Tag Archives: Michael Arthur

Princess of Despair

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AUTHOR’S NOTE:  I wrote this piece fresh after finishing the show, and there were a lot of things I was oblivious to at the time that deserve a mention now.  I read a feminist message in Madoka and I still like to hold onto how the show made me feel.  But a more substantial and well-rounded analysis should take into consideration these factors: that tons of my friends who are women who know a lot more about Magical Girl anime than I do hate it!  I later learned that the show’s creator intended a specifically sexist message, and that the darkness was supposed to be some sort of corrective to the “flaws” he saw in Magical Girl Anime, and that male fans of the show are encouraged to be as gross as they like re: objectifying the characters.  So take my reading with a grain of salt!

 

“Chucking her under the chin, he said, “What are you doing here, honey? Your not even old enough to know how bad life gets.” /// “Obviously, Doctor,” she said, “you’ve never been a 13 year old girl.”
Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

Madoka and Homura by Magical Quartet

That’s a rough lead-in to writing about a Magical Girl anime, but if the shoe fits…

Reading Noah’s article in the Atlantic this morning got me thinking about different shades “princess” roll models for girls and boys.  Since I have no day job, an indulgent partner and a crunchyroll subscription, I had already found a great example when I marathoned the entire twelve-episode run of Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica  (or Puella Magi Madoka Magica as released in the US) in one day.  It’s an extraordinary show; a queer love story and maybe not exactly a deconstruction, but a purposeful re-envisioning of the Magical Girl concept and the way it is at this point rotely marketed to young girls.It’s been a big hit, and possibly (hopefully) will have a similar cultural impact as defining Mahou Shoujo properties like Sailor Moon and Cardcaptor Sakura in time.  NOTE:  It will be difficult to discuss the major themes of this show without revealing how they are woven into pivotal plot points.  Some things must be spoiled, but I will do my best to remain discreet.

Contrary to many Mahou Shoujo predecessors, the tone of Madoka is generally BLEAK, and our titular hero, Madoka Kaname, isn’t actually a magical girl.  We begin with her as an “ordinary” eighth grade  magical girl protagonist.  She’s good natured, sweet and comfortable, with close friends and a successful businesswoman mom and loving dad to look up to.  It’s her ordinariness contrasting with her descending deeper into the secret world of Magical Girls and the unseen Witches they fight that defines the narrative tension of the show.  Witches spread unseen despair and psychological torment on unsuspecting humans, and it is suggested that they are generally responsible for humankind’s chaotic woes.  Magical girls are ordinary teens who make a contract with kyubei, an elegant, sinister white cat-like familiar who grants them one miraculous wish as well as unique frilly costumes (of course!) special weapons and a soul gem, the source of their power.

It’s revealed quickly that Magical Girls must give up contact with their past life as they must continuously defeat witches, not just in the pursuit of justice and love, but for their “grief seeds” which purify the Magical Girls’ soul gems and replenish their power.  Giving up their initial idealism for a kind of mercenary nihilism turns out to be the first and most vital tactic for survival.  It’s the first of many revelations that kyubei omits from the initial contract negotiations, and a key to why Homura Akemi, a cold-blooded and mysterious Magical Girl will stop at nothing to prevent Madoka from accepting Kyubei’s bargain.

The setting of Madoka is a Magical Girl show where a teen girl’s volatile emotions, constantly demeaned by society, are the source of her power and her struggle for self-determination is locked in the greater karmic push and pull of hope and despair.  It’s a world in which the hidden struggle of extraordinary young women against a byzantine structure of hopelessness and cruelty is the engine of all human civilization. The imposed price is living within a predatory system of oppression, where their bodies are not their own, their sacrifice is unacknowledged and their consent is trivialized.

Madoka is also a love story, one that grounds some of its most emotionally powerful scenes in nude intimate embrace between young girls without sexualizing them.  This is remarkable itself, in a landscape of anime that is pathologically unable to NOT sexualize young girls.  Just in my CR queue, Ano Hana is a somber meditation on friendship and grief where the main male protagonist perves over the ghost of his dead childhood friend, Hanasaku Iroha is a sensitive coming-of-age story about a girls and their mothers with wildly deranged notions about appropriate ways to deal with a sexual predator, Bakemonogatari is like, male gaze the anime, the most consciously and purposefully misogynistic cartoon I have ever seen that isn’t Heavy Traffic…  What point is there in going on like this?  Madoka is better than all this, and focuses instead on the deepening friendship, intimacy, tenderness, and trust that keeps the girls in sight of why they began fighting in the first place when the decks are stacked impossibly against them, and agony and hopelessness are a total certainty.  Of course love saves the day, it is a Magical Girl Show, but a bittersweet, impersonal, abiding love that runs deeper than even the karmic balance of hope and despair.

