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.

Maurice Sendak had this idea that everyone (children especially) had a wild side, aching to get out. I’m not saying he’s right or wrong, but every time I watch the Discovery Channel and watch a lion tearing into a gazelle, I feel a hunger.

There was a movie adaptation of Where The Wild Things Are, recently. It came out the day after my birthday and I wanted to see it but I never did. I think I was a bit scared that the movie would be ridiculous as they so often are. When I was a kid, my dad read me the book and I liked it a lot but I never believed those Things (with a capital T) were particularly Wild (with a capital W, no less). Even when I was 3 or 4, I knew when people were trying to pull one over on me.

The truth is, everyone is a bit wild on the inside. There is something clamoring to get out of us that we just can’t let out in modern society. We’re all so bottled up and tightly controlled. I guess that’s okay, but we need to be able to let things out somehow. For myself and for Max, the main character of Sendak’s story, the imagination was a great way to escape anger and frustration, turning that negativity into something beautiful and interesting.

Maybe The Wild Things hit me in some special way when I was a child. Maybe it made an impression I can’t quite shake. As silly as it is, I think Maurice Sendak made a good point about that wild side as well as our need to cope with it, in just a few short pages.

That’s the best part about stories. Even if you don’t know it, they can make an impression, change the way you look at things. Someday maybe I can do that for people too.

Christmas is over, but the idea of Santa Claus as a corporate entity was too much to pass up. I’d had several disparate ideas for Christmas themed comic that I tried to roll into one really long page for Christmas Day but it didn’t really pan out too well so I went back and reworked them to give them their own space.

Santa Claus, at least here in the States, is single-handedly responsible for the unholy resurrection of capitalism every year from November to December. Most businesses do okay throughout the year, but it’s not until after Halloween that everything really pulls together. The most poetic part of all this is that it almost mirrors the resurrection of Jesus himself. Am I saying that capitalism is the Messiah? Maybe.

Using religion and holidays as a tool for turning profits is nothing new in the world, unfortunately. For years the Catholic Church made a fortune selling indulgences to those rich enough to afford them. Nowadays, companies can sell products to the masses much more easily and push ideas that, in days gone by, would have been considered distasteful. Times, they are ah-changin’.

I guess it’s okay though. Giving gifts to others and being kind to human beings we don’t know is admirable. It would be lovely if we could cultivate this attitude throughout the year instead of on select days but I suppose life is difficult and people should be forgiven for not being able to keep up that level of enthusiasm.

Next up: New Year! Happle Tea moves into 2010 with a vengeance!