As of today, you can get issue 1 of “Monster Dudes” from Graphicly.com for $0.99, which in my opinion is great value for money, considering how often I chuckled while reading it. Writer Dave Scheidt was kind enough to share a copy with me, and between his lovingly screwball MAD Magazine – style comedy and Matt Fagan’s artwork, I had an Officially Good Time. Check it out, and if you like it, go to the Facebook page and pester them to include more werewolf stuff!

It seems like there a lot of ways a journal-style project like this could go wrong: clumsy narrative info-dumps, poor pacing, inauthentic voice, incidental or uninteresting illustrations. Werewolves suffers from none of these problems. The events we expect to read about – the attack, the mysterious symptoms, the strange people following her and wooing her brother – are detailed but not belaboured. Alice is clearly frightened but there’s no overwrought hand-wringing or dire pronouncements. The entries do a wonderful job of conveying Alice’s emotions and the increasing tension and danger of the story – but there’s also a melancholy sort of sweetness, too, and a real sense of sisterly concern when she writes about Mark. The writing is intimate without feeling voyeuristic, which is quite a feat considering we’re reading a teenager’s private thoughts.

The text in Werewolves is balanced out with an abundance of beautiful illustrations, rendered in what looks like graphite and watercolours. The palette is predominantly a range of warm greys, with one or two bright colours picked out as highlights. In the first half of the book, these bright colours are lively, but as the story progresses, the highlights become increasingly sanguine. Given the subject matter of the book, much care and attention is given to drawing werewolves in various stages of transformation, in styles ranging from portraits of Alice’s new “friends” (and an amazing double self-portrait) to anatomical studies of werewolf hands, feet, jaws and the like. Although Haller (or should I say Alice?) has drawn some of the most ferally gorgeous werewolves I’ve seen, her portraits of humans are stunning. As with the writing, so much of Werewolves‘ art is about conveying a mood rather than action, and there are some real successes – the drawings of those kids snarling and grinning in their hoodies, for instance, or an achingly sweet image of Alice and Mark’s mother.

I have just one complaint about Werewolves, and I’m laying the issue at the feet of the book’s designers, Kasey Free and Katie Stahnke (if you don’t know what the word “kerning” means, you can skip this paragraph). The journal entries are set in a clumsy handwriting font with perfectly regular leading. The writing style and illustrations are organic, but the machinelike regularity of the lettering goes a long way towards trashing the verisimilitude so carefully crafted by the words and images. I appreciate that books have to be produced on a timeline and under budgetary constraints, but seriously, Chronicle Books, you should have allocated the funds to get this thing hand-lettered. Design nerd rant: over.

Werewolves came out over a year ago, and I’ve been in love with it for nearly as long. It’s a nearly-perfect blend of emotionally authentic teenage anxieties and chaotic scenes of lycanthropic carnage. I highly recommend you pick up a copy – Amazon has it for stupid cheap at the moment. Read it a dozen times and you’ll still find yourself leafing through it to admire a passage or drawing. I certainly did – that’s why it took me a year to finally write this review!

From the Extinct web site:

Texas,1985. On the first full moon of the year a small town named Spring Valley gets taken over by werewolves. Teenagers Jimmy Reynolds, (the town outsider), Nick Evans (his best and only friend), and the girl next door, Lauren Finch, have to make the werewolves EXTINCT. Can they live long enough to figure out why Jimmy is the only one who can save the town?

Writer / creator Fabian Rangel Jr. populates Extinct‘s world with classic 80′s archetypes who look, say and act as though they’re from a werewolf-centric version of Monster Squad. All of your favourites are here: snobby prep girl, unaccountably ostracized everykid, his wise-crackin’ rebel sidekick, the jock villain with the amazing mullet. Somehow, Fabian takes these stock characters and combines them in a way that effortlessly invokes the “holy shit, anything could happen!” energy that made Exctinct‘s 1980′s ancestors so amazing. As Fabian writes in his blog:

This comic is my love letter to all of those awesome 80s movies where kids had to take down monsters. It’s influenced by The Monster Squad, The Lost Boys, and also The Goonies, Teen Wolf, and even The Breakfast Club. It’s pretty much just 80s as fuck.

The werewolves in Extinct (and there are a lot of them) are of a design that will appeal to most Werewolf News readers. They’re tall, rangy (if a bit top-heavy) and artist Jethro Morales has given them lupine faces with just enough humanity to make them unnerving. There are some awesome transformation scenes, too, if that’s your thing (of course it’s your thing). Letterer Ed Brisson‘s work is crispy – crispy. The guy could put on a clinic about leading.

