The Artist
This unnamed beret-wearing character began life in an editorial cartoon. (In Bessai-Saul's lecture series on pedagogy, he condemns the proliferation of weekly reading responses, slideshows, forum posts, and the like in undergraduate studio art courses as redundant and unnecessary busy work, filling a niche better served by dedicated art history classes, and cumulatively amounting to a greater work load than would be implied by its stated importance within each course). In subsequent comics, the character has been appropriated for an occidentation of the classic Chinese novel "Journey to the West." Bessai-Saul has stated in his lecture series on folklore and comparative religious studies that "I like the Monkey King. I just think the idea of a guy who's so blasphemous and annoying that God personally tries to beat him up, only to find that he can't, because this guy is also simply that tough, is really hilarious. Plus, monke."