Angela Quinton

The Infection is spreading! Pre-order KingGuro’s werewolf claw pin

In May of year artist Kris Starlein made available a gorgeous 1.75″ enamel pin of a (mostly) human skull, ensconced in a ferocious werewolf silhouette. I purchased one as a gift for my wife, and have envied it ever since. Now Kris (who goes by KingGuro) has started accepting pre-orders for a new pin that serves as a sequel to the original one and re-contextualizes the set as an ongoing transformation.

You can pre-order “The Spread” – depicting a human hand transforming into a furred claw – for $10 USD plus shipping.

If you missed the original pin when it came out, you can snag both as “The Infected Set” for $20 USD plus shipping.

Just fill out this Google form with your choice and details and you’ll be sent a PayPal invoice when the time comes. You’ll also get updates on the pin’s manufacturing progress and shipping dates (currently estimated as mid-April). If you live outside the United States you can still place a pre-order, but be aware that you’ll pay more for shipping.

I love the design so much (and was so impressed with the quality of last year’s pin) that I’ve asked to order both options – The Spread, to complete my wife’s set, and The Infected, so I can add both to my own pin & badge-laden vest. If you’re interested, act fast – the pre-order is likely to close in the next week or two.

Angela Quinton Feb. 6th 2018

Weekly Werewolf Art: “It’s Back” by Natalie Hall

If you’ve ever looked up werewolf art online, you’ve probably seen Natalie Hall’s art. Her smokey, long-limbed werewolves prowl her Instagram and Tumblr accounts, looking like the last thing you see in a nightmare before you wake up screaming (or possibly die in your sleep). Werewolves aren’t the only creatures she draws, but they show up frequently, often as women contorted or posed with eerie grace in mid-transformation.

This week’s featured werewolf art is one of Natalie’s recent posts on Tumblr. She doesn’t often title her pieces there, generally leaving a comment referencing a mood or event. This one is accompanied by just two words: “It’s back.” This perfectly captures what I love about her art: it’s stark, moody, almost clinical in its composition; but the werewolf itself, while not posed with menace, clearly represents a threat, and is most obviously and absolutely back, whether you wanted it or not.

https://nataliehall.tumblr.com/post/170428760460/its-back

A graduate of Ringling College of Art and Design in Florida, Natalie is a professional illustrator who works at Purple Panther Tattoos in Los Angeles. You can purchase products featuring her art on Society6 and contribute directly to her cash flow (which in turn enables her art flow) on Patreon. If you’d like to contact her directly to ask about visdev, illustration work, or tattoos, you can find details on her site.

Thanks to Werewolf News reader Gerson Corrêa for suggesting Natalie’s art as this week’s feature.

Angela Quinton Feb. 5th 2018

Vote for “Timber”, a Storyhive project that pits lumberjacks against werewolves

Want to help bring a new werewolf web series to life? Starting today and running through Friday the 9th, werewolf fans can visit the Storyhive campaign page for “Timber” to cast one vote per day (no registration required). Those votes will comprise a large part of the decision-making process that will award 15 projects $50,000 each to fund a full series.

“Timber” is being pitched as “Lumberjacks Vs Werewolves” by its creative team. Here’s the synopsis:

In 1920’s Canada a doctor visits her estranged brother while he is working at a lumber camp. When she gets there she is shocked to learn that the lumberjacks are hiding the dark secret that werewolves are real, and she must discover who is and isn’t infected before it’s too late.

I’m writing this post on the 4th, before the big push for votes starts, and there’s already a ton of video and production stills on Timber’s Storyhive page and Facebook page. Watch the pilot episode below!

I asked Peter Kominek, one of the experienced filmmakers behind the project, about their plans for the werewolf design. I’m always interested to hear how the werewolf for a given project is going to be built, and here’s what he wrote me:

Our werewolf is going to walk on all fours, it is going to be a ferocious beast/hell hound rather than a wolfman type werewolf. Our intention is to make it hairy, and if possible have the face be completely hairy/flocked, unlike a lot of other movies. We are going to have arm extensions and make an animatronic head. There will probably also be a separate puppet head for maximum chomping. Our instagram has a couple sketches from our designer up on it, and there is also a short video about the history of our project.

“Maximum chomping”. Those two words alone are worth the 10 seconds it’ll take you to cast a vote.

Update 12:27: this post previously incorrectly stated that Timber was in the running for a $10k prize to fund a pilot; in fact, it has already won that prize and is now in the final phase of the competition.

Angela Quinton Feb. 5th 2018

Preview “Only the End of the World Again” (or, Werewolves Vs the Cthulhu Mythos)

Here’s a strange new graphic novel from Dark Horse Books to get your claws or tentacles on: a deluxe re-lease of Neil Gaiman’s “Only the End of the World Again”. Originally published in the late 1990s as a serialized story, Gaiman’s homage to Lovecraft and Roger Zelazny was adapted into a comic by P. Craig Russell, with art by Troy Nixey and colours by Matthew Hollingsworth. This 154-page hardcover edition contains the original comic and a ton of supplemental material.

From the Hugo, Bram Stoker, Locus, World Fantasy, and Nebula award-winning, and New York Times bestselling writer Neil Gaiman (American Gods), this fantasy story blends the worlds of H.P. Lovecraft and Roger Zelazny. This new edition of Only the End of the World Again features a brand new cover, in a new deluxe hardcover format; with bonus material including high res scans of the inks and layouts.

The story features an adjustor, Lawrence Talbot who recently sets up shop in Innsmouth only to discover that the world may be ending and that the instrument of destruction is a werewolf.

