Although he doesn’t really play an active role, one of the characters having an overarching effect on the storyline in Smoked is Argo. In a way, you could say he’s actually the impetus behind everything that happens. That being the case, I recently found myself trying to come up with an image of him.
As I occasionally do these days when I want to bring the pictures in my head “to life,” I turned to an AI image generator. I basically said, “Draw a giant man lying on the ocean floor.” Most of what it kicked out where images of surfer guys lying on the beach. (In other words, this effort was a fail.) The only thing that didn’t fall into that category was an image of a guy that was… Well, let’s just say that if you were describing it to someone, you’d probably use a phrase that began with the words “Not” and “safe.” (In other words, epic fail…)
After that, I turned to stock images and found some that I thought were good, but none quite hit the mark. Still, I thought a few did a good job of capturing the essence of what Argo was probably like, including this one:
It short, it sums up a number of qualities associated with him: Humanoid, but quite obviously alien (and destructive). Again, it’s not a bullseye, but I think it works well enough.
As you can probably tell – despite him basically lurking in the background of Smoked for the most part – Argo’s a character that I really like and enjoyed writing about. And speaking of which, I should probably get back to writing more books…