I assume many parents would cringe at this Madoka show as a new  “princess” model, what with the violent dismemberment and depersonalization and unsentimental atmosphere of hopelessness that’s bleaker than a diamond made from the compressed essence of a thousand Watership Downs, but kids know better.  How many girls are sold a frilly dress and magic wand and are treated terribly, whether they take it or not?  Madoka is an ordinary girl whose ordinariness, her naivety in the face of danger are her ultimate strengths, and her love of her friends the ultimate defiance of the system that exploits them.  Also her pink outfit and rose-stem inspired magical bow and arrow are super cool.

 

Non-Canonical

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The index to the Comics and Music roundtable is here.
_____________

Black Metal Fandom

In the framing of the documentary “Until the Light Takes Us,” the pheonomenon of Black Metal was born and died in the same instant as the publication of sensational reports in the Norwegian media of the activities of Varg Vikerness and the supposed “inner circle” of musicians and agitators retroactively called the second wave of black metal. The aesthetic and thematic trappings of the world-wide scene to come, including, paradoxically, the adherent reverence to the supposed ideals of the original inner circle who despise and disavow all those who follow them, are cribbed almost entirely from these (mostly false) accounts of Satanism, Anarchism, and (unfortunately true) pointless grisly murder.

Punk Rock died in Los Angeles in 1986, according to some sources. It emerges, Elvis-like, on the underside of skateboards coasting across uneven gravel mall parking lots, or in communal houses in the suburbs of Rangoon, and in endlessly concurrent music documentaries about the life and death of Punk Rock, year after year.

Disco died when white people started making it and other white people got real mad. The whole scenario is pretty embarrassing in general. I’m glad I hadn’t been born at the time.

&The children’s television program My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic something something bronies blah blah siiiiiiiiiiiiigh.

Superheroes never die. They just get new writers who sometimes kill them. But later, new writers – and who knows?!

My favorite manga should have ended like, ten volumes agooooo. It just doesn’t seem like it’s going anywhere.

 ***

What bugs me about semi-autobiographical works is that an author can always ascribe the lousy parts of their stories to the fixed continuity of the supposed “autobio” part. Jonathan Lethem’s toad of a novel “Fortress of Solitude” sets its story against the backdrop of Brooklyn in the waning of the 20th century. So it makes perfect narrative sense that after the dissolution of the possibility and wonder of the childhood friendship of the book’s two heroes, Mingus gets chewed up and his talent suppressed by the intertwined terrors of drug addiction and the criminal justice system as his neighborhood is gentrified in real time. Dylan, the more privileged of the two, more or less becomes a dried-up old turd from the moment he begins to monetize his passions, to value things over people and to vaporize his yen for music and culture into the loveless prison of obsessive collection and curation. The fact that the former character is black and the latter white is no accident, it’s just fate. Too bad the semi-autobiographical author was only semi-interested in designing a universe with less banal systematic cruelty along with the addition of magical rings of power.

 ***

Being a fan draws a lot of people into happiness and/or success as creators in comics. But as fandom becomes more visible and defined in our consumer culture, a vocal following can blur the line between fan/participant and master and enforce rules that no one can remember writing in the first place. Just like the lions eat the antelope and the lions turn to a grass lot which gets built up into a boutique for silk-screened baby onesies and the antelope get pushed out of their neighborhoods by rent hikes, whole artforms can be scuttled by the arbitrary curation of its fans when the joy of discovery becomes the rote drudgery of collection.

I didn’t mention furries in this essay-ette, so it’s not canon.

“Don’t call me a fucking BRONY, ok?”

Foxx Luv (interview with the artist Corinne Halbert)

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Corinne Halbert – Foxx Luv

The Mission – 1431 Chicago Ave // Chicago, IL

July 13, 2012

The other morning, I was reading old Wonder Woman comics online, taking my time with the perverse ritual scene where young Amazons dressed as fauns are imaginatively eaten by their sisters.  Like you do.  Bill Marston’s imagination carried more depth and breadth than contemporary folk are often comfortable assigning to a funny book writer from the 40s.  Even so, in his wildest dreams, could he have imagined that a half-century and change after he set that spirited account to paper, young people from all over the world would meet in airport hotels and convention centers, dress up as animals and pretend to devour one another?  That the only barely obscured erotic charge of the Amazon ritual would take on a meaning to a community totally independent from any reading of the comics themselves?

