Inquiring Mind
Introduction
The Inquiring Mind is my homage to both Alan Moore's Rorschach and his inspirations, Steve Ditko's The Question and Mr. A, as well as any other old-school type of action super-detective.
I will admit that with such material it is hard to do a proper homage without almost creating a clone, but then again the same could be said for almost any other superhero homage. But in this case both the physical appearance of the characters and their overall psychology do overlap considerably. I nonetheless tried to differentiate him enough to rise above "clone" status.
The atmosphere of the Inquiring Mind's adventures is appropriately neo-noir, and the anti-hero's morality is questionable, without being quite as psychopathic as Rorschach, though it may come close at times.
His name is William O'Reilly, and he prefers to go by Bill. But no, he's not THAT Bill O'Reilly, although this may be why he changed his name to Bill O'Reitz, even if not legally so. He is of course Irish, and relies somewhat heavily on the proverbial "Luck of the Irish". He doesn't talk much about why or how he became the Inquiring Mind, but it might have a lot to do with the death/murder of his wife Muriel.
I originally created this character for my Formidable Force comics/graphic novel, but I always thought he didn't quite fit into that particular fictional universe. He was originally powerless--as he appears here--but because powerless heroes (or in this case anti-hero) didn't make much sense in the CO:MIX world, I had to upgrade him to a Type 2 Mutated Intrinsic Xenophysiology (basically making him a low-level mutant with mind-based powers) with super-intuition. Since that particular project grew in scope to include over 30 characters, I felt he could be best utilized in another setting. When I decided to shift my focus back onto my main RP character Vanity, I opted to bring this little guy in the Vanityverse, considering it was so much less populated.
One project which I had conceived a long time ago (back when I originally wanted to do comics in CO with Vanity), was a story arc inspired in part by elements from The Da Vinci Code and Breaking Bad which I had dubbed Da Vanity Code. When I was revisiting notes and early drafts, I felt that I might at least try to start the project, and see where it goes from there.
I thought the Inquiring Mind could provide a good starting point for the Da Vanity Code story so I started work on part one, only to realize that this gave the Inquiring Mind protagonist status and so I created an Inquiring Mind mini-issue to serve as Prologue to the story and to get the ball rolling on the project.
Now, without further ado, here is the--albeit short--prologue to Da Vanity Code, presented in both glorious technicolor (as a Vanity story should be) and gritty black & white (as an Inquiring Mind story should be).
Comic Book
