This is the story of the Wolf troop from Calling All Heroes, and also the story of how I, by all rights, probably should be a furry.
No judgment. Some of my best friends are furries. Great people. I’m not one, but if you’d met me when I was 8, or 10, or 12, you’d think I would end up as such.
See, you know how there’s the horse girl in school, that one who’s REALLY obsessed with horses and ponies, knows all the breeds and color patterns, and begs her parents for one every Christmas and birthday?
And the cat girl, whose crusades in life are to a) become a crazy cat lady, and b) prove officially, scientifically, unquestionably, that cats are better than dogs? (“Cats rule dogs drool,” anyone?)
Well, I was not the horse girl or the cat girl. Me, I was the wolf girl.
Example one: At the age of eight, I still played “pretend” with other kids, and I was consistently a wolf. Not an anthropomorphic character with wolf traits. Not a wolfishly grinning bounty hunter or something like that. No, even when my playmate’s characters were humans, I was just a wolf.
Example two: At ten, I started a comic about a white wolf. It was sort of a “don’t exclude people for being different” moral fable in semi-manga form. There are a few incarnations of this comic in my various binders-fulla-artworks, and they’re various shades of awful. They’re also all under 4 pages because I never finished anything back then.
Example three: At age twelve, I watched Balto entirely too many times, and I wrote entire novels, Watership Down-style, about wolves and their adventures. Invented whole societies, whole cultures, made up of tribes of wolves.
You’d think this would go on to “example four” and “age fourteen” and “deviantART,” but we’re not gonna go there. …I’m sure you understand.
Instead, we’re going to fast-forward to the creation of the Wolf Troop. When I was doing concept illustrations for OgreWare and designing the look of each Troop, I was given a lot of creative license/leeway in terms of interpretation of prompts. OgreWare would just send me “Draw a wasp,” or “Draw an imp,” or “Draw a wolf,” without much further specifications. And so when they said “wolf,” I immediately thought “wolf pup.”
One of my main intentions in designing these characters was to take very fierce and fiendish characters and somehow put a twist on them to make them cute, funny, or even pretty. Things that could give night terrors in some forms, got put into forms that make people laugh or smile. My quest in this project has always been to take the prompts and twist them. (I did the same thing when I was participating in Inktober in 2017 – I took each prompt and reinterpreted it as much as possible, while still being able to claim that it fit the prompt. Check out the images at http://julianjaymes.com/works/inktober17 .)
So perhaps “wolf pup” isn’t much of a change to the original prompt, but I do think it suits the theme of Calling All Heroes. After all, CAH is, to me, about challenging our viewpoints on what a monster is – and what a hero is, too. Perhaps, in thinking about the meaning of those words and challenging the traditional visions they prompt, we can take a look at ourselves, our own stories, and challenge who and what we’ve called a monster or a hero.
Whoa. That went pretty philosophical for a second. Sorry, the planets are in Gatorade this summer so I’m pretty loopy when it comes to writing anything.
At any rate, OgreWare did a great job coloring this Troop, and personally I love the White Wolf variation they sent me for this blog post – it reminds me of the white wolf from my old, old comics.
That’s about all I’ve got for this Troop Spotlight. Were any of you obsessed with any specific animal when you were a kid? And has that interest continued in your adult life? Comment below and share your story with us!
~Admin Julian