Markstrom's Mask Rooted in the Jersey Devil Beginnings | FEATURE

The day Jacob Markstrom was traded to the New Jersey Devils this summer, among the phone calls and texts he made, one was especially important and needed to be sent back to the province of Alberta.

That message was to Jordon Bourgeault of JBo Airbrush, the man who has designed Markstrom's goalie masks for years.

"The day that he got traded, I was like, 'Oh, well, this is going to be on,'" Bourgeault said in an exclusive interview with the Devils official website. "That day, he messaged me, and so did the Flames equipment manager to give me the information for the Jersey guys. So I was like, 'What are your thoughts, or design ideas?' But I knew he was kind of not thinking big skull, because we always do big skull. He wanted something different."

And boy did he get something different.

Markstrom was happy to give Bourgeault all creative control when designing his first New Jersey Devils goalie mask. Of course, Markstrom gets the final call, but he trusted Bourgeault to bring out the best. So, Bourgeault began the creative process.

"I was walking my dog and thinking about it," he said. "I was like 'It's not really a devil, like it's not Satan. It's the New Jersey Devil, this goat-headed creature from the Pine Barren forest. That's all I knew. I had heard of it but I didn't know anything about it."

What came to life was unbelievable.

Markstrom's new mask has so many fine-tuned details that you can only appreciate when you're looking at it up close.

“He did a lot of research,” Markstrom said. “He came up with a lot of good ideas, so that part is obviously fun. I didn’t just want the logo; I wanted a little bit more about the story and the community, trying to get everything in there.”

Once Bourgeault began the design process, he immersed himself completely and brought something quite incredible to life.

Bourgeault said that each mask he works on takes roughly 200 hours of work, which is a long, arduous process.

“Once I'm on one, I'm just on that train of thought the whole time,” Bourgeault said.

“It’s all about the original story of the Jersey Devil,” Markstrom began, explaining the details of the mask. “The Devil roaming around (the Pine Barrens).”

It all starts on the right side of the mask, the folklore legend of the Jersey Devil, and the pages from the book fanned from the side to the top of the mask. Its cover dawned with the eeriness of the story itself and the reptilian pattern of the Devil’s skin used as the motif in the New Jersey Devils logo. ‘25’, Markstrom’s number, sits on the book’s spine.

The mask is relatively dark, mostly the New Jersey Devils’ black and red, but the pops of light are the pages ripped out of the book that wraps its way around the mask like a gust of wind having strewn the pages about.

No detail was overlooked. On those scattered pages, you’ll find Mother Leeds, both in words and a picture, holding her ‘13th child’, who eventually becomes the Jersey Devil.

"While I was working on the design I searched New Jersey Devil podcasts," Bourgeault said of the folklore creature. "I Googled stuff first to just see more about it and then on the podcasts, that's where I found the information on the Mother Leeds, the Pine Barrens. And I'm like, these are all little good bits, so I'm kind of drawing, and then I hear something cool and I write that down, and that became a lot of the little news clippings that are flying out of the book (on the mask) as well."

On the front his name, ‘MARKSTROM’, also with features nods to his new team. The top of the ‘K’ boasts the Jersey Devil wingspan, and the ‘S’ is adorned with little devil horns.

It's truly a work of partnership, even though Markstrom gives Bourgeault nearly full creative control. As the artistic one, Bourgeault comes up with so many different, intricate details that he gets excited about, but Markstrom does sometimes have to reel him in.

"Obviously, I talked to the painter, and then, I tell him that's too much, and you've got to calm it down," Markstrom laughed.

Markstrom turned down Bourgeault's original idea for the mask's backplate. Bourgeault was excited about it, but in the end, it was Markstrom's final call. The design was of a bookshelf with rows of books, on their spines, the names of his former NHL teams. The Devils book was to be slated with the New Jersey Devil claw-like hand grabbing it to signify this new chapter in his life.

"He was like, 'I don't want to disappoint you, but I don't want that,'" Bourgeault said. "It was probably bad juju, anyways."

So on the back, it became something a little more personal. The Swedish Tre Kronor (Three Crowns), along with the name of his one-year-old son, Clark-Marley, and the word ‘Pappa’ for his father, Anders, who passed away in 2019.

The names and three crowns pops in embossed red in front of the façade of the sinister Pine Barrens Forest, where the Jersey Devil flies.

The anticipation for a mask reveal is often a big one. Questions about what a new goalies mask is going to look like starts the second a goaltender joins a new team. And just like having success on the ice, it's about the teamwork to bring it all to life.

"Sometimes people can have all these sort of different ideas that don't meld together," Bourgeault said. "And it's my job to pull this into something cohesive. So it's fun."

Markstrom debuted his new mask for the first time on Sunday night at Prudential Center to much excitement. But now, with the images and videos circulating, you can really appreciate the finer details that perhaps aren't as visible from afar.

"I feel like the excitement too," Bourgeault said. "I feel like people are excited about it. And that's cool."