Mr. Murk

Circumstances of Creation

Unlike the protagonist of the original film, who was gnawed at by the feeling of his own worthlessness and inferiority, Murk suffers from an unquenchable thirst for revenge. Coming from a wealthy family, Murk was given an excellent education, yet his heart is completely cold. Having lost his mother at an early age, and blaming for this loss his own father, who, as he believed, could have intervened to stop the disaster thanks to his high rank, Murk is now convinced that love does not exist and is a delusion of weaklings. Never the less, he always thinks warmly of his mother, who has turned into an angel in his mind.

Murk is a professional killer and has the rank of a “villain”. Like every villain, he has a vast underground lair filled with life support systems and crawling, pawn-like robots. Murk plays chess really well and won games in numerous school tournaments in his youth, but the victories of this kind attracted him little. He wanted to defeat everyone who is anyhow equal to him in mind, and by far not at chess. His love for this game was fully manifested in the design of his robot pawns, horses, rooks, knights and the Queen, which he crafted with special care and entrusted her with the rule over his mechanized base.

In the fan-project where Murk was supposed to appear, he was to take the role of a hitman hired by the head of the Bank of Evil to “remove” Gru. Murk had to kidnap the girls Gru adopted in order to trap him. But, of course, nothing would have worked with the murder in the end. Alas, this plot is too similar to the first movie, albeit under a different sauce. With that in mind, I decided I needed to get into the role to understand how a realistic Murk would have behaved and how he would try to kill his target.

My desire to perfect the plot of this in all senses failed fan sequel led me, however, into the creepy wilds, from which I then barely got out. I presume that any other work of art could have taken the place of this movie, because in those years I was terribly depressed by my working environment, and the stress levels went beyond all possible limits. But the point is that Murk in my role-playing version began to mutate and very soon fell outside the boundaries of the original, becoming a vampire elf, which he wasn’t before.

His image has changed and the original role simply disappeared. Murk changed from an aristocratic hitman into the Prince of Darkness and the offspring of the Devil, and I, who played his part, became interested in the topic of magic and all sorts of dark forces instead of writing anything. Instead of growing up in the gaming industry, I became interested in psychology and peering into the darkest corners of my soul. That is until I came across some strange monster in there…

In a nutshell, this was followed by 10 years of all kinds of absurdity and searching for truth in the most extraordinary places. Fortunately, there were no casualties. Thus I decided to rebrand Murk into an original character in my own project, which is still in its infancy. Never the less, it was Despicable Me that inspired me to create him. It’s a shame that the official sequels turned out so lousy…