When most people think of Gwar, they think of horrendous beings from another planet assaulting the senses with an aural and visual onslaught that includes disemboweling political figures and spraying audiences with bodily fluids while performing pummeling metal songs. Though he has explored other creative outlets such as his participation in the still-in-development Blood Vomits animated series and his recent “Spoken Turd” performance at Gwar’s Crack-A-Thon, one might expect front man Oderus Urungus’ talents to revolve around world domination and exaggeratedly phallic aggression. From wrestling matches to sword fights, Urungus and his crew of creatures have had epic battles with some of the ghastliest ghouls in the universe. But Urungus’ alter ego Dave Brockie can now call himself a novelist with the recent release of his debut book Whargoul.
Though Whargoul has been alive at www.oderus.com for years, it was only recently that it’s physical form was realized with the publication of the Whargoul paperback. The story of a demon-like creature who is reborn generation after generation with the sole purpose of creating carnage, Whargoul is just the kind of story you might expect from a guy who performs while showing off his enormous alien penis. As the band prepares for this weekend’s Gwar-B-Q festival in Richmond, Va. and the subsequent Return of the World Maggot tour, Dave Brockie talks to Wrestling with Pop Culture about his book and more.
I interviewed you a few years ago and your knowledge of weapons and military history came up. You clearly applied that knowledge throughout Whargoul, so it was interesting to see some of the things we talked about before being put to good use.
I’m a big fan of history and the more warlike episodes of human history are usually the most interesting. Art and war were probably my two biggest areas of study. It’s not that I’m a supporter of war by any means, but it is a fascination we have with the entire aspect of warfare. It’s so contradictory and so undeniably damaging to the planet, the human psyche and the physicality of being human. It’s such an unrelentingly negative thing that it’s just unbelievable that we spend so much time, money, effort and so many lives basically pursuing a system that still relies on the laws of the jungle.
I’ve been fascinated with it my whole life, probably mostly because both of my parents were World War II veterans. My dad’s from Scotland and my mom’s from London and they both were very young during World War II. But when you were living in England during World War II and you were the only thing between the Nazis taking over Europe and having a good shot at taking out Russia, they saw a lot of fucked up shit and it definitely affected their lives. As their child, it affected mine as well. So I was always fascinated with why my parents were sucked into this hideous thing. Over the years it was something I was always studying. So when I came up with the idea to write the book, it was a really good opportunity for me to purge out a lot of this useless knowledge that I had in a creative way.
Yeah. That was obviously a lot of the inspiration for the story itself, but how did you come up with the character and concept of the Whargoul creature?
I’ve always been a fan of fantasy stuff like Conan, the Elric and, of course, The Lord of the Rings. As I got older, I just devoured all that stuff – Roger Zelazny, Michael Moorcock, the more classic horror of H.P. Lovecraft. But one of the authors that really got me settled on this character was a guy named Barry Sadler who wrote a series of books about a character named Casca, who was the eternal warrior. He’s basically the Roman soldier that stabbed Christ with the spear to see if he was dead or not. So the books are about this guy, who is cursed forever and can never be killed. He has to fight in wars forever and the books are him appearing in war after war throughout eternity.
I was inspired by that kind of character and just mushed together a lot of different elements with the eternal warrior thing from the Casca books, as well as Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion, or even a movie like the Highlander. I wanted to have the completely sick eldritch horror of H.P. Lovecraft, but I wanted to have the goofy irreverence of something like Evil Dead 2. I guess Gwar was a big influence as well, especially the way the Oderus character had evolved over the years. I just wanted to take elements of all these different things I was interested in and come up with a cool character I could write about.
He came to be in our song off of Ragnarök. Whargoul’s first existence was in that song and I started writing the book shortly after that. I really didn’t know what the character was going to be or how he was going to turn out. I knew I didn’t want him to be a one-dimensionally evil creature. I wanted him to have a humanity to him and make that the conflict in the book. Once I had established those ground rules, the character kind of suggested itself. I had the whole chronology of his travels in my mind and it was just up to me how I wanted to present it.
The Whargoul character takes on many different forms throughout the book. Were there particular incarnations of the character that you enjoyed writing more than others?
I thought I would really like his time fighting with the German army the most, just because there’s a classic villain, they had the coolest tanks, the most wicked uniforms and the SS was probably the most evil, fucked-up military organization in history. I thought I would really enjoy that, and I did, but I actually ended up digging other aspects of his personality even more. I liked the way that his contemporary physicality was a big black dude living in a ruined urban kind of landscape because it had a real connection to what’s actually going on.
Most of this book was written pre-9/11, and it reflects that. It certainly is dated, but people seem to have forgiven that. I finished the book right before 2001 and it’s really funny that the apocalyptic act that kind of climaxes the book occurs in New York City. In a weird way, it kind of presaged a lot of this century’s carnage and I wanted the Whargoul to be like the first major new monster of the 21st century. Boy, the 21st century sure started with a bigger bang than anybody would have predicted in their most fucked-up nightmares.
I also really enjoyed the challenge of writing him when he was a female. There’s one scene where after he’s tortured to death by the Mossad agents and blown up along with his hooker girlfriend, he has to basically use her body to repair himself. He comes out this weird half man/half woman wolf-like creature. So that was different and really fun, especially when he became a member of the Iraqi army. Here you have this Whargoul thing that looks like a woman, but is trying to dress up like a man so he can be in the army, and he’s having sex with his subordinates and going to meet Saddam. As I writer it was so much fun to take that character to places like Saddam’s secret bunker or the weird tomb he went to go smoke hash in.
Each Gwar tour is like a new chapter in the Gwar mythos. What’s the latest chapter with this tour?
Oderus Urungus
It is the Return of the World Maggot Tour. If we’re going to call it the Return of the World Maggot, I really hope he actually does. I’m sure he will. As many of our fans will remember, the World Maggot was the focus of our Skulhedface movie, where we were trying to wake the World Maggot up with a glut of souls and he left the planet without taking Gwar with him. I guess there were two World Maggots and we’re going to see the hideous creature onstage every night and will be feeding as many hot chicks to it as possible. And we’ll have our usual collection of cybernetic assholes, violent large rubber monsters and, of course, a few celebrity victims to whom Gwar dispenses the rough justice that we are known and loved for. I’m pretty sure Casey Anthony will be there, not so sure if her dead kid will be. If something can be done in poor taste, but at the same time equally hilarious, I like to think that we’ll be the first to do it.
Do you think the Whargoul is a character Gwar might ever encounter in song or on stage?
I would love to do a Whargoul character and have him be in a Gwar song or do battle with him. The only thing that’s ever held me back from doing it is we’re traditionally terrible with pyrotechnics and it would be very important for the Whargoul to have a gun that fucking just blasts full auto a lot. We haven’t really incorporated him into the Gwar live universe yet, and certainly Whargoul hasn’t met Gwar yet, but in the crazy mythos that we’ve created, yeah, it’s very conceivable that such a thing could happen. And it could be really fucking super cool.
For more information, go to www.gwar.net or www.eraserheadpress.
