He was hired to design the action figure of Tormentor from the Spawn comic book , created by Todd McFarlane of McFarlane Toys , and would design dozens of others , including Samuel L. Jackson as Shaft and Kurt Russell as Snake Plissken in '' Escape from L.A. '' He left after a few years to work on his own , naming his company after his boxer dog , Inu -LRB- which means dog in Japanese -RRB- and starting out by fashioning toys for Marvel 's '' Lord of the Rings '' line from his Park Slope apartment .