'Ricky Thunder' puts figure-four leglock on Kickstarter

• %27The Legend of Ricky Thunder%27 Kickstarter runs through Saturday
• Ricky%27s %22awesome mustache%22 reminiscent of Hulk Hogan%27s
• Kyle Starks fostered an early love of wrestling with his grandmother

Whatcha gonna do when Ricky Thunder runs wild on you?

Aiming for comic-book fans and pro-wrestling aficionados, Kyle Starks created a Kickstarter for his bionic elbow of a webcomic, The Legend of Ricky Thunder, in order to give folks a chance to own the collected edition plus have a small print run to bring to comic conventions this summer.

Ending Saturday, Starks' crowd-funding campaign has already amassed nearly three times his goal of $2,500, and those who back Ricky Thunder will get a "director's cut" book with extras as well as an all-new mini-comic.

"There have been a couple redrawn panels, a couple new pages, some of the racier dialogue I took out — it seemed heavy-handed when I did it, so I was happy to edit it out," says Starks, who did his Ricky Thunder webcomic from 2010 to last year.

Ricky Thunder follows the title hero as he gets his mojo back in the ring, with guest appearances from Chuck Norris, Teddy Roosevelt, Ben Franklin and a bunch of invading aliens.

There's a lot to love for old-school wrestling fans, too, from his dachshund named Miss Elizabeth — a reference to "Macho Man" Randy Savage's valet in the 1980s — to the existential crisis he goes through when his friends tell him pro wrestling is not real.

While at first glance Ricky might remind folks of Hulk Hogan, Starks only borrowed the iconic wrestler's "awesome mustache," he says. "There's a scene in the comic where I re-create the 'Hulking out' process that Hulk made famous because I'm not sure how you can do a wrestling book and not homage that or the Ric Flair chop. Those things are pure wrestling imagery.

"In terms of his personality," he adds, "I just wanted him to seem like a realistic, Midwest-type dude but also seem plausibly like the type of person who would 100% believe that wrestling was real, even while participating in it."

Starks' earliest memories growing up in Indiana were attending Continental Wrestling Association matches at Evansville Coliseum and watching the likes of Jerry Lawler with his grandmother.

"I asked my mother how old I was when my grandmother was taking me to these things, and she told me I was an infant at the time, which amuses me as a father to no end," Stark says.

He was a fan through around middle school, when he went cold turley on ring wars "to pursue my new interest in girls," he says. But like other lapsed fans, Starks came back to it during the WWE's "Attitude Era" in the late 1990s with "Stone Cold" Steve Austin, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson and others, and "just rediscovered all the things that made me enjoy it so much as a child."

Decades of wrestling fandom under his championship belt helped him map out familiar beats for the comic. He also knew how important characters were, so he used a character from a wrestling game that was popular when he was a kid and cast a few historical figures for good measure.

"It just really amused me to have Ben Franklin show up and act like a tough guy," he says. "In terms of story, someone established and reputable had to come along and pull Ricky out of the funk he is in."

While most of Ricky Thunder was done pretty fast and loose, Starks admits he did carefully script out the story's climactic main event.

"I know that seems pretty silly, but for some reason I wanted that last match to resonate emotionally, as a story, like a really good match does when it's more than just people grappling each other," he says. "If you watch enough wrestling, you start to learn the in-ring language, so to speak — the only thing difficult was achieving that goal that I had set for it."

Ricky's fantastic mullet and facial hair were key for Starks in creating his tale, yet he wanted to make sure it wasn't just a wrestling comic.

"It's a lot more about overcoming self-doubt, never giving up and your traditional comic trope of a dude saving the world. Those were all important factors to me from the very beginning," Starks says. "Outside of the first couple dozen pages, it stops being a wrestling story and becomes a bigger more interesting story where the protagonist just happens to be a wrestler."

Starks has more Ricky stories stashed away if he decides to do a sequel — the high-flying style of masked Lucha Libre wrestling and the art of the tag team are themes he wouldn't mind touching on one day. Since then, though, he's also done the webcomics Adventure Wizard and Punch Captain, and Starks has others planned to put up on his website.

"Like anyone else, I would love for my next work to be for an actual publisher in an actual bookstore," he says. "Right now, though? Just happy to be telling stories and for people to have the opportunity to read them."