Murmillo

                                                     Basically Murmillo is an Italian Robocop who looks like a gladiator. And he can dive.
There are only a handful of superheroes based in Italy in the Marvel Universe... so I figured I should make a new one to add to the stable, so to speak.
To head the Italian supergroup Ronde (which is a word that translates as vigilante) I decided to combine a member of the highly fashionable and heavily armed Italian military police (if border control and SWAT had a baby...) called Carabinieri (...this would be their lovechild) with my favorite type of ancient Roman gladiator, the murmillo (this translates to 'fish man').  The result is a bionic and amphibious detective who I call Murmillo.  I tried to have the body armor be sexy and sporty while also functional yet retain its aesthetic nod to the Coliseum and antiquity.

He is a one shot supporting character in issue #3 of Advanced Iron Man.  Of course Murmillo's costume is supposed to be stylish, the major battles in this issue all take place in Milan.

In place of the tower shield he has more of a riot shield decorated with a gendarmerie insignia and Carabinieri label.
Note the spiked platemail over Murmillo's bionic arm. An arm which yes, in case you were wondering is extendible (Also, under each spike are varying gadgets from a launcher to release tear gas grenades, dispense flares, deploy a search-light, etc.).
The helmet is packed inside with the radio equipment and multispectral scanners you would expect a high tech officer of the law to be issued.
Murmillo's "gladius" is multifunctional... it has an active plasma sword mode for situations where lethal force is required and a passive anti-riot baton mode for situations when nonlethal force is more suitable.

After an initial misunderstanding, Murmillo, Omerta and Forever Man are more than happy to assist Iron Man in getting to the bottom of what AIM is doing to Fabbrica Motors.

Iron Man, Omerta & Forever Man (C) Marvel
Murmillo gladiator reference image: Sigwald's Safehouse: 4.bp.blogspot.com/-L4NVdz7Bbsk… <- Once again I am in awe of the amount of detail people put into their tabletop wargame miniatures.
Picture of a historical re-enactment guy dressed as one in some dude named Sebastia Giralt's flickr (I think you call it a ->) photo stream: www.flickr.com/photos/sebastia…

Artist notes: I remember when I was younger and would read "real robot" (look up the differences in genre between giant robot vs. real robot before you come at me with, "but Luke, it's all made up, why are you being a dork about it?") manga sometimes the little Americanized (I'm looking at you ViZ and TokyoPop) tankubon would have these schematics with design notes that would talk about each mecha's features such as details about other modes the suits had and their armaments + defenses either at the beginning (if it was nonflipped going from right to left) or at the end of the story (if it had been reflected to read from left to right for English readers).
So with that in mind and how there is a book floating around people are calling: The Iron Man ual... which has pages about Tony's various generations of armor in it, I figured I could throw people reading my fanfiction a visual bone in the form of a little bit of eye-candy and tech-geekery every so often by providing these images.  I wanted to try something new. If you guys like it, cool, that's great and I'll ask if you want to see some more of it.  If you don't, then sorry, I'm trying too hard and these illustrations were probably just procrastination from gaining forward momentum in my writings.

I like to think of Murmillo's theme as being the first 3 minutes 25 seconds of this Ancient Roman style song, Pugnate II by Musica Romana: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbW_b_…

Background: Know your gladiators: The murmillo gladiator was in the heavy armor class of fighter.  His getup was comprised of greaves, an arm guard, a closed helmet with a fin on top, a large shield and a small short sword.  He is not to be confused with the samnite, which is similar but only has one greave for the leg on the side the shield is held against, or the thracian (also called thraex), which though also featuring a closed and crested helmet and similar armor had a small shield instead of a large one and a curved/hooked short blade (called a sica) in place of the straight gladius.  He is also distinguished from the hoplite (or hoplomachus) type gladiator which though again featuring a closed helmet, greaves, an arm guard and a short sword, fought using a buckler in place of the large shield and also was equipped with a spear.  Where things get sketchy is when you have the secutor type gladiator.  It's a whole lot like the murmillo (sans one of the greaves) but the helmet is a bit different in that it is smoother & rounder and instead of a visor has two eyeholes.  That guy usually fights against a type of gladiator called the retiarius which is a guy who just has an arm guard and uses a throwing net, trident and dagger as his weapons.  Interestingly, there's another variety of retiarius which shows up later called a laquearius that uses a lasso instead of a net and has either a sword or parrying dagger.