I always thought of werewolfism as being sort of like getting black-out drunk. You start out perfectly human and/or sober, but as the night goes on, things start to change. Everything gets sort of hazy and you start to feel like wearing a lamp shade on your head or devouring everyone in the room. Eventually, you’re just sort of going on auto pilot and everything blacks out. You wake up the next morning with some woman (or man or animal) you don’t recognize and awkward moments ensue. What are they doing here? We didn’t? Oh no. The shame, the humiliation. Somebody offers to make someone breakfast or somebody WAS breakfast, and the other person politely declines/wipes the blood off and heads home in disgrace. The parallels are startling.

Then again, I’m not a werewolf and I’ve never been black-out drunk, so that comparison may be way off.

As a person who loves to write I feel some deep-seated shame for not being a perennial drunk.

I also feel some level of remorse at not being a werewolf, but that’s just because werewolves are awesome.

This comic was, in part, inspired by a scene in an American adaptation of a British show called Being Human. I had high hopes, as it sounded like a rather amusing concept and contained all the things I want from my fictional television series: werewolves, ghosts, vampires, and the hijinx they get up to. Unfortunately for me, I just ended up writing a ton of jokes instead of being involved in what was going on, as it wasn’t really my cup of tea (frothy green, where I wanted early grey). The idea of three monsters trying to make it in today’s anthropocentric world is a funny idea and I just feel like they threw that to the curb in a desperate attempt to create dramatic tension. I mean, there were three separate dramatic climaxes at the end of the very first episode! Why!? Nobody needs that! Pace yourselves, guys! We can worry about werewolf dude one day and vampire guy’s thirst for blood the next!

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, it is SyFy. I’ve learned to be disappointed with everything that doesn’t contain the words shark, octopus, or some combination of the two in it. Or crocodile. Crocodile 2: Death Roll was a fine piece of cinema.

I will say that I haven’t tried watching the British version of the show. Perhaps that’s better? I might give it a shot.

This is the first real comic tackling werewolves! It’s been over a year writing this comic that is, primarily, about monsters and mythology, so it’s hard to believe that I’ve sidestepped a lot of the more popular creatures in western lore. The trouble with things like werewolves and (especially) vampires is that they’re so well known that they’ve already been mined for the majority of good jokes. Sure, there are still things there but I’m still new to writing jokes and it can be tough to work with popular subjects without unintentionally coming to the same conclusions as someone else.

That said, I love the concept of werewolves and I plan to do more strips about them at some point. They are much too cool to leave with just a single strip.