If You’re Lucky, You’re a Furry in 2K16

Posted on July 18, 2016 by mouse

Colin Spacetwinks is a furry writer and loquacious fan of comic books. Last May, they released an impressive history of the furry fandom using the medium of Twine, an innovative tool for stories and games which allows for endlessly branching narrative strands. Everyone’s A Furry 2K16 not only documents the wildfire-like emergence of funny animal-identified folks since the advent of the internet, but also details a very personal history of utilizing online communities as a space for queer exploration and self-reflection when other options are scarce. Colin and I have had similar experiences growing up with furry, so I asked them to chat about the project and to dish about this and that. This interview has been edited for clarity.

Mouse: Everyone’s A Furry 2K16 is a history of what we call the modern furry community through your own experience utilizing Twine as a storytelling medium. What drew you to use the Twine in particular, taking on this project?

Colin Space Twinks: It was actually sort of strange, because although I talked on and off about furry history all the time – on twitter, on tumblr, wherever – what really motivated it was actually someone asking me about it instead of me going off, apropos of nothing. I got interviewed to talk about some of the economics of the furry art market, and why so many artists seemed to find it easier to generate income and reliable funds, with less hassle from clients, in the commission market there. Once that interview ended, my mind got to thinking about how “Jeez, all the pieces on furry culture and history always tend to come from people on the outside looking in” and how I was kind of tired of that, and how the history of furry itself was actually very poorly documented, scattered about here and there. Add in a bunch of other fascinations, gripes, things on my mind, and suddenly, one afternoon, I research and write this entire piece. I wanted to get something down and out there before other outlets started to really make their own pieces on furry as it was starting to mainstream. Something coming from the inside, and more accurate, as well as featuring personal, more anecdotal pieces that wouldn’t be part of those things. You wouldn’t get “here’s how queer people have connected deeply with furry for years now” in like, say, a Salon piece going “Seriously, what’s up with furries?” for example.

M: Absolutely not. Half my writing on the Hooded Utilitarian is griping about lazy journalism about furries. You do a little digging into furry origins in comics and Science Fiction fandoms, which you might be into if you know to dig into Fred Patten’s archiving but not from outside sources. That early material is fascinating to me, because once furry became a discreet identity, there suddenly was a sharp divide between which comics made the cut to become just “Comics” like Usagi Yojimbo, which debuted in the furry zine Albedo Anthropomorphics and is now a widely respected title, and those which were relegated to this separate lower-grade “furry” status. Omaha the Cat Dancer is important to both, and paradoxically, the series has fallen through the cracks.

ST: You see this especially in the late 90s debates between slices of furry fandom, and later in the early 00s in the ridiculous net war stuff – also pieces of furry history that’d fall through the cracks elsewhere – this desperation into separating things that were “furry,” (bad) or “not furry,” (good), often using the short hand of “anthro” to imply that this wasn’t ‘furry’ – it was good and mature and other people liked it, so it couldn’t possibly be it. You still see it come up sometimes, like when people are talking about Lackadaisy, or other furry media they like, this want to push away from this kind of definition that they despise, or are ashamed of for whatever mix of reasons. This was why I brought up Carl Barks’ and Osamu Tezuka’s material right from the start, because they wouldn’t be classified as ‘furry’ at all by most, yet they absolutely put out erotically charged furry material, relegating them to the bin everything else would get discarded in. Can’t play ‘no, it’s better than that’ when it’s right out there.

M: And independent comics owe a concrete debt to Omaha, in the formation of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. But I often find that title conspicuously omitted from the roster of legal victories for comics.

ST: Absolutely. It’s hard to know if it’s intentional, or if Omaha has just been passively forgotten, year by year, despite receiving praise from comics giants at the time, before “furry” was a particularly codified thing. It absolutely hasn’t gotten the kind of canonization a lot of other indie material from the era did.

M: Kim Thompson of Fantagraphics was a champion for interesting funny animal comics. His passing was a blow to American comics in general, but I think in particular to the work of preserving the legacy of work that appeared in anthologies he edited, like Critters. But there’s at some point a cultural split, and you’ve astutely pointed out that it probably has a lot to do with the emergence of the Internet. (Ed. Note, Mouse has worked as an editorial intern for Fantagraphics. Kim Thompson was very kind to her).

ST: Yeah. It’s a really interesting thing, because it doesn’t happen ’till the late 90s and early 00s – and in the early to mid 90s, furry comics are getting printed like wildfire, because the speculator market was ridiculous and everybody was grabbing a slice before it popped. At a time when furry material by furries had some of its greatest mainstream exposure, it wasn’t considered as such – not just yet. It’d take until more people had a net hookup for it to happen. So it’s this strange thing to see, as furry comics retreated back into the domain of the internet, that was when people started picking at stuff from the outside (or, often, from insiders hiding on the outside, for whatever reasons). Cruising through tons of 90s publishers, you can find these old, uncollected furry comics that would’ve been available nationwide, and nobody said a peep. And again, not to mention how Lola Bunny in 1996 blew so far outside of the confines of ‘furry’ that people who know nothing about this whole subculture and the clashes and everything. That she exists in some whole other world.

M: You talk about how there are a few acceptable furry characters, Lola, Gadget Hackwrench, Minerva Mink, who exist in this de-pressurized environment where they are safe to be considered as (presumably cis male) objects of desire, while furry on the Internet kept getting weirder and queerer.

ST: Yeah. That was a crucial point for me, because at the time, when everybody was responding to the 00s stuff, that was when the invention of the ridiculous term ‘fursecution’ came up. Initially, people really thought it was furry specifically that people were hassling and hating… but if you checked all these other forums and websites, what they discussed, and who were “acceptable” furries… in retrospect, it became very clear that bashing furry was mostly being used as a shield to oblique hating queer folks online. Gays, lesbians, bisexuals, trans people, any variety of queer folk. The bad writing of things like Jack and Better Days got their share of slams, but the absolute widest amount of damn near cyber-stalking and harassment was pretty much universally directed at queer folks in the furry community. Because if people were perfectly fine discussing how much they wanted to have sex with these furry women but were constantly picking on gay furries – no matter how serious or ridiculous they may have portrayed themselves, and extra hate for the flamboyant – well, it established a pattern.

M: There’s absolutely resistance, from outside of and also from within the community, to the idea that furry is a vector for queerness, weird sexuality, any kind of unorthodox gender expression, when it clearly is for many, many, many people.

ST: Right. It was a place for a lot of folk who couldn’t find themselves elsewhere offline, didn’t feel comfortable in the spaces they did find. Whatever the case, a lot of people came crawling into furry, finding a place to explore sexuality, gender, in a way the felt… less stressful, I suppose? I think of particular old Furcadia rooms where people were definitely working around and through gender, but somewhat clumsily, lacking the terms or spaces we’d have now. But it was important to have something, somewhere.

M: Like a decades-long therapy session running silently in the background, where you might internalize that you are Mrs. Frisby and Justin the rat is your boyfriend. Or maybe that’s just me. I’m joking (I’m Not). But speaking personally, my furryness is absolutely inextricable from my being a big gay gender weirdo.

ST: Hahaha, we all find ourselves in different ways. Books and movies keep selling this grand, deeply dramatic transformation, but an astounding amount of us, especially in the modern age, work out our sexuality and gender in weird online spaces. We don’t have the big slow-mo zoom-in moment where we go “And then I knew” over appropriately dramatic and meaningful material. A lot of us get there in ways that certainly wouldn’t be your award bait for just sounding too goofy, too ridiculous. People want your sexuality, your gender exploration to be this Serious Affair, and it absolutely can be in these spaces, but people don’t wanna admit that people do an awful lot of processing in these spaces.

M: Sometimes your “eureka” moment, if you have one, is looking at a pink husky’s butthole on the adult section of Furbuy.

ST: Hahaha, yeah, pretty much! So the whole history of furry, in comics, zines, and everything, is wrapped up in a whole bind of sexuality, especially moving out from the 90s and into the 00s, with a lot of furry webcomics in particularly delving into homosexuality and gender exploration.

M: Going to college to be gay was, and is, a THING in furry comics.

ST: Absolutely! Oh god, it was massive!

M: It gets a lot of teasing but I love it. I love Associated Student Bodies. A good friend just sent me some issues of Circles in the mail. I read the Class Menagerie as a kiddo. They’re clumsy and arguably amateur if you choose to think about it that way, but they speak from a place of real earnest gay longing that, as you’ve mentioned, mainstream comics publishers are absolutely inept at capturing.

