The Standard

And here the flashback story for this chapter begins.  I like this page.  I think you can really see Mike Gagnon’s colors starting to pop here.  I also think its such a quaint Golden/Silver Age type notion, the idea that a superhero might stop by the police station to chat with the Chief about the latest criminal happenings in the city over donuts.

Here’s a funny bit of trivia: Police Chief Merryweather, previously seen at Alex’s funeral in the previous chapter, never appears again in THE STANDARD after this page.  So, for the most part, he’s just an incidental walk-on part.  But he actually has an entire backstory of his own.  Back in the early days when I was first spitballing ideas for THE STANDARD with my friend Jamie – as mentioned back at the start of my commentary – we came up with the idea of a superhero called the Black Stripe, who would be a blaxploitation-inspired superhero.  The story of the Black Stripe was that he had once been a hugely successful, decorated beat cop, but after getting promoted up to station chief, he got bored being stuck behind a desk and not fighting crime on the street anymore.  And so he took on a crime-fighting alter ego.  For fun, during the initial promotion of THE STANDARD, I had Jonathan Rector draw up some concept art for the character.