This FotNS kick is making me pointedly aware of how much Kenshiro is intended to look like Sylvester Stallone, like there are constantly shots where they’re clearly directly referencing an expression or angle from a Stallone movie, or caricaturing his very unique face shape and proportions- - ThreadSky

The portrayal in the manga is great because it really parallels the "growth" in muscle mass of the action icons of this era. They're hilariously huge later on.

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loopingworld.com•15 days ago

not originally, though
the initial inspiration was a japanese actor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y%C5%ABsaku_Matsuda

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coelasquid.bsky.social•15 days ago

This is obviously an oversimplification because the nature of this site forces brevity and obviously there is no single 1:1 Real Kenshiro when the series combines so many elements of classic martial arts cinema with Western contemporary, but what I’m getting at is two elements of character design-

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coelasquid.bsky.social•15 days ago

One is when an artist has referenced a particular person’s face so many times, those shapes are just in the DNA of their style, it’s second nature for the artist to drift towards those patterns in a “default” face, a shorthand they use even when it’s not necessarily intentional-

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coelasquid.bsky.social•15 days ago

Stallone has some extremely unique qualities to his face that have a lot to do with facial paralysis owing to nerve damage he sustained during the birthing process. Basically a sort of palsy, but after he got big was re-coded as a “tough guy expression” that a lot of artists emulated

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colbosch.bsky.social•15 days ago

You can really see it when you compare him to his brother. Frank looks a lot like Sly, but his attempts to emulate the same expression just fall flat; he's clearly acting, where with Sly it's just his face.

Also Frank is a terrible actor even when he's not aping his brother, so that doesn't help.

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coelasquid.bsky.social•15 days ago

The other thing is something you see in comics a lot, where the artist’s style makes a sudden shift for one panel because they were heavily referencing something extremely heavily and it sort of overrode their shorthands. So proportions, rendering, stylization, all that changes for one drawing.

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coelasquid.bsky.social•15 days ago

And you don’t just see this with Stallone in FotNS, there are a ton of places where they’ve clearly referenced another actor (Bruce Lee is a big one because they ref’d his choreography so heavily) but what you do see with Stallone is ways his unique face shape started influencing the shorthand

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hexmaniacwingy.bsky.social•15 days ago

Thinking of Gundam 0079 and how with a secondary character the director was a huge fan of Rocky and wanted him to look like Stallone, but the char designers had never seen it/Stallone and didn't have time or budget to get reference materials, so they just kitbashed the Most American Guy Possible

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gingerspiced.bsky.social•15 days ago

its called bells palsy iirc

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coelasquid.bsky.social•15 days ago

I’ve heard some people object to calling it Bells Palsy because there are some ways it differs, in terms of how its contracted and permanence, but I don’t know enough about the distinction of different types of palsy to make that case

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indigoghost.bsky.social•15 days ago

That's just flat out wrong, though. Like, yes I do see that wiki casually states that but there's no source for that.
The creator of Kenshiro himself says Stallone was one of the big inspirations next to Mad Max, however.

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loopingworld.com•14 days ago

I found this

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indigoghost.bsky.social•14 days ago

That doesn't make the point you think it does, my man

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causticarmadillo.bsky.social•16 days ago

Wait, so if every anime muscleman is based on Stallone or Dolph Lundgren, and every pretty boy is based on Björn Andrésen, does that mean there's also an original Huge Moustache Old Guy?
A proto-Robotnik, if you will?

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mechwarrior.bsky.social•15 days ago

John L. Sullivan.

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coelasquid.bsky.social•16 days ago

And that’s making me reflect on how much other series were inspired by Fist of the North Star and other artists were trying to draw like Tetsuo Hara, so they were copying those proportions and the unique face shapes started to become recognized as “an anime thing” rather than a Stallone caricature

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coelasquid.bsky.social•16 days ago

And how so much of that particular school of shonen style and proportions, like the chin shape, the long features, the middle distance stares, the small mouths with pronounced lips, etc. is like… artists playing xth-generation telephone Sylvester Stallone’s face

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coelasquid.bsky.social•16 days ago

Haha the grammar in this thread is a mess, I reworded everything like 4 times to fit the character limit and apparently suffered reading comprehension decay in the process

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zeekayart.bsky.social•16 days ago

i love finding references of movies and actors in comic work. an unending game of where's waldo. watching a lot of 80s action movies a few years ago was really eye-opening!!

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homunculusdick.bsky.social•15 days ago

It's like how the original Metal Gear box art copied, almost line for line, Kyle Reese from Terminator.

