Arrow Almost Introduced Kevin Smith's Onomatopoeia

Over at TVLine's Ask Ausiello column, Arrow executive producer Andrew Kreisberg dished on the series' newest villain, Mr. Blank--a hitman played by J. August Richards of Angel and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. fame. "He's a very cool new villain to add to our rogues gallery," said Kreisberg, adding that playing the role was almost an updated take on a DC villain. "Originally, we were going to try to do Onomatopoeia, a villain from Kevin Smith's run, but Kevin apparently said in an interview that there was no way to bring that character to television and film — and after a while we agreed with him!" The producer described Blank as an "innocuous assassin, somebody who has strength and power but is just sort of there in the background. That's how we came up with the name, because he's not really anything or anyone." Of course, the comment that Ausiello's referring to comes from a DC Nation panel featuring Smith and DC Comics Co-Publisher Dan DiDio gave to Newsarama at San Diego Comic Con International back in 2008. It's both famous for showing that Smith had put a lot of thought into creating a character with the format of comics in mind, rather than how well he'd translate to toys and movies--and somewhat infamous because Smith said it in his typical coarse, flippant way. ""When I did Green Arrow, I went with Onomatopoeia for a villain, just because I loved that word, and it kind of formed the character inasmuch as he would say sounds out loud," Smith explained at the time. "It only kind of works – I think – on a comic book page because if you have a gun going off, they usually write BLAM! and then you can have, you know, the character saying 'BLAM!' in a word balloon, but like if you tried to do that cinematically you can't really rock it. A gun in a film sounds completely different. It doesn't read as BLAM! and so to have a dude say BLAM! after a true gunshot, all these people would be like 'he's just retarded'. I think it works great in print and on a comic book page. I don't think that character would translate very well outside of that."