I thought about this, too, the last time I visited Chicago in July of 2012.  My former roommates Jon and Jeremy shepherded me to a friend’s installation in Ukrainian Village.  They promised I would love it.  On the sidewalk outside of The Mission on Chicago Ave, sharing a joint with five or six fellows all in our mid-20s crisis formal attire, I was kind of freaking out, I loved it so much.  Right next door was the wake for a very young man, his friends standing in the distinct colors of a much-televised Chicago gang, smoking and kind of looking at us.  There’s no meaning I can really wring out of those two very different groups of people; these are things that happen in very large cities.  But in the basement…

Corinne Halbert had sewn a felt manequine of a bug-eyed anthropomorphic fox with an enormous erection.  Seated on an obscene green vinyl couch, he was the first thing we saw when we softly padded down the treacherous flight of stairs to the Mission’s concrete-floored basement.  All around the room were scrawled portraits of the fox, daggers and blades made of felt bulging out of open suitcases, a frantic love letter and images of the Fox’s obsession, Red Hot Riding Hood from the Tex Avery cartoons in various stages of undress.  The whole scene was dim, tacky, cartoonishly horny, delightful, hilarious, repulsive, charming…  It reminded me immediately of my favorite creatively deviant artists in the furry fandom, Swatcher, Van Weasel and Mamabliss.   After introducing myself, I asked to pick the brain of this captivating artist about felt foxes and red hot vixens.

Hello There

 
MICHAEL ARTHUR: Walk me through your inspiration behind Foxx Luv.  Why did you choose the Tex Avery Wolf and Lady cartoons as your subject?

CORINNE HALBERT: The Foxx character originally started as band art for my good friend Jason Smallwood’s New York based noise rock group, “Bbigpigg.” They had a song called “Foxx the Fox” about a psychotic murderous Foxx man. Jason and I corresponded online via email and I described to him a cartoon I remembered from childhood that left a huge impression on me. I told Jason this character reminded me of Foxx the Fox and I described him as a zoot suit wearing, horny, outrageous wolf man who was obsessed with a lounge singer. Jason nailed it and sent me a youtube link to Tex Avery’s 1943 classic, “Red Hot Riding Hood.” I fell in love with the cartoon all over again and began making my first images of the Foxx man. I wanted to transform Tex’s wolf into Bbigpigg’s Foxx, I kept Red’s character pretty much intact. After completing the illustrations for Jason I found myself completely obsessed with the Foxx man. I drew him constantly, everyday and in as many places as I could find.When I was a little girl I had a bunch of different characters I would draw. One set of characters was a momma dog and her baby doggy. I would draw them over and over again, every day in different situations. There is something very centering and relaxing about knowing a series of lines that you can rely on. So drawing Foxx made me feel like that little kid again. Except now that I am an adult I don’t only find drawing him soothing and satisfying, I can tap into the deviant parts of myself by using his character as a vehicle.I began making larger scale works with these characters using at first puffy paint and fabric and eventually I would begin to use felt and faux fur. Basically at the beginning of this journey I was obsessed with the Foxx. After learning that I would be exhibiting my solo at the Sub-Mission my attention and direction shifted towards Foxx’s obsession with Red. I decided that instead of creating a space about my obsession with Foxx I should create the Foxx man’s living room and really pile drive over the edge his obsession with Red. I wanted people to step inside a cartoon and realize how strong and bursting Foxx’s lust and obsession for Red really is.
 

Red

 

MA: The exhibition of the piece took place in a basement.  Was the specific location of the installation important to the reception of the piece?  Did you specifically request that space when negotiating with the gallery?

CH: It was absolutely key that this show be in a basement, I just knew that in my gut the first time I saw a show in the Sub-Mission. I felt like this was the perfect space to create my Foxx Luv world. The Sub-Mission is a wonderful and unique project space run by Sebastian Campos, Natalia Ferreyra and Sarah Syman who operate Chicago’s Mission gallery. They have a passionate objective to not only show mid to late career American, South American and international artists upstairs but to reserve room in the Sub-Mission space for young, local and up and coming artists. They send out an open call for artists every year to propose a site specific installation in the basement space. I was lucky enough to be one of the four artists accepted to the program this year. I believe they will be choosing seven artists next year.I can’t stress enough though that my vision made a dramatic shift when I learned I had actually landed the show. I started to think about what kinds of things this wonderfully deviant Foxx man would have in his living room. I began work on the pin up series and various other pieces and then I realized I would have to build an actual life sized Foxx man. I felt that the show would fall short without him in his own living room. I was definitely daunted by this fact and knew it would be no easy task but I knew it was something I had to do.
 

The Foxx’s letter to Red

 
MA: There is an obvious sexual current running through those cartoons, and it is writ large in Foxx Luv.  Is your choice to highlight this element satirical? personal? intellectual?

CH: It’s funny, I never intended it to be satirical at all. Even though I revel in the humorous moments that I hope the audience finds too, I actually take Foxx Luv quite seriously. Of the three words you used in this question I think personally rings the most true. There is also an intellectual current running throughout Foxx Luv. This show like all my work is open for interpretation but it is actually deeply rooted in gender roles, sexual roles and the roles we all find ourselves playing to fit into society as functioning members.The Foxx embodies men’s roles, specifically heterosexual men. But it’s not that simple because the Foxx is also me. I think it is interesting that every single person on this planet past a certain age, save maybe a few have a very private, rich world of imagined stimuli that we call a fantasy life. Yet so many of us keep these thoughts secret, it would be too embarrassing if everyone knew what we were really thinking about. That is the heart and soul of Foxx Luv, throwing that idea that my fantasies are taboo out the window and just put it all out there for people to enjoy.R ed is the embodiment of femininity. While it may appear to be a chauvinistic environment it is not intended to be. I hope that by giving Red a strong enough character she is not read as some poor helpless thing that needs to flaunt her sexuality to survive. In my mind it is quite the opposite, she has full possession of her own body and uses her powerful sexuality to dominate men’s fantasies and make a living. To me that is a powerful woman. Feeling completely comfortable in her own skin, unashamed of her choices. It is kind of beyond her control that Foxx became absolutely obsessed with her.

