[1][2] Will Henry, the pen name of liquor store co-owner William Henry Wilson, previously drew a strip called Dormmates for the Connecticut Daily Campus, the daily student newspaper at the University of Connecticut.
After graduation he created the comic strip Ordinary Bill, which depicted a beach bum cartoonist and ran in his hometown newspaper The Jamestown Press, but found the subject matter too limiting.
[1][3] Wallace the Brave is elaborated from sketches of a child Henry began to make after working on Ordinary Bill.
He has claimed both Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes and Richard Thompson's Cul de Sac as influences on the strip's style.
[4] The fictional setting of Snug Harbor incorporates elements of Henry's hometown of Jamestown, Rhode Island.