The Ivan Brodsky Challenge
March 7th, 2009 | brainjuice
So, every week or two, I set all the artists at my message board a challenge called REMAKE/REMODEL. I pick a character — usually some ancient pulp character from the claggy depths of the public domain — and tell the artists to reinterpret said character from a modern perspective.
This week, I set them the character Ivan Brodsky, about whom the sainted Jess Nevins writes:
Brodsky, Ivan. Ivan Brodsky was created by “Victor Rousseau,” the pseudonym of Victor Rousseau Emmanuel (Jim Anthony, Clifford, Ronald Gowan, Professor MacBeard, Dr. Martinus, Pennell, Shawm, Thorne), and appeared in eleven stories in Weird Tales in 1926 and 1927, beginning with “The Case of the Jailer’s Daughter” (Weird Tales, Sept. 1926).
Ivan Brodsky is a Big-Headed Dwarf Genius Occult Detective. Ivan Brodsky, the “Surgeon of Souls,” works as a “professor of nervous diseases” at a London hospital. He is a “dark, sinewy, undersized man, with a great head absurdly disproportionate to his body, and flashing eyes that seemed to pierce through you and read your thoughts.” He is “a cross between two races whose blend of shrewdness and mysticism was probably accountable for the production of so remarkable a personality as his own.” He is unassuming and doesn’t socialize, but is “all-dominating” in his hospital, where he performs experiments for treating “obscure brain lesions.” He is an expert hypnotist who receives cases from around the country. His particular cases involve psychic matters of reincarnation and possession, and he believes in an “oversoul” to which individual souls return, so that the execution of a brutal murderer will “be the release of just so much additional force of evil” to the oversoul.
Yeah.
Here’s a selection of what the Ivan Brodsky challenge gave birth to. Please do look up the individual artists in the thread itself:
is the award-winning creator of graphic novels such as 
Mr. Pace’s skullfucker is certainly the most blatantly messed up, but Sizer’s remains my favorite from this round.
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[...] regularmente en los foros de Whitechapel. El reto consistía en crear una nueva versión de Ivan Brodsky, el “Cirujano de Almas”. Creado por “Victor Rousseau”, pseudónimo de [...]