Individual issues of Extinct were meant to be distributed by Diamond, but that didn’t happen because of Reasons. Instead, you can order the graphic novel (which contains all six issues) from your local comic shop – it’s on page 304 of this month’s Previews. If you’re a werewolf fan craving a hit of some authentic 80′s action/horror sweetness, I recommend you go get your car keys now, because you’re going to want to read Extinct.

“If you were longing for an HBO series about werewolves, forget that and buy FERALS,” Lapham says. “It’s everything that TV show would be if it existed — which it doesn’t — and more, because we have no rules. This is a solid series full of true horror and violence, and built on strong characters that has no limits in terms of where we take it.  No limits.”

Despite appearances, the creatures in Ferals aren’t strictly werewolves.

…this isn’t a take on the mystical werewolf, full moon and all that. This is about a different kind of person. There are different forms to them but they don’t change back and forth like the Hulk… There are several other tricks up a Feral’s sleeve, and we’ll see that and some other more altered forms of the Feral condition, but we’ll save that for the comics.

The title will be published by Avatar, and issue 1 should be out in January 2012. For more, read the full article at Bleeding Cool. Below are two more issue 1 cover treatments – a wrapper version, and the (NSFW) “gore” cover the wrapper is ostensibly covering. Werewolves or not, Andrade Jr. can draw some mean monsters.

The nominees are:

1. Kelsey ‘Boobs’ Bornstein (in ‘Boobs’ by Suzy McKee Charnas)
2. Sergeant Angua (in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series)
3. ‘Wolfgirl’ (in The Company of Wolves)
4. Nina (in Being Human)
5. Kitty Norville (in Carrie Vaughn’s Kitty Norville books)
6. Brigitte Fitzgerald (in Ginger Snaps: Unleashed)
7. White Fell (in Clemence Housman’s The Were-Wolf)
8. Leah Clearwater (in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series)

I nominated Brigitte Fitzgerald, but she’s up against some pretty tough company. Read through each contributor’s analysis and post your vote (or write in your own) on the She-Wolf blog, then come back here and defend your choice (unless you picked Brigitte).

I’ve read a lot of werewolf comics in the years that I’ve been running Werewolf News, and some of them have been quite good, but Archaia’s Feeding Ground stands above them all as my absolute favourite. It’s that simple. It succeeds on every level: as a compelling story eerily grounded in reality, as a collection of astounding artwork that simmers with heat and tension, as a serious commentary on a life-and-death social issue and as a self-contained objet d’art crafted by three friends who wanted to make something great, and then did.

Now all six issues have been collected as a hardcover graphic novel, and as your official werewolf life-coach, I advise you to go check it out, either from Amazon or your local comic shop.

(Also, if you’ll permit me to geek out for a moment, I have to say that Michael Lapinski draws some of the coolest – and one case, most adorable – werewolves ever, and my mind is blown that they would mention me in the trailer.)

And here, because your printer is getting dusty, are two tasty pin-ups from Tim Hamilton and Benjamin Marra. They’re hi-res. You know what to do.

Holy shit.

Director Julien Mokrani and an extraordinarily talented cast and crew have created what I think we all have to agree is the definitive motion-picture version of Ben Templesmith’s comic series Welcome to Hoxford – or the first part of it, anyway.

Hoxford isn’t Mokrani’s first fan film labour of love – he and writer / producer Samuel Bodin spent two years working on Batman: Ashes to Ashes, a $15,000 tribute to Batman’s quasi-vampiric nature. On the strength of that project, Mokrani and Bodin were able to entice actors Jason Flemyng (X-Men: First Class, Hanna, Snatch), Arben Bajraktaraj (Harry Potter – Order of the Phoenix and the Deathly Hallows) and Dexter Fletcher (Kick-Ass, Band of Brothers, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels), plus director of photography Thierry Arbogast (The Fifth Element, Leon: The Professional, La Femme Nikita) and special effects makeup artist Jean-Christophe Spadaccini (The Bourne Identity, The City of Lost Children).

And why in the world would Mokrani and his colleagues invest their time, energy and money in a film that will never make a legal dime? “Welcome to Hoxford ran around in my head for over a year”, Mokrani says. “One day it was too much, I had to make it!”

