Tag Archives: furries

You Can’t Get Inside

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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.
 

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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.

Occurences Among the Fern Fanciers, Winter 2013

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A Google Image Search for “Terrie Smith” open on an iPhone

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A Wolf waiting for the Elevator on the fourth floor of the Hyatt Regency O’Hare in Rosemont Illinois / Midwest Furfest 2013

We’ve landed at O’Hare. At carousel 5, my bag does not have the “selected for inspection” sticker I expect, but they didn’t bat an eye at the x-ray machine, did they? At certain times of the year, airport security in every major city sees hundreds of what I’m carrying. The novelty peels off. I know the feeling. I’m about to take a shuttle to the office-park prison yard of Rosemont, Illinois for my dozenth or so furry convention, my coyote mascot costume tucked between extra sweaters in my rolling carry-on.

I already drank two of my packed lunch of behind-the-counter tiny bottles of Irish Whiskey (under 4oz!) and I’m cranky and cold, but my roommates for the weekend, fellow Colorado furs, have our room ready -nice and cozy- strewn with animal costumes, various leather restraining devices, a chainmail flail, rubber jumpsuits and a dozen boxes of nitrous oxide canisters. Mostly for your sake, I wish I could draw up this con report with the psychedelic horny fantasmagoria of my first furry con. But the night is dark and my muzzle is grey (I am 26!) and I honestly want to hit the hay already. I can’t give you, I won’t give you, the account of my furry convention deflowering. Since then, I have changed, and fur cons have changed rather rapidly around me (without me?). This most recent Midwest Furfest (my third attendance of this particular event) was the con where I took care of myself: ate right, slept more, drank less and still got the nastiest con crud I’ve ever gotten. I’m older and frailer now. Furry is different now.

The morning I left Longmont, my ex-boyfriend sent me a text message, wondering if I would be in town for the convention. He’s moved back to Chicago and would like to get back in touch. I am attending the con with my partner. Er…. my girlfriend. He wasn’t/isn’t a furry and she is. So anyway….

 

The people from the car show trying to clandestinely take your picture in the hotel lobby

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A weffy hands out doughnuts in the lobby at Midwest Furfest 2013, Rosemont, IL // A hot cheetah with leek prop at Rocky Mountain Fur Con 2013, Denver, CO //
Max Goof and Goofy fursuit cosplayers at Midwest Furfest 2013, Rosemont, IL

The shuttle driver is rigid, pulling us into the traffic circle. Fursuiters, insulated from the wind and cold by their costumes, spill out through the revolving door to the lower lobby of the hotel. This kinetic thrill courses through my guts out toward my fingertips gripping the handle of my rolling carry-on bag. We’re anxious to be out of our coats and into our itchy pelts. Something like a quarter or more of furries who attend conventions are fursuiters. The most visible public element of furry, costuming is increasing in its status within the fandom as a vital, though maybe not quite foundational element of participation. At my very first con (Furry Weekend Atlanta in 08), I may or may not have relied on some illicit herbal supplements to help acclimate myself to the culture shock of being around so many bipedal pink bunny rabbits. Years went by and I burned with envy to be one of them.

THE EXPERIENCE OF FURSUITING: It’s disorienting and uncomfortable. Your field of vision blinkered and diminished, the middle ground a puddle of murky shadows. Walking down stairs takes homework, comparable to descending in high heels. If you don’t quickly establish proper air circulation, you can overheat in seconds just wearing a mask. Furries with full-body costumes wear balaclavas and special sport undergarments from nosetip-to-toe, mostly as a barrier for sweat.

You learn to walk again, and to grasp door handles and room keycards and beer bottles with clumsy paws (I upgraded this year to a five-fingered set and have never been happier). People wave to you and squeal and take hasty cell phone photos in every snug spot and corridor and you learn to let the attention melt into your vanished peripheral. Squares furtively snap your picture, thinking you can’t see them. Some people ask, all blushing polite modesty. Some think you’re the cutest thing they’ve seen in the last ten minutes. Others want to fuck you. There are other suiters, suiters cuter than you, to hug and flirt and play with and share the same mesmerizing layer of over-the-top common reality.

 

In an idle moment, a friend will ask to try on your coyote head and you will feel jealous of the precious seconds they are wearing it.