ST: Exactly! They’re clumsy, yes, but like, they feel more real for it. We didn’t have the poetic words, the glorious prose, the Serious Stories, so we just worked ourselves out online in these webcomics and written serials that were very sincere, very honest ways of working through ourselves. Like, 1998, 199, it’s… 4 years till MA legalizes gay marriage? It’s not even thought of as a possibility at the time, and we find ourselves craving these places to be open and safe with our sexuality and gender thoughts, but also wanting to talk about the struggles we feel too… So we end up with a lot of “gay at college” comics, tackling both of these – where we can be very very queer and simultaneously mention “Hey, shit SUCKS for us,” inventing a space for ourselves in our fiction we don’t find IRL.

M: Associated Student Bodies, I think has a feeling of, hm… “This comic is about cartoon lions and wolves, so maybe this is a world where condoms aren’t necessary.” Circles on the other hand is very candid about its characters living with HIV/AIDS. They’re maybe not mutually exclusive approaches to processing things.

ST: It’s just processing, non-stop, basically, and everyone having room to do that in their own unique way, while creating a community. Not to mention, furry gave an alternative if you didn’t like or feel comfortable with what queer mainstream gave you, if you had spaces or access to it in the first place.

M: AYEP.

ST: There’s all this very corny art of stuff like watercolors of gay coyotes looking up at the stars you can find in VCL artists from the time – and it was so different than what a lot of mainstream gay material sold you then. This sort of sweet, romantic sensibility, and yes, very, very corny. But we wanted corny! Not to mention, the freedom of having all sorts of different kinds of bodies. If we think modern gay mags and the like are bad at offering body variety… hooh, the 90s. So we latch onto this world of modern or fantasy set walking, talking animal people having these dramatic and clumsily written gay romances and It means the world to us, because so much of it is us, and so often, made by us. Inventing what you don’t have. You can find it in the print material, but especially in the webcomics.

M: Definitely.

ST: Even back then, webcomics were so big you couldn’t possibly read them all – and there were so many in the furry field, just… processing! But all people want to latch onto is the “legitimate” stuff, so Blacksad keeps coming up on the “good” furry content lists, and the like, and, notably Blacksad runs into the same heterosexual stuff – making the women less furry, more ‘acceptably’ sexy. If the artist considered Blacksad sexy, he’d be drawn with just cat ears and a weird nose for animalistic features.

M: I’ve had my words with Blacksad.

ST: Haven’t we all!

M: I can always spot a furry in comics if they draw furries well. That’s a little obtuse, maybe, but hoo-boy, there are some gruesome drawings of Rocket Raccoon out there.

ST: Hahaha, it’s like I’ve said elsewhere, drawing animals and animal people have dropped out of superhero artist fundamentals, for want of just imitating Jim Lee. But now we end up in a weird point in 2016, where after all this, after all those inner and outer and inner-outer debates and wars… less and less people care about the old stigma of furry. It’s a weird place to be!

M: We have Zootopia. I’ll call it out as furry (those are some well-cartooned animal peoples), plenty of others are at liberty to not do so for their own comfort. But we’re getting around to your thesis. Everyone’s a furry. Or from its evolution from mainstream funny animal cartoons to a specific subculture to big business again, there’s something special about cartoon animals.

ST: Yeah. After all this, all that hemming and hawing, people making ‘exceptions’ for certain furries, just time passing made a lot of the old rules about what was acceptably furry and not just started to drop. Like, Disney puts out a movie with a furry nudist colony featuring a panther luxuriously licking at his leg and buff tigers in sparkle short shorts dancing all around. And people are just… going with it. Drawing their own fursonas or furry comics without having to go “it’s ANTHRO” or all of that. So now people are re-embracing it, whether or not they know any of the history behind how we got there in the first place.

M: So much of it gets lost, in dead links or in the hearts of people who for whatever reason no longer want to be part of the fandom, or in new folks swept up in just the tidal magnitude of new material being produced all the time. Burned furs ghost and resurface as porn publishers, or folks need to dip out to avoid the constant teasing or harassment, or maybe they’ve gotten through their processing and are at the time in their life when furry isn’t necessary for working their stuff out.

ST: It’s a lot. I chat regularly with a former Burned Fur, who read the twine and like we went back and forth about the history there. I did some old net spelunking and tracing the other day, found one artist who quit furry in about ’99, ’00, and now just recently has a furry body pillow up for sale. Some people have quit permanently and are never coming back, some are returning in quiet waves. Some never left, and chugged on quietly – Terrie Smith, iconic 90s furry artist, never stopped, and even has Havoc Inc as a webcomic that’s been stuck on a cliffhanger since 2013, I think. People worry about mainstreaming and furry not ‘being cool’ or some exclusive club, but like, fuck that, for all the obvious reasons.

M: I love Terrie Smith.

ST: She’s fantastic! Really molded and influenced so much of the 90s furry style – watercolors and markers, really vivid.

M: And Havoc, Inc. was about a gay relationship that Marvel and DC wouldn’t touch.

ST: And still are awfully skittish about, when they feel confident enough to try at all.

M: And if you’re on the net, you get to see the dirty stuff, how Ches and Deck are definitely polyamorous. Things about those characters that weren’t exactly printable, even in the boom of black-and-white comics.

ST: Yeah. Like, you can find het couples being sexy and sexual, especially in 80s superhero stuff, like Green Arrow and Black Canary – but get to gay, and it’s almost always happening off panel, if it happens at all. Lots of very chaste, very adorable gay boys, who barely so much as kiss. Steve Orlando, thank god, broke this pattern in the biggest ways with Midnighter.

M: Growing up on furry comics, seeing something from marvel like “Oh, Doctor Strange is gay now and also dead” just doesn’t impress me.

ST: Ahaha, it’s also rough times, because any gay character you get in superhero comics now can’t possibly last, especially as a solo – they don’t have time to develop, they can’t get a supporting cast, they can’t be themselves, they can’t have a full story. The print market doesn’t have the economic security it used to, so constant reboots and events happen, and when publishers do take a whack at something different, everyone knows they’re running on a very tight clock. So if you want to get the real stuff, the space to really deal with these things, you get online. Back then, and now. A lot of queer characters, especially at Marvel now, end up on team books, where their only other queer interaction is with their designated romance, if they get one at all. There’s no queer life – there’s very limited slots for interaction, and their almost never the lead character. And again, they’re on a ticking clock, and if they’re in a teambook, they surrounded pretty much entirely by straight people… So it’s bread crumbs. Well meant breadcrumbs, but bread crumbs. In comparison, the sincere clumsiness of a 1998 “gay at college” furry webcomic is a fucking feast.

M: And the state of furry now is… implicitly queer. Or is it? To be honest, I don’t follow along with too much straight furry culture these days.

ST: THIS is where mainstreaming gets weird. I don’t worry about furry ‘not being cool’, I worry about queer furries getting pushed out, and the worst aspects of furry communities – homophobia, transphobia, racism, et all – getting amplified. And lacking a clear history, one of the things I wanted to try and rectify, it’s very easy for one to come in and claim “oh, yeah, it’s always been very straight here in furry”. Which isn’t helped by outside “legitimate” pieces on furry culture either intentionally or unintentionally always focusing on het stuff. So I don’t know if it’s implicitly queer right now! It absolutely was when so much of the net was hell bent on hating furry, but right now? It’s in flux. People have to sort of assert and be loud about the queerness of furry space and not let people revise history or push queer folks out to make it ‘acceptable’ and very very straight.

Cover by Chris Goodwin

M: So to me it’s absolutely necessary for pieces like Everyone’s A Furry 2K16 to be out there to document our history in an environment when lazy journalists invent things about us out of whole cloth, or can’t even report on violent attacks on us without breaking out into laughter. To present a personal history, which fills in so many gaps in between bullet points.

ST: Yeah. It meant a lot to me when I started getting responses from people who have been in furry since the 70s, 80s, thanking me for writing a piece like this, capturing stuff people either don’t see or intentionally ignore. So while furry’s starting to “legitimize”, I don’t want that legitimization to come with the cost of draining furry out of all its queerness, its safe spaces for queerness – which its already lost some, to either tech obsolescence or just getting pushed out – and amplifying all the worst aspects we have, just like any subculture has. It does make me feel better that a lot of the old guard, the really shitty ones, don’t have the pull they used to. People don’t like what they’re selling, or aren’t paying attention to them in the first place.

M: It’s not a monoculture or really even a “fandom.” I’ve had the great fortune of finding my friend group, and hey, my spouse(!) through furry. I can insulate myself from the heinous behavior that does go on, like it does in any social group. But I agree, we need to speak up for ourselves, for or reasons for being here.

