The Day welcomes ‘Wallace the Brave’
Get ready for a little escape, no suitcases required. Meet “Wallace the Brave,” a clever young boy and his loyal crew, the creation of an equally clever Rhode Islander, Will Henry Wilson, who will bring his comic strip to The Day every day, starting Monday.
Wilson will take readers to Snug Harbor, a comic-strip community not unlike the many seaside communities along the local coastline. It’s a place where kids still happily search for bugs and fish off the rocks — when not tossing crabapples at tourists boarding the ferry.
“Will Henry has created a cast of characters and a setting that I think readers of The Day will enjoy getting to know,” noted Managing Editor Timothy J. Cotter. "'For Better or For Worse' was a groundbreaking strip but has been in reruns since 2008, and we see 'Wallace the Brave' as a way to freshen up our comics page.”
The young artist, who spent summers near South County’s Snug Harbor and now lives in Jamestown, R.I., had a vision of his little cartoon guy’s offbeat personality during the creation process.
Recalled Wilson, “The more I drew him, the more he became a little daredevil, and I thought, he must be pretty brave.”
Thus was Wallace the Brave hatched on the drawing board of the 33-year-old former University of Connecticut student who made serious his penchant for illustration while working at The Daily Campus. He was thrilled to earn $5 for each student newspaper cartoon he created, and the cash put gas in his car and motivation in his heart to take his work to another level.
Will Henry, as he likes to be known, has been at it since because, even though he majored in sculpture, “I wanted to be a cartoonist. It’s something I have a passion for.”
And he is well on his way, with more than 80 newspapers picking up his strip, noted his editor, Shena Wolf, of Andrews McMeel Syndication. She adds that she expects that number to change as the March launch takes shape.
“Will sent in ‘Wallace the Brave,’ as a comic strip submission through our general submissions email,” she noted. “We were incredibly impressed by his submission.
“Will’s work is immediately engaging. The art is whimsical and there’s always a lot of interesting details to get lost in.” Though he has been spending summers in South County since his boyhood, he grew up in Rehoboth, Mass., the oldest of three children. He now lives and works in Jamestown, over the bridge from Newport, where his family owns and operates a harborside wine, beer, and cheese shop. In the front window of the shop, he keeps a drawing board for any quiet moments when he can sneak in a few sketches during his full-time job there.
Sometimes his comic strip sketches resemble the view out that window, a seaside vista that may show up in some landlocked publications. He likes that.
He wants his strip “to have summer vibes on the beach,” he said, “but it has a lot of pieces. It’s a fictional town named after Snug Harbor, but I’d like to think it is a compilation of South County and the best it has to offer.”
The children in the strip, he said, are in “first or second grade. I like that age group. They are still a little naïve.”
And though he has been big brother to Iain and Amelia all these years and includes them in one way or another in the cartoon characters, he is also just recently getting a first-hand look at life with children: He and his wife, Isis, became parents in early March to “a healthy, adorable baby boy,” noted the new Dad. The newborn's name is William.
Will Henry’s mother, Catherine, said her own first-born son was always “fearless and highly imaginative. He was always guided by his curiosity and loved adventure.”
Trees and swings “were never high enough,” she recalled, and she sees “a lot of Will Henry in Wallace,” the clever little cartoon boy.
It’s no coincidence that a little talk of basketball sometimes sneaks into the strip. Wilson is 6'4" and
has always played. He still does and notes that his own age is the same as former Celtics star Larry Bird's number.
He has also spent some summer hours at the University of Rhode Island taking additional art courses where he met Professor Ben Anderson, who noted, "Will took several of my sculpture classes. At the time, Will was interested in cartooning. We talked about sculptural ideas as they related to drawings in his notebook.
“He had confidence in his ideas and finding a way to bring them to fruition.”
And being a product of the computer generation and social media, Wilson found a way to get his work out there by way of GoComics, an online comic strip site. This time last year, a writer for the Huffpost approached him for an interview, taking news of Wilson's skills to a larger audience and comparing him to established cartoonists — which is what he always wanted.
Will Henry shares his legal name with his father, and so on the strip and an earlier one called “Ordinary Bill,” he decided to stand out as Will Henry, and also because his almost 90-year-old grandmother Betty — he dedicated his book to her— always addresses him as such. The bound collection was a suggestion from his publisher, he noted. He happily recalled the process and a successful book signing at the local library.
“I was obviously wicked excited. That whole experience was surreal, epic, very satisfying. I got to work with a whole team of people who genuinely cared about the content and material they were publishing,” he said.
“Getting to hold the finished version of the book is something I'll never forget. It was awesome.”
Or as the little boy in “Wallace the Brave” likes to say: “Totally epic.”