MA: The character from the Tex Avery cartoon is a wolf, but the centerpiece of your exhibition is clearly a very red fox.  You describe transformation as a significant theme in Foxx Luv.  Can you talk about this in detail? Why is this?
 
CH:Transformation is integral to this body of work. I explained in the first question as to why I transformed Tex’s Wolf into a Foxx so I would like to discuss how I transformed myself into a Foxx. It’s funny to me because I think a lot of women, at least heterosexual women, would if asked which character they identified with more, my mere speculative guess would be Red. I myself identify much more strongly with the Foxx man. I have had an overactive imagination since I was a kid. I am not putting this out there to be sensational or shocking but I have an extremely deviant and perverted imagination. Join the club, I know right. But it is interesting that our culture embraces so whole-heartedly the fantasies of heterosexual males while often down-right shunning the rest of us. Clearly a lot of progress has been made and our culture does foster the fantasies of gay men, bisexuals and lesbians as well as heterosexual women and people who are transgendered to some extent. Throw any amount of kink in there and just forget about it unless you’re reading “Fifty Shades of Gray.” I haven’t read it but it makes me smile that it is so wildly popular, it just proves that people don’t even realize how kinky they could be if they just let go of our overly institutionalized way of doing everything.

Anyhow, I feel like I can see things through the Foxx’s eyes. I have a tendency to become completely obsessed, enamored and engrossed with people, subject matters, pop culture gems, films, bands so on and so forth. If I discover something new that really does it for me I want to throw myself into it completely. Learn everything I can about it, study it, absorb it, experience it. I do orient myself as majoritively hetero; however it’s not quite that simple because I am extremely attracted to women. I have had sexual experiences with women and enjoyed them immensely. I think my attraction is directly centered around beauty and femininity. I hope this makes it more clear why I identify with the Foxx, because I have been that perv with my tongue hanging out of my mouth, salivating and my eyeballs popping out of my head while ogling beautiful women countless times.

MA:Many themes in Foxx Luv, anthropomorphism, transgressive sexuality, transformation, are defining features of a contemporary subculture called “furry.”  Were you aware of this subculture during the conceptual phase of Foxx Luv, and if yes, to what degree did your awareness of the subculture influence the work?

CH: I was fully aware of the Furries before making this work, however I did not realize the connection until after meeting you and after the opening had passed. It kind of dawned on me that, holy shit there is absolutely a connection to Furry culture. I mean the luv letter, the way I phrased it it’s like a steamy little furry fantasy. And the Foxx man, I mean he is kind of like a Furry sex doll, or at least he could be. It’s really funny because I am not a Furry but coming away from this show I am beginning the process of a new body of work and I asked myself what was I most stimulated by when I made this show? And my answer to myself was line, color, fur, the Foxx man and sculpture. I love the sensual nature of fur, it’s both aesthetically appealing and gives me tactile pleasure when I feel it. So I absolutely plan to make more fur pieces.

If you look at my past work I have created a lot of characters that are animal human hybrids. I created a series while in grad school called the “Dogma of Dogmen.” These characters had men’s bodies and dog heads. Before grad school I did a series called “Businessmen in Bunnyland.” The main characters were these evil business men and various races of bunny/human hybrids. I have also made paintings of myself as both a bear girl and the sad bunny girl. For my graduate lecture at SAIC I actually dressed up as the sad bunny girl and handed out bags of carrots and eggs with Minnie (Mouse) paintings inside to the audience. So I am not surprised there is this connection. I have a lot of similar interests as an artist to the Furries.

Yiff in Hell, Hipster (the author gets over furrself)

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“He had typed stories for comic books for the past seven years… every genre but funny animals. Sammy drew the line at funny animals. The success in the trade of these dot-eyed, three-fingered imports from the world of animated cartoons, with their sawdusty gags and childish antics, was one of the thousand little things to have broken Sammy Clay’s heart.” – from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

aminals

I was asked to be a guest on a podcast recently. I was asked to explain furry culture to the curious and open-minded hosts and (judging by the response) their equally magnanimous audience. In the interval between publication and this writing, I’ve cringed at my inadequacy at each turn at stammering out bullet-pointed shorthand that doesn’t really explain anything about us fuzzy folk in any great depth or detail. My caveat was that no one had elected me as furry ambassador. Listening to myself, there might be good reason for that. Was I being honest and candid or feeding on self-validating horseshit? A: probably both.

