Rufus didn't always work for Eclipse...

One of the original ideas for Lancaster was that he would continually be up a collective of spirits, each representing one of the Seven Deadly Sins. I only got around to designing two of them, one of them being the representation for Sloth, seen here. The Sloth character would carry around a small plush bat character, which was fused with the spirit of a fierce monster. In true Sloth style, the doll would do all the fighting, transformed as a giant bat with a missing eye.

A friend who was commenting on my work at the time mentioned that the Seven Deadlies had a pretty widely used plot element, so I decided to ditch that idea, but kept a few of the character designs. Aside from Rufus, you've seen one other of these designs in the comic. More on that later.

I liked the one-eyed bat thing, so I kept the character design around and kept tweaking it. Rufus played many different parts in the original story ideas I had, from being a masked serial killer, to a mysterious ghost who would help Lancaster track down Belknap, to being a rival ghost detective. After I came up with the Eclipse storyline, Rufus became the boss of Eclipse's Northcod branch, and we all know what happened from there.

Being the boss of an Eclipse branch is very difficult work, and involves a lot of planning and management. We'll see if his efforts are appreciated when he unleashes Project HARVY on Northcod Lake...