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projectauuman.bsky.social•15 days ago

also contra was just "80s american action movies:the game"

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homunculusdick.bsky.social•15 days ago

It's like how thr original Metal Gear box art copied, almost like for line, Kyle Reese from Terminator.

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cantih.bsky.social•16 days ago

Another fun one is going through old Battletech and Shadowrun novels and sourcebooks and playing spot the celebrity.

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cantih.bsky.social•16 days ago

And then there's the Björn Johan Andrésen - bishounen pipeline.

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coelasquid.bsky.social•16 days ago

I mean, the first arc of the story is basically “what if Stallone fought Andrésen with Bruce Lee choreography”

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hokutoandy.bsky.social•15 days ago

No, FotNS's first arc with Shin is what if Bruce Lee from Fist of Fury fought Bruce Lee from Fist of Fury

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elzee3.bsky.social•16 days ago

Oh that is wild

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lasagnaless.bsky.social•16 days ago

Sorta like Tezuka being a Disney fan and giving his characters big ole cute eyes which became anime bedrock.

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k41r05.bsky.social•16 days ago

Whoah. I had gotten as far as recognizing mad max and kiss characters and costumes but this is new to me - after a few decades now! Thanks!

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coelasquid.bsky.social•16 days ago

There are definitely some occasions where it’s more clear than others, but I’m constantly catching scenes in the anime where I’m like “I KNOW that’s referenced from a photo of Stallone”

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spiceopod.bsky.social•15 days ago

This is fascinating. These are caricatures of Stallone but the artists make Ken's head smaller instead of bigger, since that's more shonen proportion.

Rare to see that in caricatures of real life people.

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indigoghost.bsky.social•16 days ago

HAAAAVE you seen Dolph Lundgren Falco?
Or my personal favorite, Christopher Lambert Amiba

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coelasquid.bsky.social•16 days ago

I’ve seen Dolph Lundgren Falco, but Chris Lambert Amiba makes a lot of sense for why his eyes are Like That.

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magepunkarchives.bsky.social•15 days ago

It feels like there's a great "draw less anime" joke in all of this somewhere, but the gray matter just isn't pulling it.

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themolw.bsky.social•16 days ago

it's so fun discovering the inspiration behind iconic manga characters, had the same happen to me with lupin iii after watching some 60s sean connery 😂 never would have guessed connery could do the :3 mouth, but he totally does!

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secondthrowaway.bsky.social•15 days ago

must see :0

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kamelft.bsky.social•16 days ago

Isnt Kenshiro supposed to be Mel Gibson?

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satanicmechanic.bsky.social•16 days ago

He's three or four people rolled into one. You can't forget all the times He's clearly being drawn with Bruce Lee as a reference, either.

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coelasquid.bsky.social•15 days ago

Bruce lee is a big part of it too, but my point is more that FotNS became such a big inspiration to so many other artists, and particular extremely unique qualities of Stallone’s face were referenced so heavily that you can see how certain anime style conventions started as direct Stallone refs

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coelasquid.bsky.social•15 days ago

Bruce Lee has definitely created his share of “is that an action movie thing or just a Bruce Lee thing” ripples but he was uh… for lack of a better word, a more normal looking and conventionally attractive person than Stallone, who has an extremely unique bone structure.

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coelasquid.bsky.social•15 days ago

And shotgunning like 50 hours of FotNS stuff in the last few days has made me notice how many style conventions of the genre can basically boil down to an artist who had an extremely practiced shorthand for drawing Stallone’s extremely unique skull, and then teaching it to a bunch of other people.

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coelasquid.bsky.social•15 days ago

It has a lot to do with the canthal tilt, the narrow-long placement of features on the face, the chin shape, the blank middle-distance stare, the deep, pronounced eye sockets and how they connect with the hollow cheekbones, the small mouth with sharply defined lips, that kind of thing

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socostx.bsky.social•15 days ago

and Hara *keeps* doing that. Fist of the Blue Sky and Misappropriation Investigator Nakabo Rintaro both have that Stallone dna in their protags.

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neekko.art•16 days ago

Your posts about Stallone and FotNS always makes me think of that Last Blood poster the creator of Baki drew

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cantih.bsky.social•16 days ago

It's... it's like a Spitting Image puppet.

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bookwormlover.bsky.social•15 days ago

Looking at this, and I do find it distinctly possible that Tommy Shaw from Styx was used as reference for Shin

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bookwormlover.bsky.social•15 days ago

And the rest of these I found for good measure

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homunculusdick.bsky.social•15 days ago

I think Tetsuo Hara actually named Abdullah the Butcher as the inspiration for Heart because at the time he was big in Japanese wrestling as a massive heel

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