and by the karmic grandpa from Mailer’s Ancient Evenings.