100 pages of bonus content for a 54-page comic seems like a fair bit of padding to me, but I can’t deny the appeal of a werewolf + Innsmouth mashup. This review from Adventures in Poor Taste makes it sound like a worthy investment for fans of lycanthropes or the Deep Ones alike. You can pre-order it on Amazon for an early February delivery, or find it in your local comics shop right now!

Here’s the cover again, plus the first five pages:

Angela Quinton Jan. 26th 2018

Weekly Werewolf Art: Untitled by Devon Bragg

This week’s featured artwork is by “freelance Illustrator, Avid dog petter, French Fry muncher and Dr. Pepper addict” Devon Bragg.

This stark depiction of a pierced, struggling, half-transformed werewolf lacks a title through which one might understand Bragg’s exact intent, freeing you, the viewer, to have it represent anything you like: your struggle against a cruel world, the strength to change yourself against all odds, the blood you’ve shed for others, or your modest collection of arrows and spears.

You can find more of Bragg’s phenomenal work on Tumblr, Instagram and Behance.

http://devside-art.tumblr.com/post/166307462441/going-through-a-bit-of-a-rough-patch-but-hey

Angela Quinton Jan. 22nd 2018

Make some “Evil Friends” with Tatum Howlett’s nasty new werewolf comic

This self-published comic by Tatum Howlett contains gratuitous murders, two counts of reckless driving (drunk; werewolf transformation) and some very cool werewolf designs. You can download a PDF for any price you want, including free, but I recommend that you pay at least a dollar for it because c’mon. C’mon.

a full, black & white, 31-page comic about werewolves and subtle nihilism!

you can download the .pdf for $0 or as many as u think it deserves, i’m not worried about it. just read it bro!!!!

Nice work, Tatum. You definitely captured my experience as an aspiring novelist – I too constantly check the fridge instead of working on the manuscript.

Angela Quinton Jan. 22nd 2018

Werewolf woman versus zombie Templars in “Ascension of the Blind Dead!” comic

David Zuzelo is a writer who did some comics work in the 2000s and early 2010s and then virtually disappeared, leaving behind a constellation of un-updated horror, pulp and exploitation media blogs. I was worried that perhaps something bad had happened, but nope, he’s still around and still clearly getting energized by pulp comics and cinema. He doesn’t seem to be writing or doing much in the way of public work these days, so I’m not going to link to his current haunt out of respect for his privacy. Instead, I’m going to share some pages from Ascension of the Blind Dead!, a gory, seven-page comic which he and artist Billy George published in the 2010 zombie anthology Zombie Terrors.

As near as I can figure, Ascension is a fan tribute and continuation of the 1970s Spanish-Portuguese horror film tetralogy. There are certainly a lot of eyeless zombie Templars here, but the focus is on a manipulative werewolf in search of an evil artifact. I won’t spoil the ending – you’ll need to head over to Zuzelo’s 2011 blog post to read the last three pages – but if he ever gets back into writing comics, I hope he continues with this story.

Angela Quinton Jan. 21st 2018

Is low budget found footage film “Wolf House” better than the sum of its parts?

I came across this 2016 found footage film from directors Matt D. Lord and Ken Cosentino while looking for recent werewolf films to add to the big list. I haven’t seen it yet and I wasn’t expecting to be interested, but after a little research, I’m intrigued.

The plot cooked up by writers Cosentino and Elizabeth Houlihan (synopsis below) sounds like a mashup of horror tropes way too ambitious for its purported $5,000 budget, and the trailer’s editing seems totally at odds with the vibe of the scenes it keeps interrupting, but the reviews tend to land in the “not bad” to “pretty good” range. The actors seem naturalistic and I’m pretty sure I can smell whatever’s in that blue tarp.

Wolf House is currently available on Amazon and Google Play. I’m not a fan of found footage movies (why are you filming your imminent death instead of RUNNING AWAY) but if this ever shows up on Netflix I might have to give it a shot.

Six friends on a camping trip think they have discovered, and killed, a sasquatch. But what they have actually unleashed is something more evil, more ancient and more deadly than they could ever imagine – an army of supernatural terrors that will hunt them until no one remains.

Angela Quinton Jan. 20th 2018

Weekly Werewolf Art: “Werewolf Heads” by Popuche

Popuche is an art student from France whose work focusses on sci-fi, cryptid and horror concepts. I particularly like her character and environment designs, and the organic warmth of her colour choices.

Her recent piece “Werewolf Heads” features the detached and mounted domepieces of fourteen of cinema’s most famous werewolves. It’s fascinating to see so many different werewolf designs presented in the same image, side-by-side. Depending on your point of view, the variety of aesthetics and scale either

highlights the diversity of werewolf concepts, or
underscores the reality that no one can agree what the hell these beasts are supposed to look like.

Check it out for yourself. Can you name them all without zooming in to read the tags? I got eleven out of fourteen.

Editor’s note: Weekly Werewolf Art is an old feature of Werewolf News that I’m hoping to bring back. I’ll be spotlighting werewolf art that I find interesting, technically great or otherwise noteworthy. Out of respect for the artists, I will never repost the original – only a cropped thumbnail, and an image embed where the source permits.

Angela Quinton Jan. 15th 2018

The Onion: “Townsfolk Strongly Prefer Man’s Werewolf Incarnation”

According to locals, blacksmith Hans Meyer sucks real bad, and everyone wishes he would just remain a terrifying human-wolf hybrid.

“We may lose a few sheep or cattle every month, but it’s worth it to get a break from that guy’s constant bitching,” said candlemaker Fritz Hermann, adding that at least when Meyer is a werewolf he doesn’t have that annoying laugh.

I love The Onion so much.

Angela Quinton Jan. 12th 2018