Despite his passion and skill, he wasn’t able to get official sanction from Hoxford creator Ben Templesmith, who said he’d enjoyed Ashes to Ashes but was contractually obliged to avoid even thinking about talking about the idea of considering having anything to do with a fan-made Hoxford film – presumably because the rights are currently managed by Circle of Confusion, who Mokrani says are only interested in talking to major studios. Circle, come on. Quit fucking around and let Mokrani and company have a stab an official Welcome to Hoxford film – if this 20-minute production is any indication, they’ll treat it right.

You can see production stills and a whole lot more at welcometohoxford-thefanfilm.com. I’ll just stay here and watch Warden Baker eat that… “steak”… over and over. Somehow I can’t look away.

C Wolf is the story of a werewolf who seeks to clean their of corruption and organized crime. Several politicians and mafiosi will go their way, but their power may hide supernatural secrets that only a creature of nightmares such as the C Wolf can fight.

The foreword and first chapter of “The Vices of Power” were released in Spanish, but the foreword has already been translated into English for the convenience of uncultured mono-language types like me. I’m also working my way through the first chapter with Google Translate, which is imperfect but sufficient to let me know that the werewolf is saying something totally bad-ass in the panel to the right.

You can follow the development of The C Wolf at the Paper Brain Comics blog.

Now, on the other side of summer, having read the book and finally having the time to write this long-overdue review, I can tell you that Wolfsangel requires no note-taking or Wikipedia visits, but you may want to accessorize a bit before you read it. I recommend a boxing helmet and mouthguard, or maybe some body armour. This book will bruise you, and you will like it.

At its core, Wolfsangel is the story of Vali and Feileg, twin brothers separated as infants and raised under radically different circumstances to be as wolf-like as possible: Vali a warrior prince and leader of men, Feileg a feral “wolfman” with the body of a human and the mind of an animal. We know from the outset that one of these young men is destined to become an incarnation of Fenrisulfr, the giant wolf fated to kill the mad god Odin, but which of the two it will be and how his metamorphosis will come about remains a mystery for much of the book.

There’s a lot I want to say about Vali and Feileg, but getting into too much detail would spoil the story, and there are lots of other reviews you could read if you want that. What I will say is that the evolution of each character forms a wonderful arc, each fascinating on its own and unsettling (and sometimes terrifying) where they intersect. Lachlan is careful to sidestep the usual “long-separated twins reunite” tropes and focus on the way each man’s actions, no matter how calculated or impulsive, draws them deeper into their respective fates.

Of course there are larger forces at work, each vying for control of the brothers – forces both worldly and supernatural. The former are employed in standard adventure “quest”, “betrayal” and “escape” plot threads that are conventional but entertaining, and serve as a convenient framework with which to illustrate Vali and Feileg’s development and regression. As fun as the action and gore is, though, Lachlan’s treatment of the supernatural is what really made Wolfsangel a “it’s 2 A.M. but just one more page” book for me. A story so deeply rooted in Norse mythology could have become a tedious lecture or who’s-who of Asgard, but the gods as written by Lachlan are every bit as vivid and chaotic as the humans who worship and fear them. I enjoyed the presentation of Loki in particular – it would have been easy to write the trickster god as a smug asshole, like an omnipotent Dane Cook, but in Wolfsangel he is tempered with solomen passion and a stoicism borne of agony without end. I liked him, but he earned it, especially with the snake venom.

Much less likeable but written oh so well is the witch queen Gullveig, whose prophecies foretold the coming of Fenrisulfr’s worldy incarnation. I’m not even going to try to be fancy here: she fucking terrified me. Early on Lachlan establishes a system of magic in which one’s power is proportional to the suffering one experiences, and the tortures Gullveig and her sisters inflict on themselves are made worse by the unflinching ease with which they are endured. She exists in a realm so far removed from light and life, is driven by motivations so alien, that she seems more like a force of nature than a character with agency of her own. Though she seldom interacts directly with other major characters, her presence lends the story a sense of looming danger.

The disparate perspectives of prince, feral human, god and witch combine to provide most of the novel a dense, unpredictable momentum. As a mechanism for keeping the pages turning, it works wonderfully – I often felt like I was being shoved around by the story, dragged into pits and up cliffs and across chilly seas with no regard for how late it was or how much work I had to get done that day. The downside of those shifting viewpoints is the accompanying change in tone and pace. Some chapters span two or three carefully-documented days, while others condense months into a paragraph. Some scenes are detailed transcriptions of a character’s dialogue and thoughts, others are presented as an omniscient narrative wherein we read about a single character’s actions in terms suited to… well, a Norse epic. None of these shifts ring false, but the switch from one style to the next can cause a bit of whiplash, especially towards the end of the book.

