Rob Saucedo’s Where Wolf may be Houston’s biggest indie comedy success story since Terry Moore’s Strangers in Paradise. After a great debut in FangoriaSaucedo is putting out a physical version and promoting it alongside screenings of the werewolf classic Silver bullet over the whole country. He will be at the Alamo Drafthouse La Centerra on Friday the 31st. March.
“I honestly could have done this whole project specifically so I could go on this book tour,” Saucedo says.
Where Wolf is the story of Larry Chaney, a 30-year-old journalist at a small-town newspaper in College Station (where Saucedo himself was a reporter) who is slowly losing his mind from a lack of excitement and direction. Fortunately (for him), several people are murdered, and the culprit appears to be a lycanthrope. Now full of purpose and with far less caution than he should exhibit, Larry tracks the wolf.
Saucedo has been planning the release of the book for years, and it’s a great example of how a punk rock mindset can make it through in comics even when the market is flooded thanks to Marvel, DC and more.
“This whole thing was born out of my desire to tell a story,” Saucedo says. “I’ve wanted to tell since 2008. For ten years I waited for someone to come long and tell me that Marvel or Dark Horse was waiting for me. I realized that no one was ever going to do that. So I made it myself, just like Lloyd Kaufman did with movies.”
Saucedo has spent a decade pulling off weird publicity stunts on behalf of the Alamo Drafthouse (remember when he brought in a Bigfoot corpse?), so few people in Texas were better equipped to turn a strange werewolf story into a runaway success. He found that billboards in College Station were surprisingly cheap and bought a month’s worth of eye-catching advertising warning the townspeople that they had a werewolf problem. A guerilla campaign on the Texas A&M Campus helped the word spread further. Fangoria was so impressed by the attention that Where Wolf 2 it is already being worked on.
Some people were upset at first, but the quality of the work won them over. Part of the story takes place at a furry convention and involves a gruesome murder, which rankles the furry community.
“I got an email from a furry in College Station and he said ‘don’t you like furries?'” says Saucedo. “I said, ‘No, I understand your concern.’ Read the first chapters. Take a look and let me know if you really think I was unfair to the furry community.’ Since then, he has become a big fan drawing fan art. I’m so honored that there’s fan art of something I’ve written.”
When it came time to pair a werewolf movie with the chance to hack his book, Saucedo’s first choice was the 1985 TV movie Silver bullet. Starring Gary Busey and Corey Haim with a screenplay by Stephen King based on his short story The Werewolf Cycle, it’s about a small town where no one knows who might be the monster that’s killing people. The film was mostly panned when it came out, and is now considered a cult classic and an interesting take on the werewolf mythos.
“Stephen King’s sincerity, especially in Silver bulletThat’s what I was trying to achieve Where Wolf, says Saucedo. It’s scary, but emotional. I like it.”
Silver Bullet and Rob Saucedo’s Where Wolf at 22.00 Friday 31 March at Alamo Drafthouse La Centerra, 2707 Commercial Center. For more information, visit Drafthouse.com/Houston or call 281-492-6900. $12.
