There’s this old joke that I very much love. Two people are
talking, the first person asks “What Howls at the moon and has cement in it?”
The second person responds, “I don’t know.”
The first person responds, “A wolf.”
This causes the second person to ask, “What about the
cement?”
To which the first person says, “Oh, I just put that in to
make it hard.”
Yeah, I know, a total Dad Joke. Which I get to tell because
I’m not only a dad, but a grandad. (To be sure I did also tell the joke prior
to actually being a dad.) But I digress.
Some 19 years ago I was at home when I was called by a
publisher and tasked with developing an eight-page comic story that frightened
me. I told the caller that I was the wrong guy for the assignment, as I didn’t
like horror, hadn’t written anything in a year, and hadn’t written fiction in
over 10 years. The publisher insisted that I was the guy he wanted. Again, I
begged off, stating that I had to go pick up my then 15-year-old son at his
job. I hung up and went to pick up my son and returned home.
By the time I returned home, less than an hour later, I
called the publisher back and pitched him the story of Wülf Girls—two
under-aged sisters who were werewülves that hunted pedophiles. Needless to say,
he loved it. So, I went ahead and wrote it. It took me two weeks—a week to
write the first six pages and a full second week to write the last two,
because, frankly, it was that gruesome, even for me.
Well, the issue came out and when my father read it, he
nearly stopped talking to me because of the content. I had to convince him that
not only was it just a story, but I had turned the sisters from prey into
predators. Once the comic was published, we shopped it at a horror convention
in New Jersey, while there I met Melvin Ylagan, the cover artist, and he loved
the story and wanted to know what the next story was. I told him there was no
next story, because you now knew the punchline of the story. Melvin wouldn’t
let up, pointing out that the Girlz were 150 years old so there had to be other
stories.
That was the spark that kicked off the rest of what was to come. I went on to write a second and third chapter (as well as two short vignettes, as well as a prose story where the Girlz co-stared with another creator’s character, plus as a comic story for a different publisher where they had a cameo). Between the time of the publication of the second and while waiting patiently for the the original publisher to print the third chapter of the Wülf Girlz saga (2006-2008), I busied myself with writing a prose story about their training into the werewülf community. That story became the prose novella Taste the Moon (now available through Dark Fire Press, yet another publisher). During that time while I was working at a job, I used my coffee and lunch breaks to write two long texts on my (semi-smart) phone that I later downloaded to my computer, stitched together, and edited to become the novella.
In 2019, after having split from the original publisher of
Wülf Girlz (the third chapter of which still unpublished), I reconnected with my friend J.M. DeSantis and asked if he was interested in continuing the saga. J.M.
agreed, and he and I began our collaborative efforts to do just that. This
process involved me getting the three chapters and two vignettes colored,
laying out and formatting the novella, getting contracts written, updated, and
signed, as well as agreeing to a business plan on how Dark Fire would operate,
and ultimately bringing the books to get published.
All of which was complicated by COVID, J.M. and my sometimes
conflicting, and often erratic schedules, as well as other complexities of
living in the world. Needless to say, against many odds we have finally done
it, and both The Wülf Girlz comicbook, and the Taste the Moon novella are now in print and
available across multiple platforms, including, but not limited to Dark Fire Press, IndyPlanet, GlobalComix,
Amazon,
Barnes
& Noble, and Net1World,
as well as, of course direct from me at shows.
One of the more important parts of the story that I skipped
over, is that, long before I had conceived of the Girlz, I had met and
interviewed Steve Bissette in my role as a journalist working for Amazing
Heroes. After I had written the first couple of stories and had
finished writing the novella I reached out to Steve and asked him if he’d pen a
forward to the book, and he graciously agreed. Sadly, it has taken some 17
years to bring the novella to print, and for his part, Steve has patiently
waited (thanks Steve).
In the background for all of this, I’ve written two other (unpublished)
Wülf Girlz scripts, a short story, and the plots to several other scripts. Currently
I’m writing a follow-up novella (yes, on my now Smart Phone), and I’m looking for
an artist to illustrate their further adventures. I’ve also written a short
prose story of another female wülf character as well as a 500-word flash
fiction story involving a female wülf character (neither of whom are Hope or
Grace).
What started as a one-off challenge has turned into an
on-going collection of stories featuring female wülf characters, and I, for
one, couldn’t be happier.