ST: Yeah, it’s definitely different than things like anime fandoms or the like, because there’s no central… professionally produced piece we circle around. We make our own things, we have dozens upon dozens of subgroups. All that’s really similar is an enthusiasm for talking animal people. Not even everybody in furry has their own fursona, it’s a really wide variety of interests in this one thing. So yeah. One of the things I’m trying to do with and after Eveyone’s A Furry 2K16 is get that history in. I’m trying to push myself to start getting some of those 90 print comics and zines, sort of assemble a library and timeline of all this stuff that has become forgotten… because who would’ve ever thought it’d be important? And maybe, hopefully, get Omaha The Cat dancer some of the recognition it lost back.

M: GODSPEED!

Zootopia, the Only Good Cop is a Judy Hopps

Posted on March 7, 2016 by mouse

Based on the leaded trailers and, let’s face it, troubling buddy-cop framing, I expected to bitterly groan my way trough Zootopia, Disney’s new CGI bauble which is on its way to box office records for the studio in its opening weekend. For me, the glaring sting in this movie purported to teach kids about racial bias and the idea that anyone can be whatever you want to be (a novel concept for a Disney film!) is that a picked-on girl’s greatest dream is to be a police officer. In the lead-up to the film’s release, I’ve brooded over a melange of discomfort and disgust at a theme so poorly timed when more and more attention is being paid to the tensions between minority communities and law enforcement. I feel like Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark. “Cops… Why’d it have to be cops?” It’s the Achilles’ heel to a film I largely found delightful. However, in those moments of doubt, I had of course set aside the fact that a) I am a furry pervert. b) this movie stars a plucky bunny lady. c) BUNNY. BUNNY BUNNY BUNNY.

I’ve written before about how using furries as an analog for racial strife can be a very bad idea, specifically dealing with the disaster that is Blacksad: Arctic Nation. (TW: cartoon depictions of racist violence/lynching) It can be just too crude a cudgel with which to bash your message into the lobes of your intended audience, and animal stand-ins often substitute for racist caricatures in an ostensibly anti-racist work. The dynamic between the lead characters, and the sociology of a furry metropolis could have fit into many kinds of stories. Instead we have a message that tensions in a multicultural society are solved by policing. That by the end of con-man Nick’s (Jason Bateman) arc is that he joins the civic-minded, selfless Judy on the force, as that is the natural end-point of those good personality traits. I’m sorely disappointed with that particular angle. I agree largely with furries like twitter friend Eva Problem s whose critiques the movie on the grounds that the political element can’t be decontextualized provide some much-needed clarity.

The social organization of the furry universe of Zootopia serves individual character interactions with less clumsiness than the broad “message” of the film. The film actually benefits from a lack of commitment to a coherent racial analogy like the depiction of white fur in Arctic Nation that mimics whiteness as a social construct. The hazy coexistence of predator/prey gives us an environment where contradictory characters can experience marginalization and empowerment in a variety of contexts. The tension between predator and prey abruptly upends itself three-quarters way through the movie, where the point of view switches somewhat from Judy’s to Nick’s and we are given new perspectives from which the characters can feel discounted, othered and feared. It’s bewilderingly self-aware and at the same time is so not. For instance the police department that Judy is assigned to is largely staffed by predator species. This makes sense in the first act when they bully and discount Judy’s ability, but doesn’t carry over to the 2nd when predators are the targets of fear and suspicion. The take-away of the film is clearly meant to instill empathy, compassion, anti-racism and multiculturalism in its intended audience of young viewers. The real concern regarding a critical reading of Zootopia’s themes is whether this movie will inspire more curiosity in young folks about bias, bigotry and corruption or pacify that curiosity instead in a pat, simplified entertainment product that upholds the status quo.

In Zootopia, Judy Hopps is our hero, voiced by Jennifer Goodwin. Judy is a punk and Judy is a runt. A child in a litter of two hundred or so kittens of content Rabbit carrot farmers in a rural community, she is driven to be extraordinary, to explore and to serve the greater good. That her vision of service involves the career of law enforcement… well I’ve already registered my reservations. Judy is personally ambitious and driven to protect others, except maybe when made to doubt her competence as an authority figure. Her chief, the hulking Cape Buffalo (Idris Elba), accepts her assignment as a publicity measure but was never interested in employing his city’s “first rabbit officer.” He wants Judy out of there as soon as the good press blows over, assigning her to parking duty in an attempt to humiliate her off the force. Stung, Judy sticks it to the chief by being the best meter maid she can be, employing a predatory practice that often disproportionately affects the poor. She knows how to stick up for herself when a (juuuuuuust right) sized citizen wants to pick on her (which is all the time) and also misjudges the good nature of bigger people who accept her presence as a matter of political convenience rather than actual tolerance. She busted her ass to ace exams she was disadvantaged for only to matriculate into a police department made up of brutes and bruisers who, predator and prey, male and female, are evaluated on a scale of physical characteristics that only acknowledge the big and physically imposing. She battles against the idea that bunnies are too meek for serious work, that gentle-hearted people are too feeble for serious service. It’s clear she’s every bit as capable at her job as much for her wits, tenacity and compassion as any big bad wolf.

She takes an opportunity to butt her way into a real case when over a dozen citizens, all predators, go missing. What’s more, they’ve all been struck by a rapid degenerative position that renders them violent and in basically a “feral” state. After being burned by him, she conscripts the petty grifter Nick Wilde, a sly-but-not-as-sly-as-he-thinks-he-is fox into her scheme to keep her job by him helping out in the missing-person investigation. Nick takes every opportunity to gleefully undermine her ecumenical dream of moving to the big city and changing the world, so Judy blackmails him into helping her, in part because she needs his streetwise knowledge of her new city, and also to test her insecurities. She wants to battle the social prejudices that belittle her, but can she overcome deep-seated ones of her own about foxes? Her moment of clarity was after being violently bullied by a fox as a child who told her, dumb bunnies can’t amount to anything. Hopps’ overcautious Midwestern parents reinforce this. So Judy goes for broke and moves to to a miserable little boarding house in the big city, not necessarily to spite them, but to prove them all wrong in any case.

Nick is Judy’s natural foil, a totally self-interested, cynical crook whose dreams got crushed early by his childhood tormentors (all herbivores), replayed in a devastating flashback (good thing I saw it at a nearly empty matinee, as a lone adult crying seated next to a strangers’ kids is not a great look). He nags her with poisonous barbs because, well naturally he doesn’t like cops, and her cloying earnestness eats away at something inside of him. They share a back-and-forth that reads like the first act of a horseshit romantic comedy, bitterness and acrimony as a silty overcoat to a significant bond. The value that comes out in the wash though, is the damage, and the shared desire to heal that damage that brings them together, and breaks them apart, and brings them together again. The emotional core of this movie, the reason that it works, is these two people who are so fundamentally opposed in every way who grow to depend and care for each other. Maybe you could read their relationship as a romantic one, but it’s not necessary for appreciating the bond they share. It’s a buddy cop movie, and Nick and Judy are magnetic buddies.

The Zootopia-inspired site banner for Furaffinity, the internet’s largest furry social media/art gallery site. By Korichi.

So again, the race allegory keeps weaving itself through every relationship, interpersonal and social. Judy is transferred to the heart of the city by calculating bureaucrats seeking to appeal to a %90 herbivorous population who nevertheless entrust their policing to a minority of mostly predator species. The predators are the natural leaders and protectors, and yet feared and ultimately despised and marginalized for their supposedly “biological” predilections toward violence. The mayor is the lion and his deputy, the lamb (well, sheep). Judy in the world of Zootopia occupies at the same time the position of being victim and victimizer. She’s someone counted out by her native community and her chosen community. But Judy finds herself wielding tremendous social power against a populace that is seen as highly influential and yet looked upon with suspicion. Criminality is shown as a trait of in predatory species, just as as political corruption is in prey species that secretly manipulate the supposedly homogeneous society of Zootopia. The explicitly stated point is that forming a multicultural society is messy, and yet each individual is responsible for dealing with their own ingrained biases when interacting with people with a (naturally) different perspective. Judy and Nick are not fast friends. But they share a common experience in being singled out. There are large herbivores on the police force, but there’s never been a BUNNY cop. Carnivores are largely integrated into society, but everyone agrees you can’t trust those nasty FOXES.

Hi Daddy

There has been non-stop chatter in the community in the lead-up to this weekend about the extent to which Zootopia is a “Furry” movie. How many of us walked among the aminators, directors and writers who brought us this fantasy. Would Zootopia, like its antecedent, Disney’s Robin Hood be a secret key to the hearts of people who pretend to be cartoon animals in order to really feel human? Young folks love cartoon animals, sure, but will this film mark another Cambrian explosion of lifers like well, me? Supposedly, the image Byron Howard, Zootia’s director along with Rich Moore, used to pitch the concept of a return to funny animal movies to executive producer John Lasseter was of Disney’s foxy loxy Robin Hood reclining in a wicker basket. The not-insignificant marketing campaign behind the movie might have included a branch directly reaching out to furries. I’ve noticed a rush to claim ownership over a well-anticipated property. I share in a relief at its positive response that wouldn’t have necessarily happened maybe just five years ago. Nowadays who even are you if you don’t have a fursona?

