Yesterday we posted the final Weekly Mask Challenge for MaskMaking March 2021: to make the mask of a fictional professional wrestler. (You can find the details here.) Now, we understand that not everybody will know of a lot of fictional wrestlers off the top of their head, so we thought we’d make this post with some hopefully helpful links to help you find out about various fictional wrestlers.

The richest source for fictional masked wrestlers is Kinnikuman, a long-running pro wrestling manga from Japan. Kinnikuman has appeared in the West as tiny pink wrestling figures called “M.U.S.C.L.E.” in the mid-1980s, and later as a cartoon called “Ultimate Muscle” in the early 2000s. Searching for those terms in English language Google will turn up a number of names and images.

• “M.U.S.C.L.E. figures“
• “Ultimate Muscle characters” shows a scrolling list of characters at the top. “Ultimate Muscle characters” is an image search.

Another good English language source for Kinnikuman characters is the Kinnikuman Wiki, which has extensive lists of characters listed alphabetically both for the original Kinnikuman series, Kinnikuman Nisei, and Kinnikuman (2011). Not all of these have illustrations, but if a particular character interests you, a google search for that name will usually turn something up. You can find another good illustrated list of the Ultimate Muscle characters on this website.

If Kinnikuman isn’t to your liking, try doing searches for wrestlers in other media. There’s a Wikipedia page for fictional wrestlers here. Not every one is masked, and not every one listed on the page is appropriate for this Challenge. (For instance, the link on that page to “Fictional Russians In Professional Wrestling” is a list of real pro wrestlers who claimed to be Russian, and not what we’re calling fictional wrestlers for the purpose of this week’s Challenge.) From that page, there is a link to “Fictional Luchadores” which has some good candidates, and from there there’s a link to “List of ¡Mucha Lucha! characters” which is definitely appropriate. The Wikipedia entry on wrestling videogames has a section of “brandless games” (ie, not endorsed by a particular promotion) and while a number of the games do contain real wrestlers that wouldn’t fit this week’s category, there are a number of games that feature fictional wrestlers, and a little digging will turn up fictional masked wrestlers. There’s another Wikipedia page devoted to pro wrestling comic books. Just doing a search for “fictional wrestlers” shows that it’s a popular subject for various “best of” lists on numerous websites.

We hope this helps you come up with a masked wrestler for your Week Four Mask Challenge. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us on Twitter!