Oh man, first of the month means vote counts reset at TWC! But you guys are still voting for me and it's awesome :D. If you want to see where Harvey is going with this, there's a preview in the vote incentive! So, if you started reading this comic and thought, "Man, I'm sure this will be just brimming with werewolves! So many werewolves!" and then later thought, "But where are the werewolves?"...well, here ya go! I'm a firm believer in waiting til the right moment, and really building up until your reveal is worth revealing. Thanks for waiting! I wouldn't say that I did much planning ahead when I started this comic. I'll admit that this entire team of "bad guy" werewolves was mostly made up and designed on the fly. I'll even admit that like, 90% of the characters in this comic were made up and designed on the fly...which is why half of them have names that start with "M". (Oops. I just like "M" names.) Largely, this project and story has turned out okay because I follow my gut pretty extensively. I don't recommend it as a working method for most people, but I knew it would work for me! I do better when I'm thrown into the fire, so to speak. A comic page comes together because of hundreds of tiny decisions, and those decisions add up over time to become real characters and a real story. Once I introduced Malaya in this giant werewolf form, I knew that down the line, I'd be introducing Elias the same way. I knew he wouldn't be the kind of guy who would jump straight into fighting (jumping into other situations, sure!), and he'd really have to be pushed to go there. So, I followed my gut on what the story needed. I needed to up the stakes, so that led to Vincent getting kidnapped. (And I knew that for him to be kidnapped, we needed to "discover" the house in the woods so that we had a new, central location for this part of the story to go down.) Then, I knew that he and Elias needed to like, communicate on any level for what I had planned down the line, so Elias needed to be the one to go after him. And now, in a situation where Elias would generally sneak away on his own, or just plain run like hell, he's gotta push his transformation because he has an easily-bruised human to protect. So, that's my writing process. Based on wherever I need the characters to get to, either within the chapter or down the line, I follow that line of logic until I've got a series of events that make sense to the character and accomplish whatever I needed to accomplish. Writing is weird! Some people brought up the idea of Elias being more lanky given his build, which is what I've had in mind for him generally. Malaya's big as a werewolf, but she's bulky. Elias is like...a stretched out, hairy version of his normal self. Also, I spent a lot of time looking at wolves and their fur patterns, and other artists' work to see how they manage that situation...I did so much freaking research into what is basically a fluffy mane. I keep getting caught up in drawing Elias's fur that these pages have taken me forever O_O. Not good! I have to go out of town this weekend for a family reunion/memorial service, and I'm being dragged backwards by drawing tails and shit. What a normal life I lead. That being said, because I've been trying to work ahead for weeks now (and failing!), I didn't have time for a Halloween drawing! Boo hiss. I've been working late every day and still couldn't find time to plausibly make it happen. Sorry guys! On the plus side, this whole comic is kind of like Halloween all the time, so there's that. In TV news, I've continued watching Xena and it continues to be weird. I'm also addicted to the campaign coverage lately, which I need to stop. If I drank alcohol, this election would have made me an alcoholic by now. (Which is why I don't drink >_>.) As it is, I'm kind of debating just spending the entirety of election day at the gym working off my anxiety until we're safely on the other side of November 8th, and I can stop worrying or prepare for the apocalypse. Fuuuuun.