I’m somewhat of a camp that understands Furry culture as inextricable from sexuality. So I’m hesitant to speculate on the upcoming generation of furries who have a right to figure their own shit out in their own time. Furries have already proliferated a king-of-the-jungle’s ransom of Zootopia inspired fan porn (sometimes obnoxiously using official hashtags. I do wish people would cut that gunk out.) If you know where to look, it’s unavoidable that Zootopia is a fueled in part by the horny of furry animators and storytellers from roughly my generation. There’s the scene where Judy, though small in stature compared to many creatures, got to be a relative giantess, stomping around the neighborhood populated by tiny mice and shrews. While not an exclusive attribute, the Macro/Micro fetish focusing on extreme size difference is a conspicuous facet of furry culture. It’s a spectacularly composed chase scene for those not in the know, and a pretty big “OOOOOOH” moment for the kink-literate. During the climax, Nick (with negotiated consent) “went feral” and play acted a scene that culminating in him sensually biting Judy’s neck. This doesn’t necessarily subvert my non-rom-com interpretation of the leads’ relationship, I’m of the school of friends boning down sans-strings being a thing that can happen. But in any case, this is a crucial, fraught, terrifying intimate moment. And Nick’s definitely a type of guy who’s down to get pegged. Oh. By the way. Did you notice, watching the end credits…………… THOSE TIIIIIIIIIIIGERS? MY GOD. Zootopia highlights a lead who is not a princess, and not really romantically driven. But it’s also the horniest movie Disney has ever made. I’m talking almost Don Bluth-level barely sublimated horny.

EXCUSE ME???!

Zootopia is a PRETTY movie, no… a goregeous movie, with jaw-dropping attention to detail in background animation and dedicated research based on the real animals the cartoonized characters are based on. Every figure, major and minor, is cartooned with an exaggerated take on their native animal’s shape, weight and movement. Their responses to high-stress situations, like ducking an obstacle on the roof of an out-of-control subway car, is informed by the meticulously observed behavior of the actual animals being represented. The environments they move through, the city center or the tundra or, my lord, the jungle zone, are spectacles, lovingly rendered in frequent wide establishing shots. The fur (THE FURR) of each chraracter is so tactile, from the fluffy cheeks of a sedentary cheetah to the greasy, nappy locks of a naturist gnu (voiced by Tommy Chong!). To the art department, only love and kisses and more money for you.

Zootopia’s message is mired in role reversals, or dualistic prejudices cast into flux. The twist ending, the reveal of the mastermind behind the purposeful stoking of tensions between species is hysterical in one sense and deflating in another. There is a constant, conscious focus on hard realities in this breezy fuzzy fable for kids. People sometimes act on unexamined biases or are motivated to do terrible things by an unaddressed but real sense of grievance. Zootopia glosses over issues of police departments’ responsibilities to the communities they serve, but also highlights its main characters empathy and selflessness as her personal and professional strength. It mind-blowingly (though abstractly) references the panic about crack cocaine in urban communities in the 80s and 90s and how it was cynically used as a wedge to stoke racist paranoia. And yet the film presents a fantasy where the government parties who stoke the fires of fear and division are punished for their corruption and the victims are given treatment. The city focuses on a theraputic, non-carceral solution to the chemical that turned the unlucky predators to violence, and they return to their families.

This court has concluded that there is no statute on record that explicitly forbids parties Wilde and Hopps from kissing.

Zootopia is one hell of a slimy gumbo of contradictory messages. But I’m from Alabama, and I like gumbo. The inherent pun in the title, in the United States release at least, is that the messy, resentful furry metropolis that Judy vows to serve and protect is not anything like a Utopia. It’s multi-culture sheen is driven by barely restrained resentment and contempt. People like Judy Hopps can in good conscience think they’re doing the right thing while letting their biases stoke sub-dermal bigotry between predator and prey. And in the pursuit of her own dreams, she realizes that she’s the convenient tool of predatory bureaucrats covering their own asses until the next election cycle. In this miasma of cynicism, the corniest of Disney cliches kind of… blossom. When Judy believes in herself, and cares about others, and trusts someone who isn’t anxious to give her a reason to, she saves the day. Fatally flawed as it is, Zootopia is one paw forward into our furry future.

ALSO LOOK AT THE BUNNY.

Furries in the Now and the Future of Comics

Posted on February 17, 2016 by mouse

I was near felled by a pang of anxiety after my last column about Image’s Graham and Rios curated Island #6 went live and broadcast the nice things I felt about it. I had been thinking about my run as a furry culture columnist and decided to embark on a conscious exercise of positive reporting, because sniping at lazy culture writers was accomplishing little more than giving myself cerebral razor burn. I do actually love that cover and do not regret publicly describing it as “spectacular.” I love a furry reintroduction into mainstream comics being gay and horny, and I love the hot, bitter tears of the comixxx boys who are scandalized by it. I desperately hoped that my friends and loved ones could read between the lines of that last missive, where I was telegraphing that I did not actually love the comic between the covers. I was focusing on the positive, yes! I don’t want furry culture to disintegrate into microcosmic atomized camps, nor do I want a dossier of everything someone jerked it to in the last six months before I can regard their work, good or bad. When I said we don’t run in the same circles, I meant Onta and I have never interacted personally or online and also that the images and words he uses in his porn project attitudes about trans people that are repellent to me and we likely wouldn’t get along anyway. I think he did good work acclimating his storytelling for a mainstream audience without compromising its voice. But I also got to thinking about the furry artists whose everyday output is spectacular in its own context, even when making its den in our own online spaces, outside the vantage point of “alternative” comics. So here is a broken, incomplete, totally lost in the woods compilation of brilliant furry comics on the web that you should be reading right now. Also nominations for the Ursa Major awards are open until the end of Februrary. The nice folk at Dogpatch Press decided to encourage a nom for some of my writing on here. While the process is open, I would pass the same courtesy along to any of the authors listed below, as they’re all a reflection of anthropomorphic excellence.

(ED: As furries are a tight-nit community, many of these comics are made by people I am cordially acquainted with and some of them are close friends. Proceed with adequate caution and curiosity.)

On Yonder Lea, I’d Shelter Thee by Artdecade (author link NSFW) (content warning for child abuse) (completed)

A remarkable, meditative, self-consious turn by a world-class furry pornographer. Two lost, forgotten-about boys in 19th century Scotland seek in each other in the mouth of famine, a new life across the sea. On Yonder Lea is a devastating tale of life and love swallowed under crushing waves of systematic cruelty. Atrdecade’s milieu of dude porn has often traded in in a phantasmagoria of gay masculine desire with a knowing wink. This comic, with it’s gentle cool grey and white spectrum nuzzles the reader up to the horrors of the other side of the coin of masculine power and the tenderness subsumed under its weight. This is Artdecade’s best, most sophisticated work in the medium of comics.

Bright Night by Kiqoseven (violence) (ongoing)

Black and grey and red, Bright Night invokes the spirit of the work of contemporary supernatural/horror comics master Emily Carroll. Two friends hunt for the unknown, the unknowable, on the property of folks who struggle with the knowing. A stylish comic rooted in a sense of place, history and character, a proper haunted house story. I’m very excited to see where this one goes.

Thunderpaw: In the Ashes of Fire Mountain by Jen Lee (Epilepsy warning) (ongoing)

What seems like a post-apocalyptic adventure story is actually an intimate journey through personal trauma as two best friends have their whole world uprooted. Bruno and Ollie are raw nerves in a world of opportunistic lightning strikes and strange gnashing of teeth. Jen’s deep understanding of dog behavior informs this humane story about the anxieties that live under all of our skins. Possibly one of the best furry comics ever, Thuderpaw showcases the duel between the deepest compassion and cruelties of life under constant stress in a distinctive style that utilizes a confident color scheme and beautiful, fluid gif animation. This is a comic that lives its best life on the web.

Posibilia by Barroo (ongoing)

Posibilia engages directly with the furry internet culture, where we use the web to connect with or distance ourselves from each other under the auspices of a specific platform. This comic trains its eye on the ins and outs of furry Secondlife in the late aughts to tell a contemporary story about connection and self-definition in 2016. It’s very funny and is a fantastic meeting of experiences of being queer online and queer irl.