I have opined in the past on the social gulf between Furry and Alternative Comix Culture in 2013 as if it is not a figment of my middle class, status-obsessed imagination. Boutique mini-comic presses, comics as art objects, zine-swaps, these are “cool.” I allow myself to feel validated by my association with them. Fursuiting/kigurumi, plushies, the free and open exchange of cartoon animal people pornography are all “uncool.” I allow myself to feel validated by earnestly enjoying things that run against the grain of internet derision. See what I’m doing here? Better not let the NYT Style section catch wind of this!

l_hanawalt_dog

 

Lisa Hanawalt, not a furry, but she draws them

 

 

There is no furry monoculture. There is room in the polymorphous furpile for everyone’s social baggage. If you think of yourself as a geek, then furry outsider-dom will reflect prismatically off of you. Kink-centric people, pull up a chair. You are home. Naturally the icons of my own middle-class “alternative” youth, (DIY, subversive comics) are a particular draw to me. So I read the new Girl Mountain comic (NSFW) where Mogg the talking cat gives a rimjob to Megg the witch, and it’s a darkly hilarious criss-crossing of wires that our brains can call anthropomorphism; animals doing people stuff, but sometimes in an animal way. There is no gulf between my “alt comix” reading and the “furry” one. They’re one and the same goddamned thing.

So I talk a big game about furry being cool and inherently dignified while dog-whistling my pleas for validation from some vague imagined “indie scene” because I’m an insecure baby. It’s unfair to furry to cage it in this rhetorically purgatory underdog status where it’s constantly being compared to other fandoms or scenes. Furry is furry, and furry comics is comics. Why stick my neck under the boot of good taste when something like Crumb’s Fritz the Cat can acquire respectability anyway in a few decades’ time?

birdsFurry Black Flag girls by Birds at Midwest Furfest 2011 | photo by Tommy Bruce

Here’s one difference. As vaudville theaters disappeared into the dust, the minstrel shows re-emerged onto the silver screen and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit (along with another more famous cartoon mouse than me) took their place. The roots of funny animals as we know them are more disgraceful than even Chris Ware can masterfully repackage. I use funny animal books as my internet handle partly out of the self-lacerating irony that is so popular among cartoonists, we who love the books designed to be thrown into the trash. The truth is, there’s very little interest to be found in what are properly called funny animal comics save maybe the naïve sexuality of dusty old Fox and Crow covers.

Furry is not necessarily a fandom for these comics though, despite how nice and alliterative that sounds. As funny animal comics eventually became too embarrassing to be publishable and began to slough off of communal consciousness, artists began collecting their own stories in self-published fanzines. Fan groups that budded out panels, meetups and parties at sci-fi conventions cleaved away in the 80s to form the basis of its own community. An exhaustive history of the emergent furry scene, first published in the fanzine Yarf! can be found here.  I genuinely miss the rough hewn amateur art (link NSFW) that circulated in early furry fanzines and on sites like the Vixen Controlled Library.  The internet was definitive in making furry a “thing” but it also may have brought about a homogenized, Disney-inspired “furry house style.” Really, a LOT has changed since 1996.

furry

Because comics and illustration are less expensive and labor-intensive than say, film, they became the centerpiece of the emerging furry scene and the basis for its valuing individual creativity over devotion to established properties. Furry lexicon is always changing. I haven’t seen the word “yiff” used earnestly since the 90s, and “furfag” has been adopted from internet harassers as a playful calling card. A wolf is a walf, and walf is a way of life.

Since I’ve been involved in furry (over ten years, yikes!) BBS boards, forums and MUCKS are toast, Deviantart style social art sites like furaffinity are on their way out and new social media like twitter and tumblr are becoming the center of furry expression and communication. I see less and less comics and fanzines, but every furr seems to have a small stable of original characters they draw in disconnected scenes. Costuming, fursuiting or just “suiting” is becoming increasingly central, with dance emerging as the dominant style of performance. I don’t have the words to describe just how uncomfortable these suits are, how disoriented the limited vision can be, how HOT they become in a matter of minutes. Groans of agony, maybe. So to see how folks can make these lumpy, unblinking mascots move with such grace and style and uncanny verisimilitude, it’s not just cool, it’s *magical.*

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Magical. Zeke Hyena by Firestormsix, worn by SkyRyd3r, photo by Abrahm

Over the years, a kind of micro-economy has emerged as furry events became more frequent and their boundaries defined.  There are furry apparel companies, full-time fursuit makers, music labels, news aggregates, book presses and distros, fetish gear makers, a company that makes luxury sex toys shaped like dragon cocks. We are famously open about sexuality and happily produce wave after wave of imaginative, mesmerizing pornography (that link is SO not SFW). Sometimes our radical inclusivity is our finest feature, other times it is a disaster. Some corners of furry are a literal snuggle-fest (my AC suite mid-handle of Bulliet), others are nests of malicious bullying and harassment, so drama-phobic we can allow negativity to carry on unconfronted and unaddressed. The youth culture is sometimes oppressive, though maybe I say that because in less than five years I’ll be 30 (a greymuzzle!) and out of the loop.

