Another 'Ring' Giveaway

As a special weekend treat, FWB are also presenting free the first book in the ambitious, 4-part illustrated re-imagining of the epic 'Ring' Cycle, 'Of Gods and Gold'.

The free offer runs from Saturday Oct 13, 2012 to Sunday Oct 14, 2012, all inclusive.

UK Kindle Readers can get theirs here.

US Kindle fans can get it here.

'The Sword and the Ring' - Book One

The culmination of over 20 years of scribbling, sketching and writing, the first volume in 'The Sword and the Ring' series has just been released in its first print edition. Some of the finished artwork was first conceived while I was still at high school, and the idea of a full-length illustrated fantasy inspired by old Norse myths has been around for longer.

The first volume, 'Of Gods and Gold', is roughly equivalent to the 'Rheingold' prelude to Wagner's Ring Cycle - a short-ish overture to the epic drama which will follow. Characters of my own creation rub shoulders with gods and heroes of legend, while the familiar core plotline remains recognisable and intact. Darkly humorous, and maintaining the usual FWB sense of quirkiness, a Kindle edition may follow if I can figure out how to keep the rather intricate formatting.

"Since the dawn of the Nine Worlds, the gods of Asgard, led by all-wise Wotan, have enjoyed prosperity and power. Wotan's noble house of Aesir rules the heavens and all Middengaard, the realm of men and monsters; yet on this peaceful stage will be wrought curses, war, treachery and ultimately, disaster. The two-faced trickster Loki, once a blood-brother of Wotan, seeks to spawn an unholy dynasty to rival the Aesir, while gold stolen from the River Rhein sets in motion a tide of torment that will drown all who come into contact with it. Sensing doom, one-eyed Wotan broods and begins to gather warriors of Middengaard to serve as his private army, while struggling to repair the growing cracks in his marriage to Fricke, and his relationship with his thirteen unruly daughters, the Valkyren..."

Arf and Mo Arrive on Amazon Kindle

Things have been quiet on the Fenriswulf publishing front lately but for all lovers of lowbrow, underground COMIX, Chaz 'n Frang's dubious animal duo, Arf 'N Mo, have now just made it across to the popular e-book platform.

Here's the link for UK readers:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Arf-and-Mo-ebook/dp/B007P7ZZRE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1333029254&sr=8-1

and for our US-based cousins:

http://www.amazon.com/Arf-and-Mo-ebook/dp/B007P7ZZRE/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1333029481&sr=1-1

"From the broken pen of Frang McHardy and the even more broken imagination of writer Chaz Wood, meet Arf and Mo, British underground comics' best-kept secret of the last ten years...

Follow the adventures of a bloated German Shepherd mutt and a psychotic white lab rat as they belch, break wind and bludgeon each other across an increasingly surreal landscape of early 21st Century British culture.

GASP! as anarchic Arf becomes a police dog, but ends up as Inspector Gadgie's lapdog!
SQUEAL!! as Mo explores the infinite wonders of sexual sado-masochistic vivisection!!
CHOKE!!! as our duo find work in a call centre...but will their peculiar brand of customer service satisfy their demanding manager???
PASS OUT!!!! as everyone else concerned drinks more beer than has ever been consumed in an Amazon Kindle funny-animal comic book before!!!!

All this and much, much more lies within this first sizzling satirical slice of sleazy surreal salami... "

This is Issue 1, a compilation of some of the best strips from over the past 10 years. Not all the best though, as there will be a second issue out sometime in the future...

A 25th Anniversary

Not content with this January being the 6th year since the conception of 'Maranatha', this month also holds another significant personal writer's anniversary for me - namely 25 years since I started writing my first serious piece of fiction, a truly epic work of adult fantasy (even though I was only 13 and a half when I began it!) inspired by Norse mythology, Wagner's 'Ring' cycle, 'Penthesilea' and many other things.