 

The Alley, the Den, and behind the black curtain

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Ad for vintage furry writing //
Inflatable Digimon Pool Toy, Midwest Furfest 2013, Rosemont, IL

The furry economy is fluid and adaptable to the niche-est of niches, where cottage industries can spring up around much desired subjects, proclivities and fetishes. I have friends whose sole income comes from operating a furry porn pay site or building fursuits or serving as the art director for an erotic furry trading card game. It’s the most fabulous geeky entrepreneurial hustle in the world.

Furry conventions have space set aside for the various commercial endeavors. Anyone can sign up for a lottery for a spot to sell their own artwork, often on-the-spot cheap commissions or highly-collectible personalized con badges. There is also the option of renting booth space in the Dealers’ Den, where there is more freedom and variety of things available for purchase. It’s a mixed bag with apparel ranging from dismal meme-inspired tee shirts to brightly colored fur-lined leather bondage gear. Synthetic fur tails of various species are ubiquitous, and Japanese kigurumi, full-body hooded pajamas resembling dozens of animals are recently very popular.

Elsewhere you can find comics and furry literature publishers and catalogers of vintage fanzines and other such furry ephemera. There’s even a company that builds custom gigantic inflatable pool floaties.

Bad Dragon, the subject of a tittering Vice profile, is a much beloved maker of high-quality sex toys in the imaginative likenesses of the genitals of various fantasy creatures. Pornography in various formats is available everywhere, although strictly censored and separate from milder material.

Unlicensed merchandise relating to the children’s cartoon My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic has risen to striking prominence in the Den since the show began airing. Many writers including myself have taken pains to distinguish furry from a fan culture surrounding any particular product, so it gives me pause to see how naturally Brony fandom (adult men who self-identify as fans of the show) has adapted and integrated with furry on such a scale. There is a strong element within furry of engaging with animal-related pop phenomenon, either personalizing a relationship with a mass product, queering, smearing and breaking it down, or simply pornographying it for its own blessed sake. But this is often in a context of liberation. My envisioning of the fandom is a space for open-minded but ethical perverts of all persuasions. How then, does this intersect with a fan culture that can be seen as plundering its ownership of the show from the girls it’s specifically made for – Girls who represent the demographic whose own engagement with media in a personal way is so often dismissed and denigrated as fake or un-serious or deranged?

I always love the art show, which has a separate section for matted and framed cartoon porn. This Terrie Smith pin-up really ties the room together!

The DIY furry comics culture has been vibrant since the days of Albedo Anthropomorphics through RRUFFURR, but has been largely sublimated by the internet. Printed comics and zines are background radiation at cons, and the zine culture is passionate but limited in its depth and breadth. No fur con can mimic the experience of a Small Press Expo, and oughtn’t to do so, but I ache for more of a cultural crossover between my two beloved non-overlapping magesteria of the Furry and Indie* or whatever comics scenes. I should either be passing out zines in fursuit or wearing my fursuit at small press shows.

For real I would love an original Terrie Smith pin-up for our home office.

 

:AIRHORN: :GUNSHOT SFX: :DROP TO THE FLOOR:

The line for the dance competition finals snakes around the corridor outside the ballroom. Regular finalists are furry celebrities, attracting fans who remove their clothing as they step to the dance floor. Fan favorites like Phor, Zeke, and OMGSparky are musically literate in current hip hop and EDM. Individual personalities vary, but a house style of dancing has emerged that utilizes locking and highly-gestural arm movements that seek to transcend the communicative limitations of hot, bulky, highly ungainly costumes. Just existing in a fursuit is a test of endurance. Performers like the flourescent coatamundi Step are exhalted for the raw aggressive physicality they bring to the dance floor.

The dance competition is a juried event, a clumsy approximation of televised dance troupe competitions, with the previous year’s winner invited as the guest judge in suit. There exists a yawning naked charisma gap between the panel and the performers.

There are raves every night. I used to love to grind nastily with suiters at these things. Now I’m old and square and any kind of dancing involving the ass in any capacity is called twerking and I can’t do that any more.

Unlike the dance competition, the music at the raves is usually dreadful, but you dance anyway.

 

Furry after dark

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Artwork by Ataraxia on display during Furry Weekend Atlanta 2013 in Atlanta, GA

Do you remember the first time you saw a fursuiter and thought “oh my god, he’s really hot?” I do.