Okay, I have to get a little spoilerish here, but this site is about werewolves so I would be remiss in my duty to you, a fan of werewolves, if I didn’t break this down: the brothers’ fates don’t deliver an actual werewolf until deep into the last third of the book, but brothers, sisters, when it appears, the payoff is perfect. Simply put, Wolfsangel contains the best psychological perspective of a lycanthropic metamorphosis that I have ever read. The physical details are there too, of course, but Lachlan puts the werewolf’s thoughts into your head with such subtlety and guile that you don’t need to read about what the beast’s claws look like – you know what they look like and feel like because they are yours. The deftness of the werewolf-perspective scenes do much to establish the werewolf as a figure worthy of fear and pity, but also scarily authentic empathy. This sets up a final act that… well, lest I get too spoilerish, allow me to quote a tweet I posted right after I finished the book:

It’s not often that I read the last page of a book, close the cover, sit quietly for a minute and then say “holy shit” to an empty room.

Suffice it to say, as a vehicle for delivering an excellent tale, Wolfsangel succeeds on practically every level, and does so in a way that is both neatly self-contained and tantalizingly open-ended.

Buy, borrow or skip?

Buy. Wolfsangel surprised me in all the right ways and has earned M.D. Lachlan another devoted fan. I have the second book in the series, Fenrir, ready to go – and now that I’ve finally posted this review, I’m going to get started on it. After all, it’s only 3:55 A.M.

The third issue of Nix Comics Quarterly came out on Friday, and I really do think you should check it out, especially if you’re a fan of

• awesome independent comics
• comics in which werewolves gleefully kill people
• things that are Quarterly

This issue is loaded with good stuff, including two werewolf stories that would be right at home in an issue (or an episode) of Tales from the Crypt:

“Terror at the State Fair” by Nix owner / editor / writer Ken Eppstein and artist Bob Ray Starker will make you think very carefully about the consequences of fried Twinkies.

“Mrs. Peterson and the Wolf” is a nasty little gem by writer Rachel Deering (who’s also writing werewolves in Anathema) and artist Glen Ostrander (whose tribute to American Werewolf in London is my desktop right now). I love the werewolf design in this one, and the transformation is well-executed.

You can order the book on-line, and it’s also distributed nationally by Ubiquity Magazines Distribution. Your five bucks goes towards supporting a worthwhile independent comics initiative (for you philanthropists) and it gets you a hell of a lot of quality content. If you want to read the previous two issues for free, they’re available as annotated black & white PDFs. One of the two issues also has a werewolf story in it. I’ll leave it up to you to find it!

The movie is available on Netflix streaming, and authors Ritch Duncan and Bob Powers, invite any werewolf, horror, comedy or David Naughton fans to watch and tweet along using the hashtag #AWIL30.

And because Steve and David love you just like I do, you can get free shipping by using promo code FULLMOON at checkout.

As of this post there are only 12 pages left, so you better get over there!

The story focuses on a huntress named Mercy Barlowe, who falls in love with the daughter of a local reverend. When the romantic nature of their relationship is discovered, the reverend cries heresy and vows to see both women tried as witches. Mercy escapes, but the reverend’s daughter is sentenced to burn. The agony and torment of the burning lures wicked creatures from the darkness, who attack the village and steal the souls of the dying women. Mercy vows to track the evil beings to the ends of the earth and vanquish them to reclaim her lover’s soul, even if it means taking on dark powers of her own.

What sort of dark powers might Mercy take on, do you think? Hmmmmmmm. What web site are you on right now?

They are looking to raise $6,000 through Kickstarter by Friday September 2nd, which will pay for the first issue’s art and printing costs. That sounds pretty reasonable to me! As with all Kickstarter projects, the more you contribute the more sweet stuff you get in return. You were pretty quick to follow the link here, so you must be totally jazzed to help out, right?

