Both Buckaroo Banzai and Xan trace their lineage back to the steppes of Mongolia, to that race of aggressive Asiatics who from the 4th to the 17tth century struck terror in the hearts of Europeans. Hordes of these invaders overthrew Constantinople (here i come) in 1453, enslaved Russia for centuries and extinguished the glory that was Baghdad.

It was here, too, that the ancient emnity between B. Banzai's noble forebearers and those of the savage Xan gave rise to the terrible blood feud of generations to come. Buckaroo's pearl-handled Navy Colts, a legacy from his father, are only taken out when the scent of Xan is near.

Xan shares the cunning and delight in death and destruction with Hasan I Sabah, The Old Man of the Mountain, whose assassins ruled the mountain passes in the 14th century (some say still) and whose flame-shaped daggers were feared by king and commoner alike. It was Lo Pep, Xan's most trusted lieutenant, if that can be said about so nefarious a character, who arranged for the Maserati to be conveniently left outside the gates of the Trenton Home for the Criminally Insane in which Lord John Whorfin, in the body of Emilio Lizardo, made his escape, and who also had some hand in the Affair of the Cyanide Roses, which claimed the life of Peggy (or did it?) and the hapless Captain Happen; it was Xan's catspaw, the Pasha of Three Tails, who managed to sew Reno and Pecos inside a yak skin, from which they barely escaped with their lives... though doubtless it was the hand of Xan himself who sabotaged the first JetCar test, killing Buckaroo's parents.

Xan's fighters are the most lethal in the world; a typical initiatory rite is to have the aspirant nailed to a tree by his ear and sometime later handed a knife with which to cut himself down; a moment's hesitation or a single scream is sufficient grounds for being shot on the spot. The one-eared survivors are then taken and trained in sabotage and commando tactics, immersed in cruelty and taught to view pain and suffering with delight and relish. Murder to them is an art form; torture and mutilation their esprit de corps... "walking in the hidden ways," they conjure evil and terror wherever they go.

Xan, wearing a Mongolian shaman's net made entirely of middle joints of the index fingers of the swordbearing arms of fallen warriors, draws out the vital essence of a fanatic follower in the creation of a Death Dwarf