Nineteen-Ninety-Nine was a really great year for movies - some of my favorites of all time.

Fight Club, The Matrix, American Beauty, Eyes Wide Shut, Magnolia, The Iron Giant, The Virgin Suicides, Office Space, The Blair Witch Project, Notting Hill, Being John Malkovich, and of course - the best of all of 'em: The Mummy with Brendan Fraser.

Oh wait, that's the wrong Mummy...

Another movie came out in Ninety Nine though, lesser known because it's an anime and it took another two years for it be dubbed into English. That movie was Jinrō 人狼 - which translates to "Werewolf." It's based upon a manga by Mamoru Oshii, of Ghost in the Shell fame, called Kerberos Panzer Cop, part 1 of the Kerberos Saga, and it's the only part of that story ever to be turned into an anime. In the West it was released as "Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade," which is how I found it as a wee lad perusing the video store at my local mall in the early aughts.

The movie is pretty good - you should watch it - but there's really just this one line that sticks with me all these years later. I'll have to spoil the story though in order for it to make sense.

Jin-Roh is essentially a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood, but in the context of a political uprising and the suppression thereof. There's a 1984-esque thought police unit called Kerberos in some alternative history timeline of Japan; and the main character, a gruff, quiet soldier named Fuse, works for them. One day, in Alaska for some reason, Fuse is asked to quell a protest and kill a "Little Red Riding Hood," which in this story is a courier of bombs and munitions for the underground rebels. He can't bring himself to go through with it and the girl blows herself up instead in an act of defiance.

This breaks Fuse somewhat and he's sent back to the barracks for reeducation. There, he's encouraged to go visit the girl's familial burial shrine in order to find peace. While doing so he meets another young girl named Kei who claims to be the suicide bomber's sister. Kei forgives Fuse for the death of her sister and the two of them strike up a romance.

As Fuse slowly returns to himself, it's revealed that Kei doesn't have a sister and is actually a secret agent for the underground resistance and that she was sent to entrap Fuse, but she doesn't care about that anymore because she's truly in love with him.

They try to escape the violence of the conflict through the sewers when suddenly a group of men show up. Fuse knows who they are and begins to put on a suit of armor with glowing red eyes and a giant gun. Kei is obviously confused, and one of the men explains to her - and this is the line that sticks with me:

"We are not men disguised as mere dogs. We are wolves disguised as men."

Kei begs him, pleads with him, not to do this. They can just run away together - he doesn't need to retreat into the darkness. Fuse's mind breaks...

He kills her and then kills all of the resistance fighters in the sewers.

Little Red succumbs to the triumph of the Wolf.

There's a million reasons why I love that line, not least of which is because it goes hard AF. It's such a brutal thing to say at that moment and cuts through all the emotion and drama to get to the bedrock of the situation: his humanity was a ruse. Everyone is playing each other, but that's all a superficial dance that's meaningless to Fuse. In the end there is only the question of which direction to point his violence.

In FLOLAS, wolves and their simplicity also play a role. There's a scene that I've illustrated twice now where Ava has a dream about her brother. They're in a cave and he's teaching her how to restring her bow. It's tuned like an instrument, he says. She only needs to make it resonate with herself. This is interrupted by an intense howling outside the cave. It's a wolf with a damaged paw, bleeding and limping in the snow.

I'll come back to this scene before Song One is complete - I promise - it's central to the plot of the first episode and it helps you understand the main character a little better. For now I'm illustrating the fight scene that occurs. This is the end of the Song One, however the ending is a little complicated. Everyday I'm trying to figure out the best way to wrap up the story as concisely and simply with the fewest images and therefore work on my part; and even with this dynamic it still is taking entirely too much time...

If you read my previous blog entry, you know that I recently uprooted and moved to a completely different city and got a completely different job. Actually, when I wrote that I don't think I even had a job or any prospects yet.

I've spent the last ten years of my life in Birmingham, Alabama - my entire thirties. Arguably, it was probably the best ten years of my life. Arguably... Arguing with myself I guess. I had a good stable job with a decent income and it allowed me the flexibility to draw this comic book and maintain this blog and website. I met my wife there. I bought my (relatively modest) dream car. I lived in the center of downtown in a fancy apartment. Still, if I could time travel back to any day in the last decade, I'd probably find myself miserable. Before I met my wife, I was probably licking my wounds from a breakup or some affair gone wrong. If I asked myself about job prospects or how my work was going I would probably recoil in despair…

In retrospect though, it was all roses. I suppose that's the nature of things. In the moment it might be bad, but when you look back all you see are the good parts.

So I ended up getting a job. It's with a very old American company and my office is right in the heart of Nashville. Every day I see a glowing azure skyline with window washers amid the shining glass obelisks and a myriad scattering of bachelorette parties scurrying on the streets below. Music bellows. Every building emits echoing rim shots and amplified garbled vocals. It's almost like it's a… Music City.

I know nothing of the product we make. Much like my last job, how we actually make money and what I do all day have absolutely nothing to do with each other. To be IT is to be mercenary. Everyone has computers - Everything *is* computer. And with that comes career stability for me and my bespeckled ilk.

More and more though I realize that I'm really not a tech bro at all. When I first got this job, there was an opening with the same company for a backend server admin. I'm pretty familiar with that sort of thing, so I figured I would interview for it and take my shot. However, during the interview I realized how much of an interloper I truly was. My ability to intuit my way through technology only goes so far. At some point, one must obtain a Computer Science degree.

There's a quote I heard a few weeks ago that I really like. It's from Mark Twain and it was said during a philosophy debate on YouTube when one of the guys asked the other if he had a degree that he, in fact, did not have. He retorted that he gets that a lot and then said this:

"Give a man a reputation as an early riser, and he can sleep 'til noon."

I feel like this sums up my career. I went to college for Art. An Associates Degree in Studio Art is the only certification I've ever had. After that I went to another college for Computer Animation and dropped out during the final class because I couldn't pass it and refused to take on more debt. My first job was for the Army making videos and eventually running live audio and running a print shop. Then I transitioned to IT and actually started making money while working not nearly as hard. And now here I am, masquerading as something I'm not, still, for cash.

FLOLAS is who I truly am though. It is my wolf.

Page 67 is still being sketched. This is the first time in like 4 years that I haven't had two pages completed in between blog posts. I hope you'll forgive me for this horror, this transgression, this travesty - but like I just told ya, I've been rather busy.

Peace. Love.