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Van-Weasel (nsfw)

 

The new trend in pop journalism from Buzzfeed, Kotaku etc. has been sympathetic, if detatched fly-on-the-wall style coverage of furry conventions. Furries are now valid because we are cute and know how to party and aren’t as bad as every writer asumes we are going to be. This is better than the boring bourgeois sensationalism that came before it. It’s hard to beat the Rumpus’ interview with Kilcodo (full disclosure, a friend of mine) who is honest and candid and dignified in a way I can only look up to from my crib. To know furry is to be one. In my experience, it has been more creatively fulfilling, mind-expanding, fun and joyful than I ever could have imagined when I first snuck that notorious issue of Vanity Fair, the one with Julianne Moore on the cover, off of my mom’s nightstand. In the internet age, where there can be no underground, it is my refuge from respectability, my own polymorphously perverse tribe, and the filter through which I read anthro in comics: Krazy Kat, Fritz the Cat, Omaha the Cat Dancer, the Great Catsby… Gunsmith Cats?

Q&A+General Learnin’ TIME

Yes, a lot of us (including me!) wear animal costumes.  No, not as many of us fuck in them as people think.  Remember what I said about the dancing?

Furries are a global phenomenon thanks to the internet, though we are mostly concentrated in North America, Western Europe and Japan.  The largest furry convention in the world is Anthrocon in Pittsburgh, PA, with over 4000 attendees.

Yes, a huge percentage of furries are gay men, and gay male sexuality and imagery is a dominant force in furry visual culture.  No, I don’t have the faintest clue why this is.

We’re not called plushies.  Furries who are intimate with stuffed animals are called plushophiles.  I’ve been seeing less and less art catering to this interest since the early 2000s.

You should google Chakats.

We are sick and tired of talking about CSI and Tyra and My Strange Addiction.  When approached by media types, your modern furry might be inclined to just make shit up.  We are over it.

Reptiles and birds and dolphins get to be furries too.

A furry can be a person who identifies that way and engages with furry fandom or subculture to any extent of their choosing.  Furry is also a shorthand for any anthropomorphized animal character in historical or contemporary work.  A character in a furry fanzine comic and Bugs Bunny can both be referred to as furries, though the latter was developed of prior to and outside of any association with internet weirdos.

Yiff is a very silly word.  No one uses it like, ever anymore.  But I’m fond of it.

Werewolves are hot.

My costume is a coyote, though I identify as a cartoon mouse.

Yes, it is like a thousand degrees in that thing.  I already told you.  It’s still awesome.

It’s important to know exactly what kind of room party you’re about to visit at a convention.

Uncle Hugo’s Science Fiction Bookstore in Minneapolis, MN has an entire spinner rack of Omaha the Cat Dancer comics and I regret every day I didn’t just walk in there and buy the whole thing.

In furry cartoon porn, some artists prefer to present their characters with human-style genitalia while others defer to the natural look of the represented species.  I like human-style.

I watched a lot of David Attenborough docs growing up.  Actually anything to do with animals was my shit.

Furry conventions are really fun.  You should go.

Cartoon animals rule and it is OK to like them.

 

Cartoonists of Montpellier

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strange creatures in a stranger land

 
Jason was born in Molde in 1965. In 2007 he moved to Montpellier. My mother was born in 1965 along with lots of other people. At intervals between then and now he has written and drawn comic books. He is the best living genre fiction writer in the world. Or someone else is. He writes. He draws. He might drink tea or coffee or perhaps he doesn’t drink either. He might dress as a werewolf and moonlight as a burglar, or simply sit at a desk and write and draw his comic books. I am almost certain my mother is not a burglar, but what do I know? Lots of other people write and draw comic books and some of them are as good as the comic books that Jason writes and draws.

By now Jason’s signature is the stoic anthropomorphic dog, crow and rabbit blanks he uses in his books. Though the majority of his work features animal characters, Werewolves of Montpellier is set aside as his most “furry” book; furry being a shorthand for anthropomorphism as a device that carries meaning.  Like other European animal drawers I have discussed under this masthead, Jason has no involvement with the subculture called Furry(tm) like I do, but Werewolves has some incidental thematic overlap with real life people who dress up as wolves for fun (and/or profit?).

Sven is a Swedish artist and immigrant to Montpellier, France. He used to fill sketchbooks with drawings of Greta. Sven might have followed her to France, but she does not appear in the book. So by the time we meet him, Sven wanders aimlessly around the city drawing buildings. At night he is a cat burglar. Sven is a dog.
 

