Slime in the ice machine!
Have a good weekend, good Golf, good Tennis, or whatever makes ya' happy!
I can’t believe we are already halfway through the release of WHERE WOLF as a serialized webcomic over at FANGORIA.com. Six weeks in, six more to go - time flies when you’re having fun, I guess. We are having fun, right?
If you haven’t read Chapter Six, you should go and do that! Things move pretty fast in these last six chapters - if you’ve been waiting for the werewolf carnage, it’s a-coming pretty dang quickly. In the meantime, here are a few nuggets of behind-the-scenes information about “Meat Cute,” the comic’s sixth chapter:
If you’re not familiar with Marvin Zindler, you’re probably not from Texas and you’re definitely not from Houston. Marvin Zindler was a reporter for KTRK-TV in Houston for decades - becoming a local celebrity and Texas staple thanks to his larger-than-life personality and on-screen style.
As I outline in the comic, Marvin Zindler found a bit of Hollywood fame thanks to his expose on the Chicken Ranch in La Grange, Texas - a brothel that serviced a good chunk of central Texas. Zindler’s crusade against the brothel was fictionalized in the popular Broadway musical-turned-movie THE BEST LITTLE WHOREHOUSE IN TEXAS, in which Melvin P. Thorpe (a character based on Zindler) was played by Dom DeLuise.
Later in his career, Zindler would become famous for his catchphrase “Sime in the Ice Machine!” Houstonians loved hearing it nearly as much as restaurants feared Zindler’s “Rat and Roach” reports. Growing up in Houston, I used to get a kick out of the “Slime in the Ice Machine” rap that would play on the local radio station.
Besides Marvin Zindler, the other big cameo in this opening flashback is Amy, my sister. I asked Debora Lancianese to draw Larry’s babysitter to look like my older sister as she looked in the mid-’90s when this scene would have taken place. If you would like your chance to be inserted into WHERE WOLF, I’ve got good news for you - I’m going to be running a contest later this week, offering folks a chance to become a character in the next book in the series. Stay tuned for more details!
Speaking of artistic references, yes - POUNDED IN THE BUTT BY A WEREWOLF is 100 percent a reference to Chuck Tingle, an author whose literary output I got kind of obsessed with during the early days of COVID lockdown.
If you’ve never read anything by Chuck Tingle, you have to check his books out - they are pitch-perfect parodies of erotica taken to the weirdest possible limits but played completely straight (er, maybe not so straight…). While I dig his erotica, I’m beyond excited to read his upcoming horror novels.
I had way too much fun coming up with names for a serial killer that might operate out of College Station:
There’s a great 1974 werewolf film called THE BEAST MUST DIE. A big game hunter gathers a group of strangers at his mansion and announces that one of them is a werewolf. As the hunter tries to guess the identity of the werewolf, so does the audience. It all culminates in a 30-second pause towards the end of the movie where the film actually stops and the audience is encouraged to shout out who they think the werewolf is.
I thought it’d be fun to have our own little werewolf break. Have you guessed who the werewolf in WHERE WOLF is? Leave a comment with your guess - and check out FANGORIA.com tomorrow for the next chapter of WHERE WOLF. We dig a bit deeper into Larry’s background, spend some time with Gwen Reed and check in on how successful Sophia is at canvassing the furry convention in search of clues.
See you tomorrow!