Night Physics by Austin Holcolmb (content warning for substance abuse) (ongoing)

What do you dream about? Austin asks this of a cast of furry strangers and himself in this handsome descent into the raw naked lizard brain. This comic reaches deep inside the grey matter to get to the animal within and the inexplicable motivations behind all our actions. The narrative floats in between on-the-spot one panel interviews with furries as they reveal their deepest secrets or offer a curt rebuff. Some people need to be known and some need to be unknowable. Night Physics is one of the prettiest, kindest, most thoughtful furry comics on the internet.

Computer Love by Ivy Jane (nudity) (ongoing)

A diverse group of immigrants and drop-outs navigate their fates in Antarctica, one of the last safe places for humans escaping a scourge of giant ratlike monsters that have ravaged the rest of civilization. Not necessarily a comic with furries, but one about furries who can explore their ideal selves in virtual reality. Even when the “civilized” world is falling down around your ears, you can define your own existence where you feel safe and can protect yourself and your friends in Ivy’s anime-inspired Antarctica. Computer Love is a story about queer people adapting, like we always have, to this or that mundane apocalypse.

Crossed Wires by I Jay (ongoing)

A free-wheeling adventure that blends a sophisticated take on post-furry transhumanism a-la Egypt Urnash with a genuine love for 90s hacker genre trash like Johnny Mnemonic. It’s another story on this list that engages with technology’s roll in how we navigate our identities and relate to each other. I Jay has a quick wit and a chunky, dynamic graphic style that propels this comic through the better parts of your brain.

Goodbye to Halos by Valerie Hallah (ongoing)

Fenic’s asshole dad seals her off in a parallel dimension where she now lives in Market Square. In her new dingy, impoverished little neighborhood far below the clouds, she learns how to chop onions and control her magic powers and flirt with the cute girls in her alien surroundings. Valerie’s smashing understanding of color and composition, along with her cute character moments really make this comic super special and a delight to read.

Boys are Slapstick by Rory Frances (content warning: BDSM) (completed)

A head-on collision between Loony Toons-style violent self-annihilation and gay ennui, this is my favorite of Rory’s work published by Aevee Bee’s great online publication ZEAL. It’s a brutal assessment of the characters we play and how we try and sometimes fail to live up to them, in queer spaces both public and private. What are your limits when your self is not tied to fragile human anatomy? Rory’s a creator who might (should) influence an entire generation of young gay furry cartoonists.

Critical Success by Roanoak (content warning: this is porn) (ongoing)

This is gorgeous furry-on-goo-creature fantasy roleplay. Cocks of varying viscosity all over the damned place. It’s the adventure zone for perverts. YOU HAVE BEEN NOTIFIED THAT THIS IS PORN. DON’T COME CRYIN’ AFTER YOU GET AN EYEFULL OF ALL THOSE PRISTINE GREEN JELLYWEINERS. Seriously though, this is a a cognizant flip of the very rape-reliant genre of tentacle/goo porn that uses the device of a Dungeons and Dragons session to demonstrate negotiated consent.

Carnivore Planet by Nero O’Reilly (author link NSFW) (ongoing).

Nero’s dense futuristic urban hellscape is like anything from the imagination of Moebius or Otomo, a rogues gallery pushed to their limit by their circumstances toward decisions they’ll (maybe) live to regret. His furry cartooning reaches back to the golden days of alternative publishing with a studied contemporary storytelling sensibility. Also look at those lines.

Crow Cillers by Cate Wurtz (ongoing)

One of the most ambitious projects from one of the most audacious minds in furry comics. Cate fuses intensely personal narratives with iconic cultural touchstones like the Simpsons with her arresting, hyper-colorful, deadpan while screaming-your-lungs-out visual sense. If you love our beautiful medium, you cannot sleep on this comic.

A&H Club by Rick Griffin (ongoing)

I might be biased in favor of this comic, having been raised in my early years on this earth by a single mom and in my adult life being into the idea of going about my day to day without wearing any trousers. Rick Griffin is one of the most prolific and influential furries making comics today and this is his most heartfelt project about women supporting each other.

Various comics in the Peaches and Cream universe by Michael Rey Vega (content warning: porn again) (ongoing)

Miu (Mike Vega) has long been the sweet candy center of a certain flourescent aesthetic style in furry pornography. He loves his characters and lets us see their lives unfold in comics for all ages and also for a more limited demographic. I love that no one character in Mike’s fruitiverse is exclusively in service of jerk purposes. Everyone has dignity and purpose and shops for muffin mix. I’m on pins and needles waiting for bi sexpot Jam to finally ask to go steady with her crush, Plum!
_____________

Today’s furries grew up on the web, and even our off-line interactions are based on the community we formed in BBS logs, VCL streams, back-and-forths-on Furaffinity, twitter and tumblr. We care as deeply about comics as any joe bazooka cranking out tijunana bibles at the kinkos round the corner. Our culture is fundamentally informed by our interactions online, and some of our best art still lives in digital spaces. With webcomics, furries push the medium of comics to its limits every day, one page at a time, and we do it for our own pleasure, our own satisfaction and benefit. If you could lend us your time, attention and $$$, maybe we could reclaim our pace in the canon of alternative comics. But if you never showed up, we’d keep on keeping on, writing and drawing our fuzzy weirdo stories.

Island of Misfit Furries

Posted on January 28, 2016 by mouse

ISLAND #6 / IMAGE COMICS / BRANDON GRAHAM & EMMA RIOS / COVER ART BY ONTA

I would like to talk about the cover of this comic book anthology. Your furry media critic wants to cheer herself up for a change. I’ve accepted reluctantly that furries will continue to be indiscriminately horny online in perpetuity, regardless of context or consequense. And outside media will continue in turn to find in us an opportunity for inspirational tourism or, depending on how the wind is blowing, a convenient excuse to say “look at these fags, lol” without saying exactly that. In my writing about this landscape, my attempts to reply to these prying eyes with the same condescension and derision from the other side of the glass haven’t really made me feel happier or smarter or more secure in my own voice. The tea of bitterness in which I steep has not proven exactly nourishing. So I’m writing about something that makes me happy. The thing is the cover of this comic book anthology, called Island #6. It is published by Image and compiled by comics auteurs Brandon Graham and Emma Rios.

There are many artists that the curators of Island could have lead this issue with. F Choo bookends the issue with her cleverly composed, sherbert colored wordless story about ominous parcels reoccurring in separate settings. Her elusive, eye-catching design style should be on the covers of more books, and inside the pages of them. Gael Bertrand contributes a dazzling, psychedelic training montage of sorts that reads like a tribute to both Moebius’ and Osama Tezuka’s embrace of imagination for its own sake. Katie Skelly draws a striking fashion magazine insert in her instantly-recognizable, elegant and economical style. Sarah Horrocks, one of the smartest writers in comics delivers a dense and challenging essay about the work of Kyoko Okazaki, her use of bodily violence and gore, human anxiety, the closet.

What I saw peeking behind the other new issues this week at my shop, Time Warp in Boulder, featured four furry friends in various states of intimate contact. A disgruntled anonymous tumblr user asked Graham “Why did you decide to have all the covers for island be very sci-fi and artsy then suddenly have one look like a cover for a gay furry comic?” I imagine Brandon has many fans of his turn at the wheel of Rob Liefeld’s science fiction comic Prophet who are happy to gloss over his omnivorous taste in media. But it’s not exactly a secret that he’s been our man on the inside of a comics culture after furry became more of a discreet identity and thus more insular and separate from the original communities that it gestated in. The cover for Island #6 looks like a cover for a gay furry comic because it is drawn by a gay furry pornographer. Again, the satisfaction I get from the thought that some independent comix fellows who may think… I dunno… R Crumb drawing Woody Allen cutting a lady’s head off with his penis is the height of wit, spitting out their coffee upon seeing some luscious purple skunk hips is fleeting and illusory. What really makes me happy about this cover is the implicit message that Graham and Rios know what furries are, listen to us, treat our art seriously, and pay us.

Onta’s story in this issue of the anthology is bland, altered in its tone for a mainstream audience. The cast of characters from the gay anthology Cocktails and comics on his site Hardblush (Link NSFW) go out for coffee after attending a pride parade. There is no real exploration of pride in the context of the thornier issues surrounding it; mainstream assimilation, corporate creep, the why and how of the centering of some queer experiences over others. We instead follow the thoughts of each character as they relate to the concept of organized gay pride. Jesse is resentful and urgent to soothe his masculine-centered perspective on loving men. Marty deals with insecurity with his femininity and whether his man will be there for him when it really counts, in ordinary moments and uncomfortable ones. Mu is there to cruise. Taylor dances and flirts and deflects homophobic venom with comfortable aplomb. This story is an exercise of taking characters originally designed for jerk material and writing them into more developed people. It’s a quality I love in many furry smut authors’ work, like Mike Vega’s, or in iconic furry coimcs like Omaha the Cat Dancer and Associated Student Bodies that leaves me still a little cold with Onta’s pretty furry boys. “Are these folk more than dicks for jumping onto?” is a question I think many furries with sexually-centered stories ask ourselves regularly.