When I was little, I wanted to be a bad-ass werewolf more than anything. I saw Jon Talbain the same way that black people saw Barak Obama on the night of his election. I dreamed of prowling through endless woodlands, my howl a primal and symbolic middle finger resounding over all the stupid cities that teh hyumans were trying to imprison me in. However, I soon realized how monumentally retarded I was being. In a juvenile epiphany that seemed to me like some rare, Shaolin moment of insight attained after years of training, I stopped being a selfish and self-pitying prick for a few minutes, embraced my humanity, and took pity on the difficult conditions of all creatures. Ironically I realized that I had actually been a sexy beast all along, and this liberating irony gave me a super-power: I realized that I had the ability to verbally rip new assholes into shitty werewolf novels and book covers.

You may say that such a super power is equivalent to Aquaman’s heroic capability to summon fish and surf on them. That is not so. You see, there’s a war going on out there – an unseen war between real lycanthrope fans and lycanthrope exploiters who just don’t fucking get it. Long ago I threw in my lot the former, and I invite you to share in this noble fight by reading my exposé of more werewolf stories that are dumb by virtue of their covers alone.

His She-Wolf Warrior by Marisa Chenery

Not to sound sexist or anything, but women* suck at writing werewolf novels. I even have empirical evidence to prove this. Every time I open one of these books, they’re always a dedication that runs something like “I dedicated this labor of love to Pickles, the best (and cutest!) golden retriever there ever was!” or “This book is for my mixed breed, Antoinette. Jeff and I got her at the animal shelter last year, and she’s just the best of all worlds! Thank you for being my furry shoulder to lean on as I finished this book, Antoinette!” But that’s not all. These books also always have a first sentence that doubles as the first paragraph, and they always run like this:

The pack leader’s vision came true with alacrity – the harvest moon shown not with the fond goldenness of autumn grain, but of dried blood.

Or…

Rebecca felt her blood quicken in her veins as her world-ancient curse stirred in the depths of her soul – the hunters were after her.

Or…

For three months he had watched her – or rather protected her not only from the humans she thought she was part of, but from herself as well, for Jessica was what his pack would call One Belonging to The Untamed.

If you managed to read through those examples without slitting your wrists, then please check if your last name isn’t Bronson, because I’d love to have a drink with Charles, your grandfather. Anyway, let’s go back to the actual book cover, since analyzing the actual text is unsound scholarship in a review of this nature. Here we have a fresh-from-the-hairdresser woman wielding a sword while the pendulous globes of her earrings dangle on long chains. In spite of the jacked guy Photoshopped in the background, I bet those are the only balls that ever slap her face, OH SNAP! And please, Marisa, make up your fucking mind if you want to be a ninja or a wild shewolf free of all oppressive, patriarchal ties. You can try being both, but then your retardedness may reach critical mass, and that may actually melt the faces of even Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer themselves.

* Angela Carter doesn’t count because she’s a literary goddess and I beat off to every word she writes and I can be her pet whenever she wants so FUCK YOU if you don’t understand our love lol!!!1!!!!!

When the Moon is Full by Stacia Ilyana St. Peter

Fifty bucks says the girl on the cover is St. Peter herself. I say that because the only constants in life are death, taxes, and authorial narcissism… and because the book description on Amazon reads thus:

Cara has been teased and tormented her whole life for being the fat girl in school. But when a new student arrives in her small Montana town, things begin to change. Hunter has more than just good looks going for him and every girl in school wants to be his girlfriend. But Hunter only has eyes for Cara… coming to her defense, he shows her that she can be beautiful without being skinny.

There are certain immutable laws of nature, and one of them is that you can’t write shit like this on the internet and get away without being trolled. I personally wouldn’t do this, since we are progressing as a tolerant society that does not judge by appearances. So of course it would be wrong of me to say that yeah, when the moon is full, I can’t see it because Cara’s ass is in the way, or that Hunter is the type of werewolf who likes the human thighs he devours to have a chunky and buttery texture, or that Hunter only has eyes for Cara because he can’t see around her, or that he can’t possibly leave her because her sheer mass has created a gravitational vortex that he can’t escape, or that Hunter is only after her because he lost a bet to his packmates that had something to do with spending an entire mating season trying to mount 5,000 lbs. of butter somehow, or that Hunter has only come to her defense because butter as a whole should not be shunned, or that Hunter has come to her defense becomes he comes from an ancient, esoteric pack of werewolves who have all taken some ancient runic oath to guard cows.

