If you’ve ever seen a Forged in Fire test you’ve probably heard a certain line from one of the judges: “It will KEAL”.
Doug Marcaida has been a judge on that show since it’s inception in 2015 (eleven years!) and those words are his calling card. Doug is a US Air Force veteran, has practiced Filipino martial arts for his entire adult life (he’s developed his own system: Marcaida Kali), and has taught edged-weapon skills to military and first responders around the country.
So when Doug makes a knife, it’s informed by decades of experience with edged weapons and thinking about what works, and what doesn’t, when things get dicey.
Lately, though, he’s been developing back stories for his knives.
LINEAGE is a comic series that Doug has developed with Kid Heroes Comics, and it features three of his designs. Two are available on his website now: the BattlBolt machete and the Kali Hawk tomahawk. The third is a karambit, pictured here, and it’s the star of the show: not just in the book, but in real life, because this is the knife that’s narrating the story! It’s a story about a knife that has waited a long, long time to be picked up and used again.
Lots of knife companies will develop a story around a knife, but with LINEAGE the story and the knives are being developed together. And you can own a piece of that story, too.
The BattleBolt
Doug’s other design we have looked at is the BattlBolt, originally created for the first season of BattlGames, a limited-release tactical machete. The BattlBolt has since appeared in his comic LINEAGE, wielded by the skull-masked BattlGames fighters, and issue #2 even sports a limited-edition chrome cover featuring the blade.
Like many of Doug’s designs, the BattlBolt was informed by his martial arts teaching, focusing on fluidity of motion and transitioning smoothly between targets and attacks. The 13-inch blade is D2 tool steel with a tanto-like tip for penetration and a small serrated section near the spine for sawing. The handle is G10 and FRN, and the whole thing weighs in at 1 pound 7 ounces and is 18.5 inches long. The special edition has a stonewashed finish to help hide the inevitable scratches and scrapes.
While many machetes can be awkward to thrust with, the BattlBolt’s tanto-like tip makes for a useable point. Most machetes can be had for less money, but for $130 you’re getting a versatile blade that can saw, thrust, and of course chop.
The BattlBolt ships with a Kydex sheath with a 360-degree rotating belt clip, making it easy to carry on a belt or pack strap and a nice improvement over the floppy nylon sheaths machetes usually ship in.
Doug also offers trainers for many of his designs, so if you want to practice your machete skills without injuring your training partners he also makes a BattlBolt trainer for $75.
The Kali Hawk
The Kali Hawk is a full tang axe with an overall length of 14 inches and a head width of 7 7/8 inches. The head is made of 1065 carbon steel, which is tough, can take a beating, and can be field sharpened easily. Choose from a FRN handle or a paracord wrapped handle. The handle also features textured scales, and a lanyard hole, paracord included. A sheath with a slot for MOLLE attachment is also included.
Doug has practiced the Filipino blade art of Kali his whole life, and it shows in the Kali Hawk’s design. The blade has a lot of flow to it, with many angles for different tasks. Being shorter than many tomahawks, it can be used more as a tool up close.
Axe, tomahawk, hatchet… pick your favorite name for the tool/weapon hybrid. No matter what you call it, chances are you have one in your kit. Some are more axe and less hatchet, and vice versa. Doug’s Kali Hawk is equal parts axe and tomahawk.
Every good fight scene needs an axe. In LINEAGE #3 the Kali Hawk takes center stage on the limited-edition cover, and inside the pages you’ll find the brothers getting tomahawked a few times.
The Kali Hawk is $130. A trainer is also available for $70.
LINEAGE, Told by the Blade
The Kapatiran ng Talim, or as the English subtitle suggests, the Brotherhood of the Blade, is a blood cult operating out of a temple hidden away in the jungle east of Manila.
The cult worships a mystical artifact known as the Markado, and it’s also the name for the karambit at the center of LINEAGE. That’s the weapon narrating events in the series. It’s Miguel’s weapon. He’s taken it with him from the Philippines to his new life in Los Angeles, and he’s used it ever since. But its true nature is unknown to him. The Markado remembers everyone who’s ever held it. And it’s been hungry for a long time.