Onta and I don’t run in the same circles, and we likely have different vantage points from which we see ourselves as furry pornographers. There are tons of exceptionally talented furry artists who could have been picked for a gig like this, and I hope there are more opportunities for them in the future. But some elements of this story, and that spectacular cover, are thrilling to me. The gay sensuality, that tail-tugging, the physical closeness these characters have in a book that mostly has showcased the intimacy between men as starting at the tip of a blade. A fantasy story that asks a presumably majority straight readership to derive as much pleasure from imagining being fucked in the ass by a problematic lion as imagining cutting someone else’s throat. It’s nice to get attention from publishers and editors who let furries tell their stories more or less as they are accustomed to telling them, but in a major publication.

This almost certainly not the case with the upcoming film Zootopia, which is squeezing seventeen metric tons of condensed furry horniness into a children’s movie about cops. This issue of Island is to me (obviously) the most interesting application of Graham’s professed editorial philosophy of doing whatever the heck he wants. I hope the risk pays off and publishers can see themselves getting behind more of the audacious talent in the fandom.

Flirting With Your Breakfast

Posted on November 5, 2015 by mouse

Totally Normal Advertisement.

We just can’t have nice things. I might eventually wrangle this column about Being a Furry back toward actual comics criticism, but journalists continue to report on furries to you, the humans of the species, as if you are all idiots. A mission of this column is to talk to you, the elusive normal-human-reading-this-who-has-no-unsavory-sex-hangups-about-Scar-from-the-Lion King, as if you are an adult. So I have to drag my Furry Scold cap out of its hatbox in the attic and once again scurry to countermand whatever half-baked copy some under-paid keyboard jockey hastily scooped under their deadline like litter under the bed. This week’s furry-punching detritus comes from Gawker Media, under the subheading Weird Internet. The headline reads “Tony the Tiger Can’t Tweet Without Furries Begging Him for Sex.”

Kellogg’s introduced a new social media campaign to promote their cereal Frosted Flakes and they gave their cartoon Tiger brand ambassador, Tony, a Twitter account. Tony treats us to a bunch of mock cartoon Instagram photos with candid moments of him just living his best life in various states of undress, all thanks to the energizing boost of a balanced breakfast. It is impossible to calculate exactly what is going on in the fevered, unbalanced minds of the advertising executives behind this campaign, but the implicit message in these images is “let’s make him a hunky dad. let’s make him conspicuously hot.”

Furries naturally took notice. Some even wondered if this giant corporation had even identified us as a demographic. Reading through Tony’s feed is a truly bewildering experience. But tons of us have responded to Tony’s new public platform with variations on *ahem* “I wouldn’t mind a little of that tiger in MY tank.” Twitter user @crucifalex picked up a few of these mentions and their tweet mentioning the “hidden gems of Twitter: the replies to Tony the Tiger’s tweets from furries” took off. The Gawker article basically attempted to alley-oop off of its popularity.

So considering that headline, I’m going to raise my paws flat to either side of my face to get your attention, and I am going to look you in the eye. We all know, of course, that Tony the Tiger is not a real entity that can tweet. “The Social Media Intern Who Tweets Under the Guise of Tony the Tiger Can’t Tweet Without Furries Begging Him or Her for Sex.” is far too long. Tony the Tiger, as a fictional brand mascot, has no agency or inner life and cannot tweet. We’ve gotten that far. But can you follow me further through this conceptual bramble bush? You know that we’re fucking joking, right?

Most of the replies highlighted are clearly jokes, antagonistically arch jokes at that. The author gets a giggle out of the term “cummies” which is used in furry slang that represents a satirical tone when joking about sexuality. The post isn’t openly hostile to furries, however the whole endeavor approaches furry twitter with a very self-conscious credulity. If readers are in on the joke, then no harm done. If they have a prejudice against us as deviant freaks, they can have a nice reassuring chuckle at our expense. The tittering is in part a balm for the readers’ normalcy (heterosexuality), as the coded imagery in the Tony tweets are clearly homosexual, and the jeering horny furry tweets come mostly from homosexuals. Furry culture is often coded as gay, and is as a result a safe outlet for coded anti-gay prejudice. “It sure is not a normal thing to engage with a brand in a way that the brand didn’t anticipate! How naughty! I engage with brands in a healthy way, which is not what these folk are doing.”

I mean of course we would fuck Tony, right? Maybe until we remember he’s a brand mascot, and as such is REAAAAALLY high maintenance. But a part of some of this engagement in an aggressively sexual way is a response to that style of marketing. By making uncomfortable overtures we are registering our discomfort with a cereal for children flirting with us. To see the eyes of clever marketers sizing us up as a potential demographic, possibly maybe. “Nerd” “culture” is a giantic tchotske factory (blocks my Captain Benjamin Sisko Xmas ornament from your view, wildly gesticulating). There’s a transgender beer for heaven’s sake. Many of us don’t want our culture chewed up and spit back out and sold to us when we have enough trouble maintaining an internal community economy. Inappropriate flattery is our sincerest form of mockery.

We see you.

“So is that a Sex Thing?” Furries and Smut (NSFW)

Posted on October 29, 2015 by mouse

This article is about sexuality, and contains sexually explicit images below. It is certainly NSFW. Please take care.

“So………. is that a sex thing, or?” my friend/coworker asked me some weeks ago, after reading my twitter feed closely enough and asking me about furries. As an answer I gave a furtive “UMMMMM. NOT REALLY.”

And since then I’ve been working on a “well, SURE.”

Sure it’s a sex thing. I can’t profess to write about furry culture without writing about it. Journalists can still safely grant themselves license to straight up make. shit. up. about us and our sexual lives without challenge, and here I am with a safe platform to speak my truth. Describing the exact affinity for cartoons is kind of beneath any of us at this point. We’re perverts. We watch too many cartoons. What do you want? Furries make cartoon animal bodies and mash them together with other cartoon animal bodies, and we mash together our human bodies too. We live outside our fungible ape forms on the internet and inside a fursuit, a swamp of our own breath and sweat. The fursuit, on the outside, is our insides, the cartoon inhabiting us. Furry sexuality is the flat null space between bugs bunny’s legs and the sensual line of ink distinguishing his tits. The life as a cartoon animal is one that wrestles with the anxieties of, and the frolicking joys of, inhabiting a human body, and that often centers the experience of fucking, or the experience of being fucked.

My history of my being a furry is my history of being in this body. Of wanting to survive cartoonish giant hammer blows. Living through the gulf of decades between Hare-Um Scare-Um and Space Jam and whatever that new cartoon is out now because if you’re strong enough, and you’re a cartoon, you can postpone death indefinitely as long as someone is watching. My body and mind existing in the Bosch-ian nightmare that is to be gazed upon and of inflicting a terrible gaze. Horniness making my teeth grow long and my bones to twist and my fur to come out. Overcoming the overwhelming paroxysmic fits of ticklishness that have previously made intimate touch feel like an attack. Not flinching from my femininity or my vulnerability. Feeling cute and safe in my little matchbox bed.

Enjoy some Ice Cream.
A piece I drew for Mice Making Love, a zine I made with my spouse.

Assigning value to furry smut categorically is a tedious process. It’s not on the whole a panacea against patriarchal repression or the feast of the Maenads with cat ears and a clip-on tail. Every furry is responsible for the continuum of choices in making and engaging with sexual material, as well as the atmosphere of the community as a whole. Though the images we repeat and the language we use to describe them can telegraph clues about attitudes, there is no linear elevation of tastes or kink that acts as a signpost for a person’s character. No threshold under which one is just vanilla enough to be beneath suspicion of making bad choices or taking advantage of someone. Which isn’t to say “hands off, judge not.” I think furries on the whole are reluctant to be self-critical of our permissive culture. Our reticence to call out has shielded some nasty behavior and unsocial attitudes among furs with a high enough reputation drawing porn in the community. Online spaces are especially fraught because the relationships people build, especially when they are young and emotionally isolated like I was, have lasting impact. Finding a community and gaining status when that experience is not connected to your offline life can be chaotic, radicalizing. I don’t know if I can count myself as lucky that I stumbled upon the Vixen Controlled Library and found that *enough* before I ever heard of ch*n sites. There was AOL furry roleplay before that. Yiiikes. Through furry I at least gained the advantage of encountering people whose sexual experience was radically, bewilderingly differently than mine. And I got to be friends with them.

Covers for Associated Student Bodies by Lance Rund and Chris McKinley.
Art by the great furry illustrator Terrie Smith.