It's a strange piece of work, something I've deliberately abandoned at various times in the past until I felt I was more mature to be able to handle the material the way I wanted it, and illustrate it the way I felt it ought to be. I would regularly get so far and then decide that I didn't have the talent to pull it all together. First it swung one way, from heroic tragedy to more whimsical traditional fantasy, and back again. Now the pendulum's swung all the way around and the work has evolved into what I reckon will be its final stage, fused from the salient points of all the previous incarnations and the multiple revisions and dramatic evolutions. The writing of it has been an epic drama in itself. By turns frustrating, exhilerating, time-consuming and demanding, it's something that's always been a part of me, and probably always will. This I now attribute to the very powerful symbolic themes and motifs which inspired it, and which I've always regarded in the very highest esteem.

And what has actually helped to pull it all together has not been new writing, but new illustration works, which have taken on a somewhat industrial - even science fantasy - edge, to create something that is new and yet true to its origins, like a post-modern staging of the 'Ring' Cycle itself that delves into the deeper symbolism and meaning with radical set design and costuming, my re-imagining of familiar characters and scenes is throwing up brainstorms of creativity right now. I know this is working well, because it was the exact same process which kicked off my work 'The Wish and the Will' recently, and led to a similar flurry of action (producing three full episodes and dozens of full-colour illustrations in less than six months).

In all the time I've worked on this (still untitled) series I reckon I've barely pulled together half a dozen chapters of finished work that is actually worthy of the name, yet I've filled hundreds of pages and written hundreds of thousands of words, produced dozens of sketches and a stack of finished illustration works since 1989, of varying quality. In this 25th anniversary year (I did say in an earlier post that I'm a sucker for this kind of thing...), to the very month when I began this thing on a cold winter's evening while enjoying a break from school due to the severe weather, I took the executive decision to finally make it happen. Yes, I'm in the middle of half a dozen other writing projects, and have recently just started taking on new illustration commissions again. Yet lately I've been buzzing with a nervous, excitable creative energy whereby I simply want more - more things to do, and the ideas have been surging around with the power of a storm. It's a long time since I've felt this wired creatively, if indeed I ever have at all, even during my blast-through of 'TWatW' this time last year.

And in the meantime, I present one of those new works of visual art which is helping me to focus so clearly on the biggest, sprawling, most chaotic mess of a book I've ever conceived!

'Sword of Lochglen' - back in production

After the past year in which Chaz convinced himself (and everyone around him) that he had finally packed in drawing comics for good to concentrate on 'graphic fiction', a recent discussion with long-term Fenriswulf collaborator Frang has suddenly rekindled his interest in the historical Scottish satire, 'Sword of Lochglen'.

This bawdy, surreal and occasionally dark graphic novel features artwork by both Frang and Chaz, and the first two issues have already been made available in print, and digital format at the Lochglen webpage.

It's been over 5 years since Chaz lifted a pen to draw 'Lochglen', although Frang has since produced excellent work for the historical fantasy sequences which tell the tale of the narrator's romantic novel.



Greta Garbo - or just a humble teashop waitress? Hero William MacFaddyen meets secret admirer Rose in brand new panels drawn for Issue 3 of 'Lochglen'.

Expected release date: Spring/Summer 2012.

To Illustrate...or Not to Illustrate?

Chaz has a new guest blog article, 'A Problem in Promotion' over at Rainy Dark's writers' and bloggers' page. In it, he addressed the nature of illustrated fiction, and the preconceptions surrounding it, an issue which is very pertinent to Fenriswulf Books at the moment. The Wish & the Will series is being produced both in text-only and fully-illustrated e-book editions, while Maranatha has just seen its second revised edition, without the original illustrations.

The article ought to be of interest to any writer who is considering illustrations for their works, or anyone with a passing interest in the concept of illustrated fiction, as distinct from the more common 'graphic novels'.


Read the full post here.


Left: illustrated page from Episode 1 of The Wish & the Will: Sundancer's Regret