It’s here. It’s finally here. WHERE WOLF will be published as a weekly webcomic at Fangoria.com beginning tomorrow, Wednesday, July 13 (the night of a supermoon!). A new chapter will be released every Wednesday for twelve weeks. After two years of writing, tweaking, adjusting, and editing, the comic book I created with Debora Lancianese and Jack Morelli will finally be released.
I feel like I need a nap.
This morning has been so surreal. Deadline - a website I have read religiously every day since my college years - broke the story. The amount of support and kind words I’ve received in the last few hours has been overwhelming. I am so damn excited for you guys to read the comic I’ve been toiling away at for the last few years. Everything is finally coming up Rob.
I’m going to apologize in advance for the amount of time I’ll spend talking about and promoting WHERE WOLF over the next few weeks. You’re going to get tired of seeing me post about the comic - I guarantee it. The next few weeks of this newsletter will be spent sharing behind-the-scenes stories and commentary about WHERE WOLF and werewolves in general. I will not blame anybody who chooses to tap out. You’ll be missing out on some real gems, though - like how I almost had the entire story be narrated by an Olive Garden waiter.
I first came up with the initial nugget of WHERE WOLF’s story in May 2007. I was on an east coast vacation with my friend Andrew Burleson. The two of us were hostel hopping across Philidelphia, Washington D.C. and New York City. I was reading a ton of comic books that summer and - while in Philadelphia - I walked five miles to a comic book store near the hostel where we were staying so I could pick up that week’s new releases. While I sat in the hostel that night reading Eric Powell’s Satan’s Sodomy Baby (a THE GOON one-shot about a hillbilly that poops out the antichrist), a guy and I started talking about comics. We talked about what we were reading and then - like all comic book nerd conversations will eventually lead - we talked about what we would do if we ever got to write comic books of our own.
He pitched me his version of a GREEN LANTERN story. I pitched him my reboot of WEREWOLF BY NIGHT. “It’s a murder mystery, where the murderer is a werewolf and the mystery takes place in a furry convention.” “Huh,” he said. “What’s a furry?”
While I failed to entertain my new friend with my pitch, I couldn’t get the idea out of my head. I’ve loved werewolves for a long, long time. I think the first werewolf movie I watched was THE MONSTER SQUAD and there was something about Stan Winston’s design that blew my small child brain. Over the years, I would devour anything lycanthropic-related I could find: movies, television, comics, books, even CDs. The first compact-disc I ever bought was piano music overlayed over wolf howls.
I had never written fiction before, though, and there was no way Marvel Comics was going to let me anywhere near WEREWOLF BY NIGHT so I put the werewolf story in my back pocket and moved on with my life. Over the next few decades, I would write a few short stories and scripts, but I concentrated my writing on film reviews and columns, and essays. Fiction was hard and I was lazy.
Cut to 2020. I had spent the last decade working as a film programmer and, while I loved sharing other people’s stories with audiences, I wanted to tell my own stories. I was dying to do something creative. If I couldn’t come up with my own stories to tell, maybe I could borrow somebody else’s. I loved Gregory Mcdonald’s FLETCH novels (more than the movies, don’t hate me). I would read the book series every few years like one might revisit their favorite restaurants or sexual positions. I had watched the attempts to reboot FLETCH as a film series flounder and I thought I had a solution: Podcasts!
Gregory Mcdonald’s dialogue was so perfectly suited to being read aloud, I thought, but the current audiobook version of the FLETCH novels featured a single reader. The rat-a-tat-tat of Mcdonald’s dialogue wasn’t being captured in the way it could if the books were read by a full cast of actors. I decided to try and track down the rightsholders to Mcdonald’s estate and see if I could pitch them on the idea of doing the books as full audio podcasts. To do this, though, I would need to create a sample of what I envisioned the project could be. I started working on breaking out the story for FLETCH WON as a podcast - divided up into 30-minute episodes - and quickly realized that I would need to rework the story and create new material to modernize certain elements. I would need to learn how to write in Mcdonald’s style. What the hell did I get myself into?
I started writing new non-FLETCH material in my best approximation of Mcdonald’s style of dialogue. New characters, new scenarios, new dialogue - but written in the style of the author I most admired. It was daunting and I am sure I got nowhere near the level of skill I would need to be in order to touch my beloved FLETCH - but I was having so much fun. As I wrote new scenes - all featuring a character named Larry Chaney - I started to realize that I was having more fun writing about this hapless sadsack reporter from College Station than I would have had trying to follow in the footsteps of my literary hero.
As I wrote more and more scenes about Larry Chaney, I started to realize I was actually telling a larger story - about a slacker reporter who finds himself in over his head when he finds himself on the trail of a werewolf preying upon a furry convention. I was writing my version of WEREWOLF BY NIGHT! But - for legal purposes - definitely not WEREWOLF BY NIGHT in any way, shape or form. Don’t sue me, bro.
Well, we all know what happened with 2020 - COVID showed up, I lost my job and I found myself with days alone in my apartment with nothing but time to kill. I threw myself into writing WHERE WOLF - publishing a chapter every day on a small personal blog. It was rough, but the idea was solid and the characters were there. As I finished the novel, I basked in my accomplishment - I had finished something substantial! - but I also knew the story was not in its final form. I took the blog offline and continued to tweak the story. I decided to go back to my original podcast idea and adapted the novel into a script for a twelve-episode podcast. I started recording the script with friends and very talented actors. It was fun, but it still wasn’t right. I have always thought in visual terms and I knew that WHERE WOLF was a story that needed to be told visually.
I love comic books. I love the possibilities they offer to tell unique and interesting stories and I love the fact that they are born through collaboration between writers, artists, letterers, colorists and so many other members of a creative team. Alone in my apartment due to a pandemic, I craved artistic collaboration. WHERE WOLF needed to be a comic book and I was determined to make that happen.
More next week!
The Secret History of Where Wolf
Congrats!!!