Miguel is a private investigator in Los Angeles, keeping to himself and hiding his past. His younger brother Vergil is a livestreamer, chasing down urban legends and occult mysteries for his show, On the Verge. They were raised together in the Philippines, learning the blade from their father, until the day a demon-like figure wearing a skull mask took him from them.
Doug’s brother RJ made guest appearances on Forged in Fire during Season 4, standing in for his brother during kill tests while Doug recovered from a shoulder injury. Here, Doug and RJ are the two stars of LINEAGE, with Doug as the quiet, brooding older brother and RJ as the wisecracking, camera-happy younger brother. The fight sequences they’ve choreographed together are incredibly detailed, breaking down the finer points of their moves to show traps and counters and specific blade angles in painstaking detail.
LINEAGE began as a Kickstarter project, with issue #1 being fully funded within 28 hours. There are three issues out so far, with a fourth on the way to bring this first storyline to a close.
Doug and RJ’s father was taken from them by a cult that worships a mystical knife called the Markado, known as the Brotherhood of the Blade. But in real life, the cult’s smiling elder Balthazar, who wheels around on a cane, presides equally over food drives in town and blood sacrifices beneath the mountain. I don’t know if he’s based on anyone, but if he is, I sure as hell don’t want to get on that family’s bad side!
The Markado serves as narrator in LINEAGE, opening with a sinister edge: “If only you could see through the edge of my existence,” it begins on the first page, laid atop a candle-lit altar, “you would hear the tales that I know… tales where every blade has a story to tell.” As the series progresses, the knife’s narration takes on a darker edge, hinting at the sinister secret it’s been keeping all this time.
By issue #3, you may even begin to suspect that it’s not Miguel who’s wielding the karambit, but the other way around!
The Markado Karambit
Doug’s catalog also has a few different karambits as well as karambit trainers, so he is well versed in this type of blade. While other artists might make karambits that look the part for a movie prop, it’s another level for the person writing the story to be intimately familiar with karambits, down to exactly how the curve should move through a cut.
The Markado’s karambit is the third blade fans will be able to purchase, and the one we are most excited about. It has not been listed on Doug’s site yet. The Markado’s karambit is very distinctive. It’s a deep hawkbill with a finger ring that has three colored stones set into it. There is an etched pattern that runs down the length of the spine and the cult’s glyph etched into the flat of the blade. Vergil’s first issue begins with him searching for a karambit that has the same glyph etched into the blade. It is central to the plot. At one point he even receives one in the mail that looks like it but when he opens it up on his stream he says it’s fake. Knife people will appreciate that one. Even in the comic a fake gets busted by the way it handles. The shape is just a tad off, the balance is wrong, and it’s missing the symbol.
The comic-accurate version from Doug is very important to us. Backers of the LINEAGE trade paperback Kickstarter had the option of adding pendants replicas of the blades from the comic but we are looking forward to showing off the full-size karambit!
Steel With a Story
It’s not about how many you hurt, it’s about how many you protect.
That’s the motto that Marcaida’s Doug lives by, and it’s a good one. But in LINEAGE we get to see if Doug can stick by it as two brothers and a bloodthirsty karambit test his morals and his mettle.
Every knife comes with a spec sheet, and a lot of knives come with a story from their maker. What almost no knives come with is an actual story, three chapters deep, complete with a jungle cult, family secrets, and a first person narrator that’s the knife you happen to be wearing.
Doug’s put more knives to the test on camera than almost anyone in the industry, and with designs like the BattlBolt, Kali Hawk, and Markado karambit, he’s making some excellent knives. But after reading LINEAGE, picking one of them up won’t just be grabbing another tool off the pegboard. It’ll be picking up a character, and we can’t wait to see how their story ends.
Find more at dougmarcaida.com
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