Furries are free to deny that weird sex is not a central element of this great weird social thing, but this thinking is backed by their own deliberate and reactionary cognitive dissonance. In the real world, furries exchange pornography to solidify bonds of friendship, integrate their fetishes into the forefront of their furry identities and meet at cons for casual sex. If you know the right friend of a friend, you get an invitation to each con’s sheath party, gear and pup-play get-together, babyfur meetup, XXX dead dog and transformation drawing circle.

Schrodinger’s digimon pool floatie in the lobby is at once a family toy and coveted fetish object.

I’m a champion of furry as a space for enlightened, ethical sexual liberation, but real-life sneaks in. There are many malignant spores of patriarchal rape culture that bloom in any free love environment. At this con I found myself having to almost immediately telegraph though my expressionless cartoon coyote eyes “Stay away from me. I know. What. You. Did.”

Exchanging erotic drawings is fun. My roommate drew my mouse fursona sheepishly beholding an ostentatiously athletic horse dude (!). I drew a lithe nude dog man striking a broadway pose, underscored by “HAIL CUM” in all capital letters.

During Midwest Furfest 2011 I attended an invitation-only party where I had to strip down to my underwear as a condition of entrance. I tried on a leather pup play mask and allowed myself to be reluctantly goaded into slapping a stranger’s ass. Arf Arf.

At that same con I smoked pot out of an apple in the backseat of my car.

Everyone really does love those dragon dildos.

 

This is my mate…

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Fursuit photos event, Midwest Furfest 2013, Rosemont, IL // My partner with her friend Ness at Midwest Furfest 2013, Rosemont, IL, both costumes by Jillcostumes // Spiral’s head in the hotel room at Midwest Furfest 2013, Rosemont, IL.

I met my partner for the first time at a furry con, but we fell in love on twitter, each keeping it secret from the other for almost a year. I used to think that I didn’t want to date a furry. A great number of furries only date within the fandom, and I thought that loving a non-fur would provide depth and perspective that an insider could never give me. And my ex was a peach of a non-furry partner; non-judgmental, mostly bored by my accounts of my debauched weekends in Pittsburgh and Atlanta without him.

I had discounted how foundational this furry thing is: the animal stories I was raised on, the lull of David Attenborough’s gentle baritone, the centrality cartoon animal people have to my personality and profession and sexual wellbeing. How right it feels to be with someone who “gets” Tom and Jerry cartoons like you get Tom and Jerry cartoons.

A quandary with furry is that furries like to date furries, but by its nature as an internet centered culture, you’re likely to fall in love with someone far away. I bit the bullet, feeling like I would be just as poor and aimless in Colorado’s front range as I was in Savannah, Georgia and packed up stakes to move across the country and live with my lover. Not everyone can do this. One friend hasn’t seen his Australian boyfriend in two years.

With our deep and abiding weird love comes the tension. I can’t recapture the experience of my first cons, the exploratory euphoric sexual abandon when I identified as exclusively gay and single. She doesn’t get invited in after dark parties I might get invited to because she’s the wrong type of person. My friend Kilcodo put it aptly, “Furry is a boy’s club; really it’s a gay boy’s club.”

Furry has changed, or I’ve changed without furry. I feel left behind by a more and more technically sophisticated, irony conscious furry, a sexy and cool furry. But my lover and I show up, and we try and get up for the Chakat breakfast on Saturday morning. We hold paw in furry paw, as deer and coyote, and we are cute. People tell us that.

Furry Blacksploitation

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I notice the air getting very thin when I’m in a discussion with cartoonist peers and the subject of furries is brought up (oftentimes by myself and my friend, the glass of wine), filling the vacant atmosphere like a silent fart. To the sub-culturally literate who know and love to hate us, we are mad, shallow tacky perverts; aesthetically handicapped loser-kin often more adept at creating elaborate webs of internet drama than art, stories or comics of any value to people outside of the fandom. This is a half-truth.

