Thanks to the costume his wife made him (and having gone off his meds), J. D. Brink thinks he’s a superhero. 

In his real life adventures, he’s served aboard a warship in the Pacific, collected intel from foreign submarines, trained Navy corpsmen on how to save Marines, and cared for patients at hospitals in Kuwait and Japan.

When not in costume, he maintains a secret identity as a mild-mannered nurse and educator in his native Ohio.

J. D. Brink was not a private detective in the 1940s, but he’d liked to have been. Instead he was born in the 1970s, was a kid at the best time ever to be a kid (the ‘80s), and went to college in the ‘90s.  

Since then he's joined the Navy twice and both times been stationed in Japan, where there weren’t enough cheating husbands, missing persons, practicing witches, or hard-boiled mysteries to keep him occupied.

If taking a college fencing class, eating from the trash can, and smelling like an animal were qualifications for becoming a sword-swinging barbarian, J. D. Brink might be Conan’s protégé. 

Instead he's been a sailor, spy, nurse, and officer in the U.S. Navy, as well as a gravedigger, insurance adjuster, and school teacher.

Today he’s rooting through the familiar dumpsters of his native Ohio.

Th Marshman & O'Keefe Traveling Circus was shut down in 1926 following a string of mysterious disappearances in towns it had visited. By the time the police had caught up to them, the show's mime--a key person of interest--had also vanished without a trace. 

Today, urban legends claim that chanting his name before a mirror will summon the ghostly image of a mime wearing bowler cap, smirking at you in the darkness...