Big Bad Wolf

Bilious Bartholomew Wildehund, better known as the Big Bad Wolf, was a childhood friend of Frieda Jacobs. Later, after a serious of unfortunate events, he was pressed into the service of the young woman’s chief nemesis: the Wizard of Oz.

Appearance & Personality

Billy, as his friends called him, was a gentle giant at heart. The traits of his public persona—ferocious, bloodthirsty, and cruel—were adopted out of the sadness and resignation that the wolf felt when he heard exaggerated stories of his exploits. If the people were going to fear him anyway, then he decided to play the role they’d thrust upon him. Better that, he figured, than to have his heart broken again by someone he’d come to love.

The wolf stood 8' 11" tall when fully grown and weighed 864 pounds. The shape of his head, his ears, and his feet were decidedly wolflike, but the rest of him was the shape of a man. An extraordinarily muscled and long-limbed man—and hairy, too!—but a man just the same.

Supernatural Abilities

Billy possessed the ability to expel air from his mouth at such speed and with such force that he could blow down houses built without proper reinforcement. The wolf also had a stomach like a pocket dimension—like literally like a pocket dimension. When he swallowed someone or something whole, he could choose to send them through his traditional digestive system or else keep it/them prisoner in the confines of a stomach that was definitely “bigger on the inside.”

Biography

Warning: Here there be spoilers!

Early Life

Bilious Bartholomew Wildehund was born in the Forest of Fangs in 243, the runt of a litter of seven, and he was different from the start. The descendent of wolves who had been part of the same Reekian experiments which created Albus Lepus and the crocodilian Sobek, Billy was the only member of his litter—and the only wolf so far, in the decades since the experiment—who developed the humanlike traits the Reekian scientists had been seeking to splice into their test subjects.

Fearing the way that Billy spoke, the way he sounded more man than wolf, his parents cast him out of the pack. Lost in the woods, with a sense of smell that wasn’t quite as keen as that of his forebears, Billy wandered without purpose or plan until he came upon a cottage which belonged to Charlotte Goose—the grandmother of the aforementioned Frieda Jacobs.

Billy was a sad sight to see, as sad as he was strange, and Granny Goose saw that she had no choice but to take the pup in. The next time her granddaughter came round to visit, Granny introduced the two. And then, for years afterward, they were fast friends. Frieda and Billy became the leaders of a neighborhood gang of misfit children, woodland animals, and adorable weirdos.

After the Betrayal

As Billy reached the age of maturity, however, many of his more wolflike instincts began to take hold of him. And after one particularly violent incident—an accident in Billy’s opinion, but something more in Granny’s eyes—Billy was cast out once more.

For years, he wandered the Forest of Fangs in search of his parents or his siblings. But for years, he never saw another wolf amongst the trees. They knew the smell of him, he decided. And they all stayed away on purpose.

Eventually, he made his home in a den not far from the border with the land of Oz and took to feeding on the livestock of the farmers near the village of Yonder. It was here that he finally met his match in a trio of porcine brothers who it turned out were descendants of the same experiments which had caused his own differences. When he realized he could not best them, that they were three very clever pigs, he thought for a moment to befriend them. They seemed willing and said they knew lots of other folks like him and like them. But in the end, Billy refused. He decided he couldn’t handle another abandonment, an abandonment he knew would come sooner or later.

The Wizard’s Pet

After a bit too much poaching on the Ozite side of the border, Billy was captured by Baccata the Blasphemer—The Witch of the East—and brought before the Wizard of Oz. The Wizard, seeing an opportunity to manipulate Billy’s anger and abandonment issues for his own nefarious purposes, placed the Big Bad Wolf in the custody of Glinda the Good. Glinda would keep the wolf safe and warm and fed, the Wizard said. And then, when the time came, he would be called upon to repay these favors.

The time came in the year 263, when the Wizard sent Billy after his old friends Granny and Frieda—all in an attempt to upend the Wonderlandian unification movement before it could properly begin. And the rest of that story can be found in The Blood of Seven Queens.