It's as simple as this... FPU is all about masked wrestlers.

The notion of hooded grapplers goes back to the late 1800's, and outright masked wrestlers as we know them today show up in the sports pages as early as the 1910 's. Mexico fell in love with the mask in the mid-1930's, and for the next seven decades turned it into a multi-media cross-cultural artform admired the world over.

The wrestling mask is not only the icon of "lucha libre," but spills out of the ring and onto the pages of comic books and b-movies. Legends like EL SANTO were ring stars, comic book superheroes and justice fighters on the silver screen.

Until the 1990's, with a few notable exceptions, the cultural and language barriers kept the "enmascarados" largely south of the border. However the internet fuelled a growing underground of fans, trading tapes from Spanish-language cable, bootlegs of old Santo films, and souvenir ephemera sold at arenas on match night. It caught the imagination of a generation of artists, writers, and other creative types, too.

That's where I come in... Working in the comic book industry at the time and frustrated by a void in English-language resources on lucha libre, I used my publishing know-how and a pool of talented friends to launch THE RASSLIN ' MAGAZINE FROM PARTS UNKNOWN in the summer of 1996. It reflected my life-long love of old-school masked wrestlers like The Assassins and The Spoiler, plus my rabidly growing fascination with lucha libre and it 's spin-off media, and an affinity for vintage men's magazines and kitschy typography. A thoroughly 90's "zine" it was... a missionary effort to bring something exotic to the world in a fun and accessible way.

In 2000, I moved to LA from the East Coast, and parlayed the magazine's reputation into design and consulting gigs in lucha libre itself. I did event posters for shows at the legendary Grand Olympic Auditorium and the term "Lucha VaVOOM" and their early lobby card-style art direction was yours truly, too. In 2006 I was hired to write LOS CAMPEONES DE LA LUCHA LIBRE, an animated film being put into Mexican theatres by the features division of TV Azteca. If that 's not coming full circle, I don't know what is...

More than a decade after I started bringing lucha libre stuff to the English-speaking world, things have really caught up. ¡MUCHA LUCHA! and NACHO LIBRE have helped make the notion of the Mexican masked wrestler household, and the iconography of the enmascarado has been embraced by cutting edge gallery artist and Madison Avenue advertising agencies alike.

Who knows where it will go from here, but one thing's for sure... I'll be here sharing my collections of vintage mags and accumulated ringside stories and whatnot, like I always have. It 's all in an effort to provide an easy gateway to an exotic world. Enjoy!

Keith J. Rainville