Houston’s Rob Saucedo debuts horror-comedy comic ‘Where Wolf ’
who has known Rob Saucedo, the program director for Houston’s Alamo Drafthouse theater, is aware he’s a sort of mad scientist. This is the dude who had live alligators at a screening of “Alligator” and who brought in a (fake) corpse of Bigfoot to accompany a Sasquaxploitation film festival.
So, when he said two years ago that he wanted to tell a story about a werewolf stalking a furry convention, nobody doubted it would be something special. “Where Wolf ” (the title comes from a joke in the film “Young Frankenstein”) is both a loving tribute to journalism, of all things, and a perfect example of the state of werewolf fiction in 2022.
The hero is Larry Chaney, a 30-something feature reporter in College Station who is slowly losing his mind in the small city and dreams of doing something exciting. He gets his chance when something mauls three people to death. The one thing they all have in common is sexual fetishes, such as dressing like babies, in anatomically correct animal suits or engaging in vorarephilia (role-playing the act of devouring or being devoured by another creature).
Now, Larry is on the hunt and loving it for the first time in his life. Like Larry, Saucedo studied journalism in college and briefly ended up as a reporter in College Station. “I love journalism,” he says. “It meant a lot for me to talk about how important journalism is, as well as the messy and frustrating bits. It’s been a really weird process. I’ve had the idea since 2007. It took the world falling apart for me to write it.”
Saucedo is releasing issues weekly for free through the horror magazine Fangoria. As a purveyor of horror films, he’s had a long relationship with the iconic publication. A producer has already optioned “Where Wolf ” for a movie, though an old cinema industry insider like Saucedo is managing his expectations. “I read Variety,” he says. “Hundreds of things get optioned and go nowhere. In the meantime, I’m glad I have a job I love doing. I’m happy to keep doing stories with these characters. I’ve already got a sequel written.”
Debora Lancianese’s art for the comic perfectly captures both the horror and comedy of the story. There are gruesome shots of torn-apart victims that would do a “Tales From the Crypt” page proud, but there is playfulness, too. One hilarious moment involves Larry peeking under the bar that says cenAnyone sored, which covers the crotch of the furry suit, commenting on the girth.
This is par for the course for werewolves these days. Recent films, such as “The Wolf of Snow Hollow” and “Werewolves Within,” have enthusiastically leaned into the inherent ridiculousness of lycanthropes, and “Where Wolf ” gently teases its own monster, even as the beast leaves the guts of its pursuers on the grass. “I’ve been in love with werewolves since I was a kid,” says Saucedo. “They were, to me, the ultimate monster. It captured my imagination, but as I got older and started looking more critically, I realized werewolves were a metaphor for addiction.”
While the dialogue in the comic has a quippy ’90s quality that wouldn’t be out of place in a Kevin Smith film, that undercurrent of need and smalltown despair lends the story a lot of gravitas. It’s probably why Stephen Graham Jones, who wrote “Mongrels,” the greatest werewolf novel ever, gave the project his enthusiastic endorsement. There is quality and heart in “Where Wolf ” as well as humor. As of this moment, it’s the greatest comic to come out of Houston since “Strangers in Paradise.”