The thing is, whether lycanthrope-fan readers belong to the insensitive AntiLard Darkclaw Pack or not, they’re going to see When the Moon is Full for the self-aggrandizing literary horseshit it is. And while I haven’t eaten enough Twinkies, donut holes, and Peanutbutter Cups to understand the secret logic of fatties*, I don’t need to eat a single pound of Entenmann’s to know that Hunter is going to get damn tired of Fatticia McFatterson after her fifth hour of watching Power Puff Girls and eating Funyuns.

* For all of you who think I’m some patriarchal oppressor, let me buffer this whole review by saying that Scooby Doo’s Velma (and those like her) doesn’t fall into this category. Who cares if she doesn’t look like a Calvin Klein model? Seriously, look at her. She has delectable wolf prey written all over her, and if she was the main character in When the Moon is Full, I wouldn’t be having this gripe to begin with.

Sarah Palin: Werewolf Hunter by Andy Raines

Holy shit, where do I start?

In previous Worst Werewolf Book Covers installments, I’ve explained how it’s possible for something to be so stupid that it becomes awesome. I haven’t totally figured out how this phenomenon works, but perhaps it’s related to paradoxical concepts beyond man’s scientific understanding, like black holes becoming so dense that they’re actually not holes at all but rather portals to other worlds, graspable only by a dimensional understanding that our minds were perhaps never meant to attain. The awesome retardedness of Sarah Palin: Werewolf Hunter is simply too awesome for the human mind to understand as well.

First of all, is it just me, or is the thought of Sarah Palin as a werewolf hunter the most erotic thing ever? I say this because Palin’s idiocy is a lot like the afore-mentioned paradox of the black hole: it’s so concentrated that there comes a point where it’s not idiocy at all, but rather sheer genius. Sure, she tells the story of Paul Revere’s midnight ride like she’d tell the story of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, but when that political crusader becomes a fucking werewolf hunter, her storytelling incisively strikes the spirit of truth harder than any ancient Hindu text ever. Liberals are too self-absorbed to give credence to this concept, and conservatives are staunchly oblivious to the existence of things like this in the first place.

Palin is seriously like the guy from Get Smart, who fucks up so unbelievably hard that he actually catches the criminals and saves America. However, Palin doesn’t do so in a doofy, Three Stooges way. This woman is actually smart in spite of herself, and perhaps it’s within that aspect of the unsolvable Palin-equation that the hotness resides. I would seriously pay big money to read about the most bad-ass werewolf guy ever getting out-witted, trapped, and ridden into blissful transcendent torture by Sarah Palin the Werewolf Hunter. But here’s the extra charm: the porno that this cover implies could actually run the other way as well. Palin could engage in some type of Bond vs. Bond Villain battle with the werewolf guy, only to have the werewolf guy win and then sexually destroy her. However, the plot twist is that this was their plan all along… and that this sort of thing has happened between them before! In fact, this is the ritual they enact weekly to maintain harmony between werewolf and human civilizations! Think of the thematic, multifaceted quality of that whole gig! Wow, I know that I have a special talent for literature, but I seriously blew my mind just now. Time to re-write this novel so I can win myself a Pulitzer, and by “Pulitzer” I mean Sarah Palin: Werewolf Hunter’s sweet little lacy dog-bone adorned panties.

Seduced by a Cajun Werewolf by Selena Blake

It’s funny just to see shitty werewolf novels exist, but it’s especially funny to see them strain for new ways to fit “wolf” or “werewolf” into their titles. Take this crazy shit, for instance. Stop reading this and say “Seduced by a Cajun Werewolf” out loud. Go ahead, do it a few times. Done? Ok, you should either be laughing your ass off, feeling immensely retarded, or both.

Such titles are usually invented when authors who do internet searches for what they think are clever titles, like “Wolfsbane Rising” or “The Romulus Factor.” I think that lycanthropy writers dimly realized that the words “wolf” and “werewolf” are all but worn out, but when they try to solve the title problem, their wit catapults them into realms of uncharted stupidity.

Think critically about all of this. What must it be like to be seduced by a Cajun werewolf, anyway? Do you go into a bar, enjoy the dim lighting and boppin’ Zydeco music, order shrimp gumbo, and then Remy LeBeau introduces you to a dashing Louisiana werewolf? Or do you have to drive through Louisiana on a business meeting, after which your car breaks down by the woods, and only the rustically wise Cajun werewolf mechanic can restore your car? But at that point… do you truly want to leave, and are you not “home” already?

