When I was a kid, we had something called reading, an activity we loved to engage in when the weather was bad, there was nothing on our (mere) five channels of TV, or, you know, just because. I read a lot. When I ran out of my stuff, I read whatever my dad had just finished. And so, by age eleven or twelve, I'd read all of Robert E. Howard's Conan series. Shortly thereafter, I encountered Odysseus, Beowulf, the Man with No Name, and Yojimbo. I grew up in a time of Bruce Lee and Muhammad Ali. Every summer, my folks dragged me to see Seattle Opera's Ring Cycle, where I watched Siegfried battling the evil dwarf, Mime, and the monstrous dragon, Fafnir. At the same time, we made a regular pilgrimage to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where I was equally enthralled by the Bard's heroes and villains. Finally, as a child of the seventies, I was really into comic books and favored the more flawed characters like Batman or Iron Man over superheroes like Superman.
It's fair to say, then, that Vykers is a reflection of all of these influences, equal parts Dirty Harry, Achilles and the Hulk. The point is, he takes no shit from anyone.