There are artists working within and at the margins of the furry subculture producing spectacularly daring, inventive, funny, hyper-aware fiction who nevertheless feel deeply insecure about associations with such a maliciously misunderstood subculture. There aren’t many works in the canon of respectable comics which feature anthropomorphism in furry style ™. Instead of majestic, inventive comics like Krazy Kat, furry style was initially shaped (as an offshoot of science-fiction fandom in the early 80s) by admiration for Disney cartoons (Robin Hood, woof!) and advertising mascots. Our foundational sensibility is gene-spliced super-soldier pulp paperbacks, Tex Avery and the naïve dom/sub sexuality of old Fox and Crow funnybook covers. And those comics suuuuuuuuuuuucked. Sucked the paint off a barn. The vicious aside about funny animal comics near the end of Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay stings all the more bitterly because woe, it is so so true.

So we furrs pounce when a sophisticated mass-market comic featuring talking animal-people gets a little, or a lot of love from readership and critics. The Blacksad series by the team of writer Juan Diaz Canales and illustrator Guarnido might be the holy grail of furry respectability within the world of comics. The stories utilize a cast of upright-walking humanoid animals that exist within a model of human behavior, yet their individual animal speciation informs their human-like character and personalities. These are conceits that furries can claim as their own, regardless of actual authorial involvement in the subculture. (This applies retroactively to previous iterations of pop-anthropomorphism as well —but let’s not get sidetracked.) Blacksad has cred, it’s popular, and it’s very furry. It’s also very troubling if it’s the type of material that we’re going to hold up as a standard of excellence for anthro comics with a broader market appeal than furaffinity.net.

Blacksad has been recently reprinted in hardcover, bundled with the unreleased -en Anglaise- Ame Rouge, by Darkhorse as well as a second volume of new material which I have not yet read. The previously released second volume, Arctic Nation, won a Harvey award in 2005. It thrusts our hero, the titular John Blacksad, into an intrigue set against an atmosphere of mid-century racist tension and violence outside New York City. Rather than a sober European critique of American racism and class struggle (haha let’s not trouble ourselves with that thought), Arctic Nation is unfiltered, earnest pulp. It begins, subtle as an asteroid collision in your nana’s parlour, with a lynching. On page 2.

Backing up a bit. I can’t offer much in the way of relevent analysis or anything new to say about racism, or depictions of racism in comics per se. I don’t have a seat at that table. Furthermore, the Blacksad universe is very clearly meant to represent a pulped version of reality, and it’s up to discussion whether fiction in this vein should be judged according to its reflection on political reality or read on the terms of the self-contained universe of its creators’ imagining. But the animals Guarnido populates the world with are meant to suggest inferences about human traits, including racial ones. And I do feel, as a furry, like I have something to say about their use in Arctic Nation (or the use of various species to represent different ethnicities and nationalities of human beings in the first place. Hint: it’s a really bad idea!).

The second volume in the Blacksad story follows our hero John, the taciturn tom-chat noir private eye, on an assignment into a suburb called the Line, which is in a state of social upheaval following the decline of its post-war manufacturing boom. The world, entirely populated by a managerie of anthopomorphic animals, expands in complexity here. A coalition of animals of various species who share in common their white fur, many of whom occupy ossified posts of old social power has hardened into a hard-right group -a mixture of the Ku Klux Klan at the height of its influence and the American Nazi Party of the 60s and 70s- that overtly terrorizes everyone else. The only organized resistance, the “Black Claws” — an obvious parody of the Black Panthers — is cast as equivalent in their odiousness to the white hate group.

This brings up an interesting point that is not readily apparent in the first volume of Blacksad. John, a black-furred cat, is in terms of a human analog, a black man, and is treated as such — but with a caveat. He has a patch of white fur on his muzzle which affords him some access to interactions with the white-furred power brokers within the neighborhood. This concept of his “whiteness” is directly alluded to on page 9 of the iBooks paperback printing when he is hassled by Arctic Nation thugs in a diner that conspicuously displays a notice that reads “NO colored people ALLOWED.” He rolls his eyes and offers a deliciously smug, self-confident grin. “This here isn’t enough?” The initial victim of the AN goons’ attention, an old blind crow wearing a US Air Force Jacket, a possible nod to the Tuskegee Airmen, isn’t so lucky. He also has white facial markings but they are signs of age, and without John’s gift of brute strength (applied with gusto in the following page) he is an easier target.
 

