CG Models and Artwork | Fang, Claw & Steel | Man-Wolf | Contact

Terry Wessner

I don't think we get to choose our obsessions. They're chosen for us by our subconscious minds. What triggers these choices has been a subject of debate (and gainful employment) among psychologists for over a century. For the rest of us the triggers don't really matter. What does matter is that everyone is obsessive about something. As long as we recognize the obsessions for what they are and don't take them too seriously, they can even be fun. 

In my case, the only fictional character that I'm actually obsessed with is a little known Marvel Comics character from the 1970s called Man-Wolf. Obsessions are always more fun when they're about something obscure. Indeed, one can pile obscurity on top of obscurity to double or even triple one's pleasure.

Case in point: There are actually two different versions of the Man-Wolf. When comics fans remember Wolfie at all, they almost invariably recall him as a standard, savagely violent werewolf who appeared in the Spider-Man comics. They may admit that his silver fur and very wolf-like features were quite a novelty back when he appeared. But his destructive behaviour was no different from any other werewolf in movies or comics.

Of course, that's not the version of the Man-Wolf that I'm interested in. The Man-Wolf I first encountered in Marvel Premiere #45 back in 1978 was intelligent and civilized, but still ferocious when he had to be. He wasn't a monster, he was a hero. And he was a wolf, which was even better.

This was the Man-Wolf as Stargod. The story David Anthony Kraft wrote for Marvel Premiere was pretty good, though not without its faults. The characterizations were stiff, our hero only had one expression, and the climax was pure deus ex machina. In fact, the story's essentially a retelling of John Carter of Mars with a silver-furred werewolf who was even named John as the hero. Could it have been called John Critter instead?

But these were just flaws in the execution. At once my eyes were opened to the enormous potential the Man-Wolf had. An intelligent, heroic werewolf who actually looked like a wolf, and who had a background and setting that incorporated both fantasy and science fiction. Marvel could have done anything with this. 

Unfortunately, what they decided to do was go backwards. None of the other writers at Marvel picked up on the Man-Wolf's changes and they continued to portray him as a regular werewolf. By the 1980s Marvel had lost its flare for doing monstrous or nonhuman heroes, a flare that had helped build the company in the 1960s with such characters as the Hulk and the Thing. A new generation of writers and editors had taken over, and sadly, most of them assumed that when a human became something nonhuman, that must be a bad thing. In 1981 the Man-Wolf was "cured," resuming his ordinary life as ex-astronaut John Jameson. 

I was crushed. But I knew Marvel wasn't going to change its mind just because of me. So I started to doodle the Man-Wolf. Like most fans, I couldn't resist making a few changes that I thought would improve the object of my obsession. I began drawing the Man-Wolf with a tail because it seemed to better fit Wolfie's underlying concept of a more wolf-like werewolf. I made up my own stories, which eventually evolved into their worlds. The Man-Wolf became for me what all good obsessions should be: an inspiration for my own ideas. 

But as I developed my own stuff I didn't give up on Wolfie. Eventually I met up with Michael Winkle, my first contact with another Man-Wolf fan. This zine you're reading was really his idea. I just put all the pieces together on my PC. 

Future issues of Fang, Claw, and Steel will focus on what we see as the central theme of Man-Wolf/Stargod -- the lycanthrope as hero. Starting next issue FC&S will feature all sorts of heroic werewolves, weretigers, werebears, and werewithall. The Man-Wolf will always have a special place here, though, and this first issue is his alone.

<^>