Wolves just aren't all that scary in a post-agrarian, post-industrial revolution age. Sometimes I think the way to go with werewolves is the way they appear in the Twilight movies, or the Amanda Seyfried-as-sexy-Riding Hood movie from a few years back just big-ass wolves, the size of lions or horses, possessed of a human intelligence. That's always struck me as more of a dog-man than a wolf-man. played in The Wolfman, your basic dude with beard that covers his whole face, pointy ears on the side of his head, sharper than usual teeth, and a dog nose. I like the pointy-nosed, snout-having wolves like the one Haun draws, and which seems the more popular one these days, then the sort that Lon Chaney Jr. There's somethng inherently wrong about wolf-men in general, if you ask me, in that they are so often made into some kind of weird gorilla hybrid with a wolf's head on top of it, and claws that are more cat-like then wolf-like (I have never been attacked by a wolf before- knock on wood!-but there more about biting with their jaws than slashing with their claws, you know? We probably haven't talked about this at too great length before, but I think about werewolf design an awful lot, and I struggle when it comes to deciding how I think werewolves should look. If this was a movie, we would probably then have a reaction shot from the hunters, while an unseen monster cuts through them and the credit sequence begins.īut here, this being comics, we get to see the monster immediately-right on page two! Just seven panels in!Īs you can see, Haun has drawn what I guess you'd call the default werewolf of the day: Big, broad-shouldered, hairy humanoid form, with no tail, no genitals (despite what Monster Squad has to say on the matter), samurai sword-sharp claws (he slices the hunters to pieces on the next page) and a gigantic, wolf's head. The dogs pick up a scent, the hunters release them, the dogs tear off into the woods barking furiously, and then then their barks turn to whines from somewhere off- screenpanel, and then an eerie silence sets in. The book opens with a group of hunters and dogs in Kentucky, on the trail of some animal that's been mutilating cattle. He scabbed out a Before Watchmen project which I've heard a few people say was one of the better looking ones, but what kind of asshole wants to read a Before Watchmen book? And he's done a pretty interesting job on the issues of Batman/Superman he's managed to draw, but the stories haven't really been worthy of the art (competent, occasionally entertaining generic superhero fare), and his pace usually means other artists are involved in every one of those stories. DC seems to make okay use out of him as a cover artist he's been killing it on the covers for the new crime comic direction of Catwoman, but his comics-comics work has seemed somewhat wasteful. I wouldn't mind seeing a whole book on this fairly universal, even generic genre by Lee just to see what he would do with it, but he's just doing the cover. It's a pretty unique take on a person turning into a wolf (or hey, maybe it's a wolf turning into a person), and of the sort that can be extremely effectively rendered in a static drawing, perhaps even more effectively than it could be in any other medium. The wolf monster is seemingly bleeding out of the human character, like some sort of mass of fluid ectoplasm taking the shape of a werewolf, morphing and warping her body. It's basically a werewolf transformation scene of the sort that's central to werewolf movies, presented in a way I've never seen or even imagined before. Look at this cover for Wolf Moon, a new movie-pitch style miniseries from Vertigo by writer Cullen Bunn and artist Jeremy Haun (with colors by Lee Loughridge). He has such a unique, particularly interesting style, and while I think it has its limitations-it can be a fine line between minimalism for style's sake and just not drawing stuff because drawing is hard and takes a long time-he's capable of really great work. I hope someday DC finds something both interesting and worthwhile for artist Jae Lee to do.
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