Werewolf links, news, and reviews
From last night’s Community episode, “Horror Fiction in Seven Spooky Steps”.
“Teach me to read?” “Awww!”
Also, in case NBC kills the video, here are some animated GIFs of the scene you came to this post to see (thanks to drain-the-blood for posting and @Salome for pointing these out).
The magic of Google Alerts has brought to my attention an upcoming comic series written by David Lapham (Stray Bullets, Crossed: Family Values) and illustrated by Gabriel Andrade Jr. (Lady Death). If this interview at Bleeding Cool (and the issue 1 “gore” cover) is any indication, “Ferals” is going to be a delightfully fucked-up gore-fest – and with Eisner-winner Lapham at the wheel, you know the story’s going to be great.
“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.
Academic, writer, publisher, friend and fellow werewolf enthusiast Dr. Hannah Priest has a terrific post up on her blog, She-Wolf, in which a number of contributors (including your humble servant) make a case for our favourite female werewolves. Hannah’s the authority on lady lycanthropes, so the results of this poll will be canonical – we’ll be logging the results with the Library of Congress and Wolfram Alpha.
The nominees are:
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. (more…)
2002’s Dog Soliders is one of those polarizing werewolf movies – either you love it or you’re not a real person. Murmurs of a sequel called Fresh Meat faded back in 2006, but now Kismet Entertainment has plans to bring our super-tall, super-skinny werewolf friends back to the screen. Two plans, actually: a web series called Dog Soliders: Legacy, and an as-of-yet untitled full-length sequel. No release dates have been announced for either, although Kismet has released a trailer for Legacy (somewhat confusingly titled Red) and a handful of promotional stills. I’m kind of on the fence about the trailer, but come on… more Dog Soliders! Additional details will presumably appear on Kismet’s site as they become available.
Hat-tip: ArcLight
Digging through some marked-as-read emails, I found that I’d missed an email from reader Byron Dunn, who shared this Badass Digest article about An American Werewolf in London‘s 30th anniversary. Click the link, friends, and gaze upon the wonders contributed by Beware The Moon director Paul Davis: never-before-seen-storyboards of David’s first werewolf transformation, by concept artist John Bruno. Here’s one frame, showing David’s muzzle – click through to the article to see the rest!
If you haven’t seen this already, scroll down and watch it. Go. Now. If you have seen it, holy shit, right?
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.
I last posted about Monster Brawl a year ago, when we didn’t know much more than the basic premise and some casting information. Now, with an official site, official trailer (see below) and a delightfully authentic poster (see further below), it looks like we’re getting closer to seeing these monsters kick each other’s asses. Here’s a synopsis from the film’s Facebook page:
Set in the tradition of a Pay-Per-View main event, comes a grotesque and hilarious fight to the death featuring a cast of eight classic combatants in all. Along with their colorful managers, these Monsters compete in visceral bloody combat in the ring to determine the most powerful monster of all time. Monster Brawl stars comedian Dave Foley (Kids in the Hall, Bugs Life, Despicable Me), wrestling icons Jimmy Hart – The Mouth of the South, Kevin Nash, revered MMA referee Herb Dean, Robert Maillet (300, Sherlock Holmes, The Immortals), Art Hindle (Porky’s, Black Christmas) and the voice of horror legend and Call of Duty narrator Lance Henriksen (Aliens, Terminator). Monster Brawl is sure to be a cult classic in the making!
There’s no release date yet, but the film is making the rounds at these festivals:
International Premiere – Lund International Fantastic Film Festival
European Premiere – Slash Film Festival
Calgary Premiere/Black Carpet Gala – Calgary International
Toronto Premiere – TORONTO AFTER DARK FILM FESTIVAL – Horror, Sci-Fi, Action & Cult Movies
French Premiere – Fantastique Semaine Du Cinema
Watch this trailer and tell me this doesn’t look like a throwback to everything that was awesome about being a rowdy ten-year-old boy in 1991.
You want more? That’s good, because I have more. Here’s the poster, which prominently features the Undead Conference vs. Creature Conference matchup between Frankenstein and Werewolf. Dang, I got a little giddy just typing the last half of that sentence.
More comics, this time from Chile! The C Wolf is a “vigilante anti-hero” comic with a stark, black and white illustration style that reminds me of Frank Miller or Mike Mignola. The werewolf design is very reminiscent of Rick Baker’s “Wolfman”, which I think works quite nicely with the art. There’s a lot of violence foreshadowed, so if the Miller influence persists we’ll probably see a lot of red mixed in with the black and white. What I’m trying to say is that The C Wolf looks real good, like a good comic should. Writer / artist Carlos Henríquez introduces his creation thusly:
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.
Back in June, my copy of Wolfsangel sat unread on the coffee table, the topmost book in a stack that comprised my reading list for the summer. A visiting friend saw the references to Odin and Vikings on the back cover and proceeded to give me a thorough lecture on Norse mythology. I was charmed by his enthusiasm, but I was also secretly terrified: was Wolfsangel going to be just as convoluted and grandiose? Was I going to have to memorize a catalog of runes? Would I need a map of Yggdrasill the World Tree?
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. (more…)