Long John

This is the first post in a short series that will discuss the growth of Hellrider Jackie as a character over the years.

As I’ve hinted at before, Hellrider Jackie is a character––in concept––that has been around longer than Long John (but not longer than Eben07, technically).

Believe it or not, it all started from this:

The original Hellrider Jackie (then known as Hellrider Jack).

This is a children’s meal toy the fast food chain, Jack in the Box, released in 1997 a collection that has the chain’s eponymous “Jack” doing a variety of interesting things that may seem out of character for a guy with a large, spherical head.  Somehow, Josh and I got a hold of the figure above. For some reason,  we got a huge kick out of this little figurine one afternoon. Being the creative people that we are––and, being the very bored kids at the end of our high school careers that we were––we each took turns making up stories about this motorcycle-driving Jack.  One day, we were sitting around playing video games and one of us was playing around with this toy, narrating his thrilling adventure out from the depths of a literal hell, and––bursting forth from the grasp of Satan’s flames––one of us said something to the effect of, “…and here comes––Hellrider Jack!”

This name cracked us up and we laughed on it for a good while.  After that, the name stuck with me even as the fast food iconography fell away, and I have worked the character into many fictions I have dreamed up over the years.

The first major implementation of Hellrider Jack was when Josh and I, in high school, decided we were going to make a Japanese-styled role-playing video game not dissimilar from major titles at the time like Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger, the Seiken Densetsu series (most notably, The Secret of Mana for the SNES here in the US), or Dragon Warrior.  I got caught up in creating the characters and world-building and was able to work in a character named Hellrider Jack who was a former valiant knight who––for reasons forgotten––became disgraced and was forced to wear a cursed mask constructed a human skull.  He rode around on a robotic horse and became a legendary figure.

Hellrider Jack. Pencil, 1999.

Despite being written as a man for a fantasy setting, there are fundamental underpinnings that carry through to Hellrider Jackie as she is today, though it wouldn’t be for awhile until Hellrider Jack became Hellrider Jackie as we now know her.