 
He speaks French well, though there is often more than a language barrier between Sven and his neighbors. He doodles the rooftops of Montpellier and plays chess with his Romanian friend Igor. When he prowls those same rooftops under the shade of night, he wears a werewolf mask. He outs himself at a party when he describes his profession as  “jewel thief.”  Sven “can hide in plain sight under a small talk double-backflip, but when the moon is full and Sven trades the ironical social mask for the werewolf, he enters a more primal state. As the werewolf, Sven abandons pretense and get to know his neighbors in a more intimate setting, prowling through bedside table drawers to uncover not just watches and pendants but lockets, loose Polaroid photos, a vibrator… all because of a story he tells about losing his faith in humanity after he’s taken advantage of for a little bit of money.  After he’s finished he goes home to tell his neighbor Audrey across the hall all about it. She knows that he is in love with her, though he can’t really say it. His secret which bonds him closer to her than anyone else is the goal of his moonlit raids, not the loot.

This is the tidy little meta-narrative of Werewolves: Sven, the immigrant artist, gets to put on an animal mask and go on adventures just like Jason, immigrant artist, drapes blank animal faces over his characters so he, and his readers alongside him, can fully immerse into the stories. We can see ourselves underneath the dogs and rabbits, and we don’t need the glasses from “They Live.” We see the work as self-aware of its own cartooning, the falseness of the animal faces in little moments, a dog emitting sweat-drops of nervousness, or a muzzle still white and furry after a shave. Jason’s animal faces are famously immobile like a mask.
 


c’est ne pas une chienne

 
Jason’s work is often thought of taciturn and unemotional, but in Werewolves, the artificial blankness of the cartooning shores up powerful emotional moments. Sven runs afoul of a secret society of real Montpellier werewolves when a chance photo of one of his botched burglaries makes the front page of the local paper. After a rooftop tussle, one of the real wolves falls and breaks his back. His transformation is witnessed by hospital staff, and to put them off further question, his comrade has to kill him. After a frank exchange, an “I’m sorry” and an “I know,” the second werewolf smothers his friend with a pillow. The wolf’s final, agonized breaths are rendered with a trio of cartoon stars, as if he were bludgeoned with an ACME anvil. Afterward his eyes are a pair of cartoon Xs. Ordinarily used for comedy in classic cartoons, these old warhorses of shorthand highlight the unreality of what it must feel like to have to do this to a friend, and to underscore just how much the second werewolf doesn’t want this to be happening.

“Let’s see how you like it,” the second werewolf says after biting Sven in the book’s climactic scene. The primal werewolf state for him had been truly bitter; an isolation so profound he had to murder a friend to preserve it. Sven had pretended to be a werewolf to escape the loneliness of transplant life in Montpelier, to have a story worth getting close enough to someone to share it with.  For the friendless werewolf, the lycanthropic transformation is a fate worse than death.  For Sven, it’s a release from a life of putting on masks.

 

The joke throughout the book is that when you’re a dog, being a werewolf isn’t all that different. After a hilarious transformation sequence, Sven has a scruffier cheeks and a round nose instead of a pointed one. His eyes take a slight oval shape. Audrey is still the only sharer of his secret, only now he doesn’t have to climb through strangers’ windows.  He can, no, he must stay at home.  “She’s all yours,” Audrey’s ex girlfriend snarls at Sven before she speeds away, though hers and Sven’s relationship changes little after this. Once Audrey Gertrude is now free to literally “let her hair down” and drop her glamorous Hepburn imitation, her status as Sven’s object of desire melts away, and they are at the end what they always were; friends. Transformation is a means of escaping loneliness, even if it metamorphoses from a means to the end itself.

The aspect that makes this book furrier than Jason’s other animal stories is the space that Sven inhabits between being another blank dog character and as a stand-in for the artist.  Furry is not a fandom in that it is not organized around appreciation between any specific commercial property or artistic movement.  It is a creative subculture, where animal characters (either in stories or as autobiographical analogs) as well as the costumes we make for ourselves and each other to parade around in are facets or extensions of a creator’s identity.  There is a performative aspect to Sven’s midnight lycanthropic haunts.  Sven might be Jason’s werewolf mask.  Or he could be fucking with us, a boring old cartoonist in the end.

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.

The Mysterious Joy of Kpop

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14 year-old me would likely arrange to have present-day me quietly thrown into a gorge. My brittle teenage mind that had just begun to cultivate a personality oscillating between discomfort and revulsion with American consumer culture as experienced by my fellow upper middle-classmates didn’t have the mental tools to process the idea of an adult me who would get true happiness from mass-produced consumer pop music. From Korea.

