Enter Chikara

Over the last few months in STARBURST, we’ve begun to dip a toe into the world of professional wrestling, particularly where it crosse s over into the genre television we all know and love. Other than a few m entions in issue 445’s piece on graps vampires, however, we’ve yet to scra tch the surface of actual wrestling storylines that wouldn’t look out of place between the opening and end credits of your favourite shows. That time is now.

- Alan Boon

 

 

And time is apposite, because the particular storyline we’re looking at in this issue of STARBURST involves time travel. What’s more, it’s a multi-season arc, which is rare in a medium that doesn’t usually have an off-season! One place it does, though, is the fun-filled super lucha world of CHIKARA Pro-Wrestling…

CHIKARA grew out of a wrestling school in Allentown, a city north of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The school - the Wrestle Factory - was founded by Tom ‘Reckless Youth’ Carter and Mike Quackenbush, two of the bigger names on the very small independent wrestling scene of the time. After the school’s foundation in January 2002, they very quickly realised that they needed somewhere to showcase the considerable young talents they were attracting, and on May 25th that year, CHIKARA Pro-Wrestling was born.

Right from the off, the school’s students adopted outrageous characters, influenced by the colourful Mexican lucha libre tradition, with the initial graduating class including Hallowicked and Ichabod Slayne (who both worked a Legend Of Sleepy Hollow gimmick), and Ultramantis (a humanoid insect), all of whom enjoyed long associations with the company.

Those three were soon joined by Phantasmo (a ghost) and Private Eye (a detective with a huge eye for a head), and a host of other characters as CHIKARA settled into its pattern of nine-month (or so) ‘seasons’, with the events in each season named for a different theme. Recent seasons have used James Bond film names, as well as episode titles from Doctor Who, Lost, and Goosebumps.