Writing WHERE WOLF was a huge learning opportunity for me. I had never written a comic book before, nor anything this large and plot-driven to be honest. It’s like “they” say, though, if you do something long you'll eventually get good at it. The second half of WHERE WOLF is really good - the problem with comic books, though, is that it’s very costly and inefficient to go back and fix things that have already been done. This is all a long way of me saying that the fourth chapter of WHERE WOLF is not my favorite chapter.
This is by no means a criticism of my creative team - Debora and Jack kicked butt on the chapter and everything they were asked to do with it. It’s my own damn fault. I was a novice writer and did not yet know how to slowly parcel out the necessary plot needed to set up a story and move it forward so, instead, I took a big giant exposition dump in the middle of chapter four. Good thing I also brought some jokes.
A lot of folks have caught the fact that many of the names in WHERE WOLF are pulled from the cast and crew of THE WOLF MAN. Larry Chaney = Lon Chaney Jr plus Larry Talbot, Gwen = Gwen Conliffe, Claude = Claude Rains, etc. The Hotel Wagner was supposed to be a reference to THE WOLF MAN director George Waggner but, during the editing and revisions, I dropped one of the g’s - completely by accident! I blame spellcheck. Either way, I hope it’s the thought that counts.
It was very, very, very important to me that WHERE WOLF not be seen as dunking on the furry community. I am a firm believer in folks being allowed to be into whatever they are into - be in furrydom, the Dave Matthews Band or ultimate frisbee. It would be too easy to just spend the entire book making fun of furries, and also too cruel. When you take a step back, how much weirder or unusual is an average furry’s interest than everybody else’s? Is being really into anthropomorphic animals that much odder than collecting Criterion discs and organizing them by the spine number? Let folks have whatever interests they want to have, I say. That said, I also felt I had to acknowledge the fact that most people - when they first encounter the concept of furries - are confused and their instinct is to make fun of them. Luckily, I have a protagonist who is a complete asshole and who I can use as a surrogate for obnoxious opinions.
Billy Wagner is a composite of a lot of folks I knew in college. I had a good friend in college, Andrew, who really just wanted to be a firefighter, despite going to business school because his parents wanted him to. He was also from Corsicana but he was not the roommate who would tape love letters from his sister to the wall of our dorm room. I just like the name “Corsicana” - it’s a fun name for a city. And it does have delicious fruit cakes. My roommates and I also did almost get arrested for trying to steal a tractor tire. We had gone to see STAR WARS III at a midnight screening and, after the film, one of my roommates noticed that there was a giant tire sitting seemingly abandoned in the field behind the theater. He convinced the rest of us to load it into the back of his pickup truck so we could then take turns rolling down a hill in it. Shortly after we had gotten it into the pickup truck, a cop shows up wanting to know what we were doing. I got extremely nervous and froze - I’m not good around cops - but Andrew was an incredible smartass and I was in awe of him. When the cop asked us what we were going to do with the tire, Andrew responded “break it down into parts to sell in Mexico.” Meanwhile, I’m there about to pee myself. We didn’t get arrested, the cop did make us return the tire, but my roommates went back the next day to find a snake they had seen living in the tire. They killed it with a machete and then grilled it. Fuckin’ Texas A&M…
In the original version of WHERE WOLF, when it was written as a novel, there was a whole subplot about the lurker having the user name “EddieQuist81.” This is obviously a reference to THE HOWLING, my favorite werewolf movie, but I went further and had Larry and Sophia mistakingly believe it was a reference to the act of Quisting (don’t click that link if you’re my parents). I’m so, so, so glad I cut that from the book. Not only did it stretch believability, but it was also a step too gross for even me.
Despite also being a bit of an exposition dump, this week’s drop - chapter five - is one of my favorite chapters from the entire book, mostly because I think it’s the funniest chapter. The jokes just really work (in my humble opinion) - plus we get really deep into Sophia’s character and College Station lore. Check it out Wednesday morning at FANGORIA.com.