Muhammad Hassan Discusses The Creation Of ‘Assassin And Son’ Alongside Shad Gaspard

Scout Comics will be releasing “Assassin and Son” in November to benefit the family of Shad Gaspard. The comic was done by Gaspard and Muhammad Hassan. Scout Comics acquired the rights to the comic a year ago and will be releasing it with a special variant cover with all proceeds going to Shad’s family.

Shad tragically passed away in May, drowning after saving his son.

Speaking to Cultaholic, Hassan discussed working with Gaspard to create the comic. 

“He had brought a framework of a screenplay to me in 2007 called Path Of Vengeance and it’s based on a movie that he really enjoyed that I had never seen called Lone Wolf and Cub,” Copani said. “It’s an old Japanese movie. And then we started working on it together, just bouncing ideas off of each other of how we’re gonna change this movie to be more modern. A black hero in a multicultural city like New York, what would that look like? So, Shad left that with me and I spent about a year myself working on it and I would send him drafts of the screenplay and we would be talking 1, 2, 3 o’clock in the morning, whenever he had time, whenever we both had time, until we finally nailed what we thought for the screenplay. I think that was 2008. The screenplay got picked up a little, it got polished by an agency, it got shopped around and it never really went anywhere.”

Hassan continued, “I don’t know why it didn’t, I think it’s a great story. It’s a revenge story. We called it an urban western. It’s kind of like picture Clint Eastwood in the city where you have just this badass character that goes around kicking ass, taking names, but then there’s such an underlying story of redemption, biblical redemption, and wanting to set your son on a different path and wanting to do good because you’ve done nothing but bad in your life. And it was a great story, but like I said, it didn’t really go anywhere. Multiculturally, we wanted it to honour New York City. It’s a black hero, you’ve got white, you have Arab, you have Latino, you have Asian, you have gay, we wanted everyone represented positively in this book.  Come 2011, I move back home and I’m going to school full time and I’m also working nights at UPS because I didn’t make that much money in wrestling, not enough to support me for 10 years to pay the bills. And Shad gets hold of me and he’s got this idea that he wants to turn this into a graphic novel which I thought was an amazing idea because it very much was kind of like Sin Cityish, kind of like a noir, gritty feeling to it. I didn’t have time to do it but I know Shad well enough to know he would have done anything for me, and so even though I was working and going to school 16-18 hours a day, doing homework, him and I worked to turn this screenplay into a graphic novel. And once we had done that, I think it took us about a year, it was about 2012, Shad went and actually on his own produced this book… And so this book got picked up and it got a very limited release and it didn’t really get the production that we wanted and so it wasn’t until last year that Shad, who was always marketing and always selling, pitched this idea to Scout Comics who picked it up.”

You can learn more about the comic, including how to order the special variant by clicking here.