It took almost a year after my boyfriend first showed me a music video, “Nobody” by Wonder Girls, before I took the bait. I was a serious person, after all, with serious taste in designer earhole stimulants. Fast-forward to me trawling the Gaon top 30 every week and spreading the gospel of Girls Generation (make you feel the heat) to my friends. While I’ve been haunting the periphery of the American fandom devoted to Japanese comics, cartoons, food, history, toys, etc. I haven’t found a scene of any analogous size and scope for Korean culture. What a shame! I admit to a touch of troubling exoticism in my enthusiasm. When I use the power of the internet to ask them, plenty of Koreans have told me they find K-pop just as annoying as the Backstreet Boys. I am a white American fan who speaks maybe six words of Korean and can’t decipher Hangul yet, so I don’t understand any of the lyrics as they are sung to me (I’m also a death metal fan, so this is not unusual). I do get a funny feeling when I hear those ebullient diphthongs “niga dagaogi maneul barae / eoseo naege / wa nal deryeo ga jebal (wishing that you would come close / come to me now / please take me with you)*.”

To me, much of Kpop resembles an off-kilter version of music I rejected in the early 2000s, maybe what could have been. Korean music was mostly either traditional or Trot until 1992 when Seo Taiji Boys puzzled a panel of judges on a televised talent program with the concepts of hip hop and the boy band. Much of K-pop today is performed by large prefabricated groups of sometimes more than a dozen fussily styled members. Often one of them is designated to contribute various rap breakdowns scattered throughout each song. Difficult choreographed dancing is a really, really, big deal. Music videos always look very expensive and involve rapid costume changes in a weird empty white room, or rapid costume changes in a multi-colored Missy Elliot-style nightmarish puzzle dimension. Not every member is chosen for their singing ability, and people are refreshingly candid about this.

Like I said, this all sounds like a twisted throwback to the boy and girl groups no one in their heart of hearts truly misses. The thing is, Kpop is blowing up. It’s a global phenomenon, and Korean producers like JY Park (Wonder Girls, Miss A) are taking bold aim at insular American pop charts. The Wonder Girls’ “Nobody” was the first Korean single to crack the Billboard top 100 ever, bolstered by their opening slot on a Jonas Bros. tour in 2009. They have their own made for TV movie on Teen Nick. Competing powerhouse Girls’ Generation, who have two American members, recently performed on Letterman promoting their new single with (asinine) English lyrics.  There’s no telling whether American audiences will bite in large numbers.

In speculating about Korean music’s prospects in the US, I wrestle with my hip instinct to crow about how I knew about all of this K-pop business before it was on the tastemaker blogs’ radar. Also present and accounted for is the urge to contrast Korean aspirations  with those of the Japanese, whose biggest hit in the American market was Kyu Sakamoto’s “Ue O Muite Aruko” at a fluke #1 for three weeks in 1963. I’m not remotely qualified to comment with authority on any of the above. I will briefly note that Korean groups are working with Diplo (the producer miraculously capable of coaxing good music out of Usher), while a new sensation in Japan is Hatsune Miku, a holographic projection, which I should have seen coming a mile away (let’s be honest, I did see it coming. I first saw Macross Plus a decade ago, but that was cartoons, people). If different markets ask different things from their pop performers, or their pop moe holograms then it’s not my place to pass judgment.

Korean producers have proven rapidly adaptable in appropriating the bells and whistles of American and European pop music – autotune, dubstep-style bass drops, that stupid chirping square-wave noise LMFAO has been using – into their artists’ repertoire. The tone of the charts ricochets between hyper-cutesy bubblegum, hard-edge sex danger and syrupy ballads. Lots and lots and lots of goddamned ballads.

I’ve fallen hard for the boisterously feminine groove of Girls’ Generation’s “Gee” and the demented tonal shifts wedged into Davichi’s “8282” and “Time Please Stop.” IU is capable of twee grandeur. 2NE1 provided the anthem for my inner bad bitch. Boyfriend is cute. Super Junior is hot. Wonder Girls’ “Be my Baby” is pure, unrestrained bliss. The music triggers involuntary nostalgia and packages familiar hip hop and R&B melodies to a sophisticated, hopped-up electronic dance beat, but still the music is fresh, playful, at a slight remove from dreary American pop, which prattles on about the club, invoking an hour-long line for the washroom.

K-pop artists go through rigorous training for years while I mime along to the dancing at home in my spare time. The cadence of Korean is pleasant and unfamiliar, but most of all, so is the world of these confident, insanely stylish, physically fit performers. There is a transparent element of escapism in my appreciation for the dancing, which is more often than not stunning. Sometimes I want to watch a group dance, other times I want to be the one dancing like that. Am I going through some creepy quarter-life crisis, reliving my teen years as if I were worshiping Miss A instead of the devil? Loving K-pop is helping me sort out how I experience my own gender queering, and I’m healthier and happier now than I ever was before I tried the green eggs. It’s a dismal world that asks people to logically explain why a certain music makes them feel good. There’s just something special about it. Probably the visors.

 

 

*That translation/romanization comes from youtube users Ffusionnz and TheKpopSubber3.