"It is with our passions, as it is with fire and water, they're good servants, but poor masters." -L'Estrange

I've always thought that a person is most honest at their wits ends. At that breaking point there's no time for facades, or chivalry. That's when you really see what a person is all about. I've wondered what it takes for a good man to do wrong, or an honest man to lie. How far would a person go to feed their addiction or protect someone they loved?

The films and books I liked as a youth really reflected those questions I had. When the camera pans up and away from Gittes (Jack Nicholson) at the end of Chinatown, and no matter how much he wanted to protect Evelyn (Faye Dunaway,) the evil of the world won. From there I picked up on the film-noir genre and started reading Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. The world of the private dick was rough, man. Lot's lot's unfulfilled hope and best intentions that, in the end, didn't count for much. The characters really reflected what we're capable of at our worst.

If I could spend one day with anyone, from anytime, it might just be Rod Serling. Twilight Zone seriously sparked even more questions in my young brain. He said once, "There is nothing in the dark, that isn't there in the light." Crap, now I had that to worry about. The beauty of that series still astounds me today. How did they make such poetic self contained perfect stories in the runtime that they had? It's a format that's been done many times since, but none as cleanly.

After I started reading comics, it didn't take long for me to gravitate towards Daredevil. The universe seemed unwilling to give Matt Murdock a break. Story after story, you just wondered, could it get any worse for this guy? It did, over and over again.

Silence of the Lambs showed me that the scariest monsters are the real ones.

Crime, Suspense and Horror.

The artwork in this site represents days and nights without sleep. My obsession over this type of work, will hopefully be evident as you tread deeper and deeper into these pages. They say the devil is in the details. I think that is true. I have found myself slipping further and further, at times, into the subtle parts of these pieces. Knowing that they would likely be overlooked, or not even visible on the internet. So, this is the fruit of my compulsion, I hope you enjoy seeing it as much as I have working on it.

If I can get one thing from a reader, it's an emotional connection with the character. One of the writers I recently worked with said, "You really like to draw sad, sad people." That's probably true, but the common denominator in everything I work on is there is a feeling there. Angry, sad, dispossessed, things that every person on this planet has felt at some point in their life.

I started working on short stories in '07. I found a lot of talented writers online. One script after another the stories were all somewhere between the spectrum of cold, film-noir style cop stories to pure evil demon and devil pieces. The majority of work on this site is from those stories, though there are some random bits I did for others, and some I just drew for me. The book is titled Charnel House. I hope you consider picking up a copy from this site, a lot of talented people really put a lot into it. The expectation we put on ourselves, for the book, is to have better writing and better visual storytelling than most things a vailable from independent press. As it evolves I hope that also becomes evident.

I have some other side projects in mind as those become more corporeal, obviously this will be the first place to find out about it. Thanks for coming by. I hope you enjoy the rest of the website. Feel free to drop me an e-mail.

WES.

wes@weshuffor.com