Please. The story of Seduced by a Cajun Werewolf has already been told in Wooed by a Misunderstood Wyoming Lycanthrope, Claimed by an Indonesian Were-Leopard Billiard Champion, and Dominated Hardcore by a Dashing, Funny, Bristle-Tuft-Tailed, African Werehyena Jiu-Jitsu Artist and Writer of Werewolf Book Cover Reviews and There’s No Way Anything Else Could Ever Compare, Ever. With the exception of the last title, Blake’s Cajunness and the other stories in its vein are just more of what readers could do without.

Bad Wolf by Tim McGregor

I’m in an interesting situation here. Mr. McGregor personally asked for his book to be featured in the next installment of Bad Werewolf Book Covers. As the writer of these features, I have conceded, although I really don’t think that putting your werewolf book in my hands is the smartest publicity tactic. In fact, it reminds me of a time when Howard Stern asked a hardcore Fiona Apple supporter: “If it would assure the release of Fiona’s new album, would you let someone throw feces at your face?”

Seriously though, Tim, aside from the fact that your wolf looks like he’s wearing a fucking pair of underwear on his head, I can’t think of anything wrong with your cover here. Your cover features no swooning women who missed the cut to be in Victoria’s Secret catalogs, no conflicted Hot Topic employees, no perpetually snarling bipedal wolves, no Sarah Palin (sigh, fap fap fap), and on top of all that, it looks like you had an actual graphic artist design the cover instead of your little nephew who’s pretty good with MS Paint. So props to you, Tim. Good luck!

The Canuck Werewolf by Marissa Chenery

Marissa Chenery’s writing is the equivalent of a gigantic retarded person plopping down on your lap and shitting through his pants onto your thighs and breathing into your face a breath that smells of dead fish, tarnished silver, and Sour Patch Kids. I can honestly say that it has been a spiritual struggle to even so much as research her books and formulate opinions on their covers alone.

But enough of the actual content of this book. The title is The Canuck Werewolf, but it doesn’t feature a cardboard-cutout type of werewolf with a flapping head and beady little eyes. I’m visiting Canada right now as I write this, and from my culturally educated standpoint, I am disappointed at the lack of hockey, flapping heads, farting, wacky transparent paper money, and more hockey on this cover. Canada is basically the world’s last bastion of maple syrup and Native American wilderness (except the Canadian version of that), and while there are like millions of howling wolves in its mountains, they shouldn’t be exploited for the cheap thrills offered in books like The Canuck Werewolf. This country is basically the floating mountains of Pandora that hover ethereally over America, but it is people like Chenery who want to ruthlessly strip it of its lycanthropic unobtanium. It’s taken me a long time to climb my way over the pain-in-the-ass golden arches and baseball stadiums that compose 99% of the American surface, and I’ll be damned if anyone’s going exploit Canada while I’m here. And if you think that’s hardcore, you should see actual Vancouverites. When the Canucks hockey team recently lost the Stanley Cup, this whole city basically went Super Saiyan on its own ass. The Rodney King riots were patty-cake compared to this event in which Canadian citizens, like noble samurai warriors committing ritual seppuku, sought to systematically destroy Vancouver in a blaze of Maple-colored glory. The only thing that saved the whole country was an elite strikeforce of Mounties who romped and stomped shit like the Canadian version of both Paul Revere and Norman Schwarzkopf. In fact I owe my time in Canada to these patriotic men and women who did what it took to temper Canada’s power and honorably save it from itself. Also, Vancouverites are so hardcore that only flashbang grenades to the crotch can stop them.

Anyway, my point is that The Canuck Werewolf doesn’t embody any of the awesomeness described above. It just features a huge jacked guy with a background featuring the lanky wolf that we’re supposed to believe that he can turn into. Using this formula, Chenery could write endless cultural exploitation and misunderstanding and get away with it. So if you see someone in the book store about to pick up The Canuck / Indonesian / Yugoslavian / West Paterson / Sri Lankan / Turkish Werewolf, you’re now intellectually equipped to stop them from supporting cultural misrepresentation.

South Park – style werewolf illustration by Tandemonium

Did you like it? I liked it. Billy, you’re fucked. I’m looking forward to reading this. Check out Monsterverse for more details on the “Tales from the Grave” series – their site is still showing issue #2, but hopefully they’ll update it soon.

If you’re curious, David Hartman is responsible for this deliciously malevolent cover, and I recommend you check out his site for even more excellent horror art (hint: frequent werewolves).

via Dread Central