On 90s furry Internet, I was able to uncover illustrations related to a furry comic called Associated Student Bodies by Lance Rund and Chris McKinley. A punchline by a generation of young furries much savvier and with more resources for articulating their weirdness than us greymuzzles. It became the great furry comic cliche. Lonely sensitive homo goes to college, everyone is gay and they all fuck, no one uses condoms and everything is lovely. I knew of this comic’s existence as a young fur but didn’t read it until I was older, collected in a nice hardcover edition. The comic means more to me as the previously unavailable prize, the sense of NEEDING to read it more powerful than whenever I actually got around to like… reading it. Squinting at the tempestuous, loathesome storm of my teenage years like a ship in a bottle now.

A common motif in furry porn is public sex. We are teleported to the locker room, the bar, the dancefloor, the back alley adjecent to the bar or dancefloor. The furry subjects in these dioramas are enthusiastically rutting while an audience telegraphs their titillation. Maybe one bystander performs a perfunctory gesture of being scandalized while the peanut gallery winks to the audience. The stigma of sex, of being seen as wanting sex, is flattened and erased in a cartoon environment. We watch ourselves watching each other, and in our inhibition we are free from the stigma of being watched. But isn’t it annoying when there’s a line of bottoms on the bar with tails up when you’re just trying to get a drink!

By my friend Artdecade.
You can see more at his website Artdecade Monthly or buy his gay furry visual novel game Willy Bear Beach.

I imagine a world where Waller, Whorley and Vances’ Omaha the Cat Dancer is more respected and influential in comics than R. Crumb’s body of work. They both radically sexualize funny animals. Omaha (notably after Kate Whorley’s involvement) is a sensitive portrayal of many people’s journeys as sexual beings, mostly women. It treats gay and bisexual people like people in a time when it is disadvantageous to do so (that time extends to present day). It’s described as a soap opera. It’s pulp is not the pulp like the paper that it’s printed on, that steals our breath. It is pulp like the orange that nourishes us. Omaha the Cat Dancer shows sex as a negotiation between two partners. Fritz the Cat is Crumb’s dick. His elegantly hatched dick. Fritz is killed when Crumb’s dick finds him boring, or when Scrutiny, the evil stepsister of Muse, becomes like… a total drag, man. The legacy of Crumb’s radically sexual funny animal art is as a cloak for more boring, insubstantial fuck art by people who don’t care about funny animals. The demographic division between furry comics and proper independent comics has been delineated as much by the sensibilities of comix doods who venerate Crumb yet ignore Omaha as the genesis of the CBLDF. As much as furry culture coalescing as a distinct identity that circulates material exclusively among our own community. In our timidity to address the centering of sexuality in our artistic community, we have found ourselves at the bottom of the hierarchy of prestige as folk who make. alternative. comics.

As a person who makes comics, or webcomics, a niche market, I’ve made the deliberate decision to make a niche niche furry comic. No, a niche niche niche furry comic with porn in it. When I express myself the calculations of getting the dollars of non-gay, gender-conforming people who don’t like cartoon animals because they’ve been tainted by furries like me aren’t that much of a factor in what ends up on my pages. It is possible, and it is an aspiration for me as an artist to depict, the love we give to each others’ bodies as affirming the inherent dignity and loveliness that inhabits our soft hairless ape shells. That the debasedness of sex as represented in art high and low, and our wrestling with what it means to us as creatures who have to live with each other, is illusory. To be a filthy animal is a fact of life. To be a filthy cartoon animal is a gift. We are squashed by ten thousand ACME anvils and do not bleed, only pool in a swamp of ink and reconstitute, with a constellation of dizzied stars and bells and tweeting birds circling our noggins. Our bodies are ink on paper. Just ideas at the mercy of a nib. You see us, you turn the page and you wash your hands.

You Can’t Get Inside

Posted on January 5, 2015 by mouse

Furries are a little ridiculous. We have an understanding about that. But every blip of attention, even an attack on our second-most populated convention, investigated by authorities as an intentional act, is an occasion for poking fun. Midwest Furfest is in Rosemont, Illinois, and this year it attracted 4,571 fuzzy folks. My wife and I are regular attendees, though this year work obligations found us elsewhere. Very early Sunday morning on December 7th, someone laid chlorine powder in a ninth floor stairwell. Nineteen people hospitalized (one of them a good friend of mine), and hundreds endangered and inconvenienced, and all of them odd ducks. Please remember how odd they are, and that they sometimes have sex, which is odder still. So the gorge of distrust between our community and the media grows wider. “We’re just not going to talk to you people any more,” we tell ourselves periodically, when the eye of mainstream culture is upon us. Mainstream culture then obliges us. A pity, because insulation from outside scrutiny is poisonous for any human endeavor. But who is ready to cover us?

Paula Young Lee’s article in Salon was briefly heartening. She is sympathetic to the idea that no one, even very ridiculous people, ought to be beset by poisonous gases, and she is duly critical of those who have a giggle at our peril. But she runs into trouble when she tries to profile furries as a social phenomenon. She mischaracterizes the fandom not out of malice, but out of a reliance on sources of dubious relevance. Her article records not a peep from an actual furry, not even a mouse. How does one get “inside the ‘furries’ craze” without even talking to one of us?

Furry is a subculture of people-animals who like animal-people. Invocations of the furry “fandom” are mostly for the alliterative utility. There is no one property, one thing, that we collectively adore. The “thingness” is a shared quality in us. There’s something, a furriness, that is deeper than appreciating a cat with a form of dwarfism that is cute. Millions of children watch Disney’s Robin Hood and go on with their lives, while for others… there’s a kind of lightning bolt that digs into the pit of you and generates a current throughout your whole life. A drunk person exiting a gathering in a party store zebra costume is not a furry.

What of our sources in the media? Furries are terribly sensitive about the “Fur and Loathing” episode of CSI. It’s a TV show that is a fake thing a committee of people made up for entertainment. The less said about it, the better. George Gurley’s voyeuristic safari into our spaces, “Pleasures of the Fur” in Vanity Fair, is also infamous in the fandom. Reading my mom’s copy thirteen years ago, I said, “Well, OK. Where do I sign up?” Now that I’m grown, I’m amazed that his subjects were so candid with him. Profiles written in good faith by outsiders are thin on the ground. Accurate ones do not exist. Do not feel discouraged. If you really “got it” like we get it, you’d be one of us.

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The Graham Norton Show, via typette on Tumblr

So who are we and who am I? I’m the Hooded Utilitarian’s furry in residence. I write about furry things because I was invited to. Dr. Sam Conway might perhaps enjoy a position as an unnofficial spokesperson for furry, but that’s not necessarily what I want out of life. Though it is nice when people say nice things about what I write.

I’ve been a furry since I was 14 and started posting my art online. My “fursona” is a mouse. Hi. I draw the mouse as a stand-in for myself, an inspiration from my background in alternative comics, especially the mid-2000 wave of autobiographical material inspired by cartoonist James Kochalka’s daily diary strips. Furry art pushed me to admit to myself that I love men, and I met my wife at a furry convention. Go figure. I’d like to think I’m well-rounded. You wouldn’t know from meeting me what I’m into, which doesn’t make me one of the “good ones.” The standards for being the good ones (well socialized, neurotypical, non-sexual) are not good or just or fair in any case.

Animal stories continue to fascinate and inspire me as a writer, and as a kid my particular obsessions were the Wind in the Willows, Redwall books, Aesop’s Fables, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH and Don Bluth movies in general. There are Lion King furries and Digimon furries and uncountable Robin Hood furries, but I figure I’m a “little mice in big people world” furry. Sleeping in a sardine tin, rapelling down a hoosier cabinet on a strand of darning thread. Those sorts of things still capture me, as I often think of most everyone else as big people world. It’s a professional as well as personal attachment to me, and I don’t hesitate to identify mself as a furry cartoonist to the outside world. The alt comics of alt comics. I may only have a career within the bounds of the fandom. I think that would be fine. Though I’m always happy when non-furry small press shows will have me.

A selfie with my wife as Sweatervest Cornbread Peach Pit Jones and myself as Coyote at Rocky Mountain Fur Con 2014. Suits by Jill Costumes and Kilcodo Costumes.

Sharing this weird thing, it’s only natural that strong bonds can form between strangers from different walks of life, so regular convention attendance can become personally vital and necessary for maintaining strong relationships. Furries have been meeting like that since the very early 1980s. Thanks and credit is due to Fred Patten for keeping track. It could be said that a proto-furry subculture germinated in the funny animal comics fandom, which had been producing alternative press anthologies and fanzines since at least 1976. Publications like Vootie and Albedo Anthropomorphics were the launching pad for nationally acclaimed comics such as Reed Waller, Kat Whorley and Charles Vance’s Omaha: The Cat Dancer in the former and Stan Sakai’s Usagi Yojimbo in the latter. Later zines like Yarf! cultivated comics and stories focused inward and circulated primarily among the furry culture that began emerging as a superset of the existing fanzine scene. While there was an early gathering at a San Diego Comic Con, furry discussion groups mostly emerged out of science fiction fandom at Westercon, NorEasCon and other conventions. Small parties and groups grew into formal gatherings and eventually miniature ecosystems of diverse participants.

