Rob Saucedo has been hawking his new graphic novel, Where Wolf, at screenings of werewolf films at the Alamo Drafthouse, and it's a great marketing tactic, to be sure. Especially when your book has a delightful hook like "Journalist goes undercover at a furry convention in Texas to catch a werewolf." I thought it sounded fun enough to take a thirty-dollar chance on a special variant cover edition after watching The Howling, especially when the cover specifically included an endorsement from Joe Dante! And the back included endorsements from Stephen Graham Jones and Paul Tremblay! And the average Goodreads rating was a whopping 4.92!!
Look, I'm a generous reviewer, and I find it hard to believe that any of those people loved this book THAT MUCH. This feels like one of those situations where a movie has a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 92% but a Metacritic score of 52. Is this book bad? Certainly not. It's perfectly enjoyable and competently done. But it's overall so mediocre and underwhelming compared to what I thought I was going to get from this book that I can't pretend you should go out of your way to check out this random graphic novel you've never heard of.
Larry Chaney (GET IT GET IT) is a shitty boyfriend and a slacker reporter in College Station who gets a chance to prove himself to his put-upon girlfriend, Gwen, when he looks into some mysterious deaths that just happen to coincide with a furry convention. He enlists the help of a witness, Sophia, who becomes his girl Friday, as it were, and they try to suss out who the werewolf might be.
Saucedo's horror-comedy is far more comedy than horror, and how much you enjoy the book will depend on your tolerance for main characters like Larry, who is not The Worst, exactly, but also not exactly the most endearing of doofs. Thankfully, Sophia's clearly the best character in the book, and her outrageousness gives the book some fun attitude, and Saucedo gives Gwen a bit more agency and dimension than is often afforded the girlfriend characters of characters like Larry. Saucedo gives them all some solid backstory that deepens their characters and relationships. From a horror perspective, Saucedo does actually have a compelling take on werewolves, but unfortunately, it's all dropped in one chapter near the end of the book with little time to explore (but I guess that's what the sequel is for).
While there's good stuff in here, it's a frustrating read because so little really happens for most of it. Most of it is spent trying to convince people there's a werewolf, and there's very little werewolf action, and there is exactly one (1) scene of a werewolf being mistaken for a furry! That's it! Isn't that the whole joke of this premise?? (Another point in this book's favor, by the way, is that it treats furries respectfully rather than making them the butt of the joke for the whole book.) So it's mostly just Larry and Sophia running around and occasionally a werewolf appears. It's...cute and fun, I suppose?
I would probably rate this book higher if I liked Debora Lancianese's art at all, but I don't. I could tell when I flipped through that it was not appealing to me, this very simple sketch-y black-and-white that feels like the rough drafts of panels. Like literally they remind me of the sketches I see of panels before they're properly drawn and inked and colored. Again, I wouldn't say it's bad, per se, just...baseline competent, with the occasional striking composition.
Anyway, the punny title makes no sense but it's cute, and that's basically indicative of the book itself. It's cute. It exists. It's not going to set the world on fire, but I sure wish it delivered a hell of a lot more from its premise.