Shelly Wahnee on her motorcycle
Shelly Wahnee is one of the most commonly appearing characters in Wapsi Square. She's the best friend of Monica, and a car mechanic with muscles like a dock crane. Kachina doll keeper, and the owner of a magical silver hammer courtesy of Phix. Proud of her Comanche heritage, but was unaware of her relationship to Phix until recently.
Although it doesn't come up often, Shelly is an accomplished musician. She was the bassist for the band Fermented Banana[1] and installed the sound system at Punk Yoga[2]. Interestingly, it's Monica, not Shelly, who is the audiophile of the group.
As a teenager Shelly took a vision quest into the forest, led on by "Coyote" - Nudge - where Jin (in her rabbit form as Tochtli the moon-faced rabbit) found her suffering from exposure and nearly frozen. It only turned out much later that this happened the same day as Monica's traffic accident. She met Monica through Jacqui years later; the two of them didn't exactly get off to the greatest of starts but are now close friends. Apparently, in some previous iterations of the calendar machine's cycle, she and Jin were good friends; this may be the reason why Jin "hid" the tapestry design as a full-body tattoo on Shelly. The tattoo then disappeared at the end of the Calendar Machine arc, causing some awkwardness.
Her romantic life has been getting better. She was good friends with Owen since they were in grade school; at one time or another there was unresolved sexual interest on both sides but they never quite hooked up. For a time things started getting complicated with Heather. She's currently seeing a Minneapolis police officer named Justin[3]. (Bud also met Justin on her own[4], leading to some interesting explanations later.)
Shelly has her own demon[5], sometimes known as The Companion[6] (or 'the creepy girl'), not as specialized as Monica's entourage, as a side effect of her vision quest experiences; this is an anomaly still being explored. She spent quite a lot of subjective duration in the Time Forest, although it was only an eye-blink for those watching; there she discovered she was a sphinx, a quality which runs in her family. She's talking with Phix about this. Her mother is still a sensitive subject for both of them. Shelly's grandmother is Bia, a titan.
Her first appearance was in the third strip[7], which appeared on September 11th, 2001. Shelly is the third sculpture for sale at the Patch Together website. She is a primary cast member[8].