Fursuiting and comic book/anime cosplay are connected purely superficially, and exist as distinct and separate cultures. Furry costuming as a tribute to existing characters in pop culture is rare. Suiting is important to us, though. It’s the most visible face of our community and is adored and envied widely. Fiercely competitive dance competitions with contestants in full animal costume are often the nexus of communal energy at conventions. Believe me when I tell you that any kind of physical activity in costume is immensely challenging. Coordinating a dance routine, conveying charisma and confidence and sex appeal in a blank-eyed mask without overheating is Herculean. It’s a big deal. Characters and suiters can accrue a modicum of celebrity, as can the people who make them. They are sought out for their skill as craftspeople and individual personality. Jill Costumes made my wife’s suit on commission, and it is modeled after her drawings. Our friends at Wild Life don’t take commissions at all. They create whatever creature they fancy at the time and sell them at auction. There’s a small community of Wild Life suits in Japan.

The furry lexicon journalists trot out is a grand old cliche, and as with any outside attempt at corralling slang, always painfully out of date. The word “yiff” is legendary. I’m one of the doomed few manifesting its earnest use in a withering swarm of ironic re-appropriation. But to most, its use is dreadfully passé. So meet me at the greymuzzle breakfast with that one. The jumble of screech and malaprop that furries exchange is plastic and varied. A friend of mine once innocently typo-d “walf” in place of “wolf.” Then for a brief time walf WAS wolf. We ran across a complete stranger once who had printed it in block letters on a tee shirt. But I haven’t given you anything for free, because wolf is something else now. You’ll have to wade into furry twitter, a subgenre of interaction with its own elastic parlance and decode it yourself.

Why, man? Why do we do this? Well it’s fun and we like it. We meet our best friends and partners. We establish small communes and all-furry households and keep each other safe. A person starts an online discussion board about Richard Adams’ The Plague Dogs and a community forms around that. Furries start making suits, or soap, or a trading card game, or high-end sex toys modeled after dragon genitals, and a community supports a modest living for them. A charity for rehabilitating abused pit bulls is identified, and that charity is subsequently handsomely funded. We love animals, and we love cartoons. Without people who continue to love and fixate on cartoons as grownups, cartoons don’t get made.

And we come to the point where the essay is supposed to take a turn. But what of a “darker” element? What about sex? You want to hear about the sex. Ok. A respectable position is one of incredulous denial. “Oh, THAT stuff? I’ve heard of it. Really we’re not about that. Sex and pornography are entirely marginal in furry, as they are in the rest of the world.” It’s a defensive posture, an understandable one, a human one, buttressing our identity against a mainstream culture that uses sexual taboo against us. Marginalized groups are historically hypersexualized by those in power as a tool for keeping us marginal. Take for example this buzzfeed piece of work. It is actually well researched, and features actual furries who confirm the writer’s narrative. The frame is an insinuation that the subject of furry sex is a general anti-social perversity. It uses clearly stigmatizing language and cherry picked news items to portray the sexual impulse as some sort of sordid underbelly of a group of damaged folks. The ray of hope, and the path to us being respected, is our disavowal of the notion that our culture might touch upon our sexuality in some way. We’re growing up and getting real jobs that good and nice people have, like as police officers.

Ok.

I don’t tolerate being put through this ringer of conditions for respectability as a bisexual person. Not to conflate my experience of being a sexual minority in general to this thing I like. However, I am conscious of the sense of disgust leveraged against furries, who are likelier than the general population to be gay or bisexual, transgender or non-binary, and it doesn’t fly with me. “Furfag” is the pejorative du jour for furries online, and it did not fall out of the sky. Why are furries seemingly preoccupied with sex, though? I dunno. Why do adult people like Star Wars? The answer is, who gives a shit? Or rather, if you might be asking “what causes someone to be like this, instead of like everybody else,” you might be just comfortable in couching something you don’t understand in the realm of pathology. That’s rude. Sex is clearly a part of the fandom, as the fandom is a part of our lives which include a desire and drive for sex. Impolite fantasies are not proprietary to outgroups. Remember when Zeus transformed into a white bull so he could fuck a lady? That’s not on us.

Furries draw a lot, and we draw a lot of porn. I’m friends with people who make their living from it. We can have a catalog of what we like in our favorites gallery. We might exchange an erotic drawing as a friendly gift. Artists attract loyal followings with a clear understanding of what they will and will not draw, as the list of things that people might want is long and tall. I like that you get to make your own fun if mainstream porn bugs you or isn’t your thing (it bugs me and is not my thing). We are fixated on our desires, like everyone is fixated on their desires. Furry erotic work can be outrageous, uninhibited or self-conscious, imaginative, cute and uplifting and vanilla, or nihilistically depraved. Many furries are on the asexual spectrum and nevertheless experience great joy in expressing unusual fantasies. Snouts that stretch absurdly, a dripping goo that transforms a rat furry into a cow furry, a character that inflates like a balloon when you blow into the right nozzle, characters from the video game Star Fox but they are giants and making love against a skyscraper, swallowing a lover whole and now they take a nap inside you, lulled by your massive heartbeat. Cats and dogs living together!

Furries like to date other furries, sometimes they meet and fall in love and sometimes have one night stands. Sex in costume is indeed rare, but it does happen, between adults individually responsible for the care and cleaning of their own fursuits. If you don’t get it, don’t worry about it. Maybe one day you’ll lock eyes with a coyote in the elevator line and you’ll get zapped with that funny feeling, or maybe you won’t. The imaginative fetishes and non-standard sexual norms furry offers are in many cases a healthy alternative to mainstream sexuality, which may I remind you is exploitative, abusive, non-loving and cold, especially toward women and gay and transgender people. There has always been and always will be an internal dialog within the fandom about restraint and consent, about appropriate physical boundaries with costumed folks. Some pine for an imaginary time before the fandom was tainted by sex, and that’s their prerogative. But furry sexual culture goes through many of the same ordeals as the wider world. We hunt out abusers and try to ostracize them, because we want friends and strangers to be safe. And yet some look the other way when the accused is sufficiently popular. We try and keep our spaces, online and at conventions, safe and comfortable for transgender and queer folk as furry sexual openness and imagination are not a panacea against harmful mainstream ideas about them. And yet some are married to treating trans people as objects. We ask ourselves, all the time, what are sensible parameters for erotic content in our drawings, stories, animations, or are there any? We’re working on it. We are tolerant and free, sometimes that is better than the fallen world, other times it is not. Individually, furry sexuality has been a good thing in my life, though my individual experience isn’t a challenge to or a dismissal of those who have been done poorly by an environment of often unchecked and unexamined horniness.

When I met my wife at a convention in Atlanta, I had already known her online and thought that I might have feelings for her. I was with my non-furry now-ex-boyfriend at the time, so she and I friends. Only just friends. At a later convention in Pittsburgh, we were by chance in the same hotel room alone, and my feelings began to take a definite shape. There were sparks in the tummy and butterflies in the air. I couldn’t even keep my metaphors straight. What does one do in such a situation? Well, nothing. This ain’t the movies.

We remained friends, and after my relationship reached its end and I had to move out, she offered her couch until I got back on my feet. This was a terrible situation! Being a guest in her house, feeling how I felt about her, would have been a creepy and unfair situation. So I declined and moved across the country, only to move all the way back two months later, after confessing my feelings in good faith. We were both waiting for the other to say the thing, the funny thing. “It seems the unlikeliest thing in the world, but I like you this much.” That’s the short story. I love her and respect her and we “get” each other and we’re married and we draw cartoons and watch Fleischer shorts and Tom and Jerry and are best friends. That’s just a little bit of what furry is to me.

We’re ridiculous, but we have our dignity. I don’t like what you have to say about us, and I don’t want your sympathy if it means having to assimilate to please you. I don’t even like damned grumpy cat. The poor creature was named after an ableist slur and her owners ripped off Kate Beaton’s punchline for merchandising. That’s contrary to furry values, man. The chance of an outsider cracking our community in a meaningful way is vanishingly slim. So let us write about our own damned culture, please, and stay out of Malibu, Lebowski. You employ your imagination only in further stigmatizing us, therefore you are exiled from the furpile, forbidden from our dens, the fuck out of here with your stale memetic condescension. Furry will be fine.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Author Archives: mouse