I want to thank everybody who read the first chapter of WHERE WOLF last week. The response has been tremendous and - I’m not going to lie - made up for a lot of the sleepless nights and stress-filled days, unsure of whether self-financing a 300-page black-and-white werewolf funny book was the biggest mistake of my life.
And if you haven’t read the first chapter of WHERE WOLF? You’re dead to me. Dead, I say! Just kidding. Maybe. But seriously, you should read it HERE. And do it quickly, because spoilers follow.
Over the next twelve weeks, I thought it might be fun (for me at least) to offer some behind-the-scenes info about the comic book’s development and production. Maybe you’re an aspiring comic book writer yourself and want to know how the sausage is made. Maybe you just want to know exactly how autobiographical certain elements of WHERE WOLF really are. Either way, I hope that there’s something of interest within.
The first few pages of WHERE WOLF were added pretty late into the game. I was given some feedback from early readers that, for a book called “WHERE WOLF,” the titular werewolf took a while to show up. “Where’s the wolf?!!” they cried. “Patience,” I answered. I really didn’t want to do a traditional cold open as I really liked the way the story reveals are paced throughout the first and subsequent chapters, but I’m also open to feedback and compromise. I really struggled with how to address this note while still maintaining my preferred narrative structure. Real pretentious artist shit. Ultimately, though, I realized that by adding a prologue, not only could I offer a small tease of the werewolf action to come, but I could also do a much better job introducing College Station as a setting. The original first page of the comic is as follows:
Larry’s aversion to Olive Garden is based on my real aversion to chain restaurants. I really don’t like going to places like Olive Garden, Chili's, Cheesecake Factory or the like. It’s nothing really against the food. It’s all internalized fear of my own basic bitch personality. I am paranoid that I’m not really that interesting of a person and, thus, go out of my way to try and avoid places that will cement those fears. A few years ago I walked into a Subway Restaurant near my office and the sandwich artist asked if I wanted the usual and I had a small nervous breakdown. I left the Subway and walked to a pho place down the street. It was years before I worked up the courage to go back to the Subway. In the words of your friendly neighborhood comic book store, I have issues.
While developing the story as a podcast, I really struggled with how I would handle the narration. One iteration of the podcast was actually narrated by Brian, Gwen and Larry’s Olive Garden server. There were so many running gags about Olive Garden throughout the entire show, including fake ads in which we the show was sponsored by Olive Garden, and then sponsored by a legal firm hired when the real Olive Garden sued me. It was all much more entertaining to write than it would have been to listen to, I promise.
I actually hadn’t been to an Olive Garden in almost 15 years. The last time I went to one was in College Station for my roommate’s birthday party. To celebrate the release of WHERE WOLF, some friends and I went to eat at Olive Garden this past Saturday. My big takeaways: The breadsticks are hella salty, the food’s actually a lot more expensive than I thought (no way somebody on a journalist’s salary is eating there once a week), and the Spicy Alfredo Chicken Tenders aren’t on the menu!
I love this gag with the CENSORED bar and it was born entirely from the fact that I was too nervous to ask an artist I was just starting to work with to draw genitalia - human, animal or otherwise. As scripted, the readers would see the costume’s junk but - when it came time to send the script to Deb - I just couldn’t bring myself to ask her to draw it so I quickly revised the script and the result is so much funnier than actually seeing the furry frank and beans. Or at least I hope it is.
One of the big ideas I wanted to explore with WHERE WOLF was that any job, even one you love, can grind you down if you do it long enough. I thought I was going to be a journalist when I graduated college. I had worked at The Battalion, Texas A&M’s student newspaper, all four years of college and when I graduated, I got a job at the Bryan/College Station Eagle on the copydesk. I wasn’t a great copyeditor, though, and I didn’t have the self-confidence in my writing to pursue my desire to be a reporter so I decided to move on from the profession. I still occasionally think about how my life would be different if I had stuck with journalism. The answer is that it would probably look a lot similar to Larry Chaney’s relationship with journalism. I currently have what many would consider a “fun job” as a film programmer and marketing manager for a movie theater chain but there are days and weeks where my job drives me crazy and I have dreams of doing something else, anything else. It doesn’t matter how great the job is or how much you dreamed of doing something as a child - work can wear you down and have you climb the walls in pursuit of something different, something better. That’s life!
Thanks again for reading! As one last bit of background information, I thought I’d share the script for Chapter One in its entirety. Note - this was the first comic book script I ever wrote. I had flipped through a few examples by Brian K. Vaughan, Alan Moore and Sean McKeever and the number one thing I learned was that there is no universal standard for writing a comic book script. If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you know I can be a verbose writer so my script is a whole lot chunkier than it probably needed to be. I really had fun with the deceptions, though. That said, I’ve read some scripts by writers who are much, much, much better than me and their scripts are a whole lot more sparse. They trust the artist and leave it to them to do the heavy lifting. For the record, I do trust Debora Lancianese completely to create the best layout and draw the characters the way she thinks will look and work the best and I encouraged her to veer away from my script as much as she liked, but - this being my first script - I just felt the need to be as thorough as possible. Sue me.
The next chapter of WHERE WOLF will drop tomorrow morning so please check it out in the AM. I promise we will finally answer, “Where’s the wolf!”