 
One of the most interesting characters in the story, for many reasons, is Weekly, the sidekick and comic relief to John’s turgidly upright straight man act. An unctuous tawny-furred mustelid, Weekly reads as white but is unsympathetic to the Arctic Nation’s fanatical racial vision. He is a target of scorn by the white-furred citizens of the Line, though this could be attributed to his unsavory profession as a weasely tabloid reporter or his “European” approach to hygiene (his nickname stems from the supposed infrequency of his change of undergarments). His exclusion from the ivory racist clique also exempts him from the system of oppression against black-furred animals in the Line. He is familiar, actually chummy, with our hero from their first interaction. The only system of oppression in Blacksad’s universe is at the hands of a white nationalist extremist population which has the means to mobilize against a specifically black one. Red or brown or orange fur occupies a “neutral” territory.

John is on a case of a missing child whose mother is reticent to report her disappearance. John is working on behalf of the girl’s concerned teacher, Ms. Grey (symbolism!). The “plot” that transpires hurls him neck-deep into a preposterous, Oedipally-fraught revenge scenario whose architecture involves murder, incest, the previously-mentioned abduction and plenty of manipulation through the withholding and dispatching of gratuitous sex. In spite of all this spice, it’s not all that interesting. A polar bear named Karup (wordplay!) falls in love with and marries a deer, but their relationship is poisoned by his lust for power and inclusion in the white-furred elite of the Line. He abandons his pregnant bride to die in a snowstorm (symbolism!) and goes on to become chief of Police. She survives and gives birth to two fraternal “twin” daughters, a white-furred polar bear and a vampy, heavily caricatured black deer (more symbolism! nonsensical biology!), but separated from her husband’s love, she wastes away into alcoholism. (An aside: if the case were to be made for Arctic Nation being in fact a hideous racist publication, the panel where we are made to leer at the deer’s degradation and death while her daughters stoically look on would be exhibit A. It’s skillful cartooning at its most rotten, twisted, and cruel). Moving on!

Karup’s daughters, now adults, set their revenge against him in motion, Jezebel (a Madonna/Whore cliché, goddamn with the symbolism) marries him, though their relationship is icily chaste. She meanwhile uses her sexual wiles to foment a power struggle within the Arctic Nation. Dinah meanwhile orchestrates the kidnapping of her own daughter to exploit standing rumors of Karup’s perverted predilections and set up a coup for his ambitious subordinate Huk. Just about everyone dies gruesomely, leaving Jezebel with her thin victory to cloak her grief and Blacksad to righteously brood over the twisted nature of the world.

Throughout, John does little actual detecting. He slinks throughout cross-sections of the Line and throws a couple of well-placed elbows when things get hot while the sisters’ plan falls into place on its own. He sneers at the endogenous old blue-bloods, the white tiger Oldsmith and his mentally-handicapped Cheetah son whose only purpose is as a tidy avatar of rebuke. He tussles with a few representative members of the Black Claws, two beasts of burden and a Rottweiler. Acting as a typically crass reduction of black resistance movements, the lead black toothy horse first intimidates Weekly to publish some piece of propaganda and then taunts John for his whiteness. “What happened to your snout, brother?” he asks before attempting to smear the white patch on Blacksad’s muzzle with motor oil. John responds by plugging his revolver into the assailant’s waistline. It’s no accident that this Claw is a horse – what with their prodigious members. You emasculate me, and I’ll emasculate you! Either way, John will have none of your Black Consciousnes, sir. Whiteness unbesmirched, John fumes in the car outside after the claws disappear into the foreground and from the story altogether. “You’re not going to publish that crap, are you?”
 

 
I might wonder similarly at Blacksad’s editors. Guarnido employs honed caricature, meticulous detail and a sophisticated color palate in service to a crude and unsophisticated pulp rag that exploits images of American racial and class struggle for cheap moralizing while rendering nothing of any value. Anthropomorphism is a give and take, and often works better when we allow the animal traits (themselves human projections) to reveal character i.e. Sam the Clever Fox or whatnot. Shoehorning human society onto one or several unsuspecting ecosystems and tossing them together in a fantastical New York is simplistic and prone to breakdown. The relationship between the arctic fox and the snowshoe hair is warped beyond any sense within the boundaries of Arctic Nation’s universe. Are they bonded as brothers in attempted domination of the vampire bat, the grizzly bear, nay any creature not possessing white fur, an arbitrary gesture of humanity draped over animal cyphers? We can use funny animals to talk about funny peoples, but my god we can do so much better than this turd.