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I get this way in the morning as well, just not enough coffee.
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reminder that these stream SUNDAY @7pm on YouTube if you would like to join the chat! for all things Dragget: www.draggetshow.com Here is video of it at the con! -- https://youtu.be/CV2EFfUlnAA Our Patreon w/ great new rewards! www.patreon.com/thedraggetshow Telegram Chat: t.me/draggetshow Dungeons & Draggets #12 - reminder that these stream SUNDAY @7pm on YouTube…

ARTISTS WANTED! Please share. Artist of the month is a program to commission and promote furries. It’s paid by site funding with gratitude to patrons. There will be a headline post for the chosen furry, and regular comics may be added too. Here’s art that previously appeared, and this month’s banner and comic from Hugo the Pink Cat.

Twitter: HugoThePinkCat
FA: http://www.furaffinity.net/user/hugothepinkcat/ (some NSFW stuff)

“I’m 34 years old, from Montreal, been in the fandom since 1999 , active since 2001. Been drawing more seriously for the last 7 years. I don’t exactly have a college formation in arts but I’ve been self-taught for the last decade and take a lot of inspiration from European graphic novels and early western animation. “Ligne claire” and bright lively colours are my thing. I like to think I fill a nice little niche between cartoony and still somehow alluring. (Or so my friends say).”

TO APPLY please submit this to banners@dogpatch.press:

• One favorite piece, a one-paragraph bio, and your links.
• Your price for a banner for the top of this site.
• (Optional) price for one comic with artistic freedom (any format, a panel, strip, or page.)
• Price for a six month/six comic contract.

Banner should be at least 1000 x 200 (.jpg, png or gif). Toony furry characters never fail, but it doesn’t have to have characters if it says “furry news” somehow (a graphic design with a fur pattern or collage of headlines would work – experimenting is good.) If you need any idea about what the site is for, try the About page. A comic can be any format – strip, single panel political cartoon, or a story page. Use artistic freedom. It can have existing characters of yours, or just a funny joke. It could be about a story on the site from the last month, issues in fandom, or toon characters talking about stuff in the regular world. Try to keep it SFW. Happy subjects are great but criticism with a point is OK too.

Special shout outs to other artists for this fan art! 

@DogpatchPress: "-mossy swamp ghost gator with a battery powered smoke machine"

I was inspired! 2 ver gator suit & a made-up gator. #anthro #furryart #reptile pic.twitter.com/O3GLcEmlA4

— Jackqua (@Jackqua92) April 9, 2018

Fan art of @DogpatchPress @patch_packrat pic.twitter.com/Jvhv9E9Bml

— Wolf Tanuki (@jacobspencer04) April 9, 2018

@eddie_mote asked me a question in PM and I spent a while answering so he sent a drawing in his style. So cool! Was not expecting that! The floofy tail and ears are my favorite part :3 pic.twitter.com/M0W75LhqXo

— Dogpatch Press (@DogpatchPress) April 18, 2018

Gift art from @eddie_mote for answering some stuff in PM. No need to give anything for that, but I love it! This one is from my rat. (He forgot to draw part of the tail but I'm going to make that part of the sona, he's so sneaky he does the detachable thumb trick with tails.) pic.twitter.com/9B4rzQTSDP

— Dogpatch Press (@DogpatchPress) April 24, 2018

Like the article? It takes a lot of effort to share these. Please consider supporting Dogpatch Press on Patreon.  You can access exclusive stuff for just $1, or get Con*Tact Caffeine Soap as a reward.  They’re a popular furry business seen in dealer dens. Be an extra-perky patron – or just order direct from Con*Tact.

And more kitty art, courtesy of artist Kevin Chan. According to his web site, HeyItsMeu.com, “Kevin Chan is a Los Angeles-based illustrator, designer and multidisciplinary maker.” In spite of the title he’s chosen, he doesn’t only do cats — you’ll find dogs, bears, sheep, and monkeys there too. Many of them available on pins, plushies, prints, and other items that he sells through his Etsy store.

image c. 2018 by Kevin Chan

I would totally go to Cats island.
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Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

Chlorophylle et le Monstre des Trois Sources, by Jean-Luc Cornette (writer) and René Hausman (artist). Illustrated.
Brussels, Le Lombard, March 2016, hardcover, €14,99 (48 pages), Kindle €9,99.

Thanks, as always with French bandes dessinées, to Lex Nakashima for loaning this to me to review.

I am a big fan of the original Chlorophylle stories written and drawn by Raymond Macherot (1924-2008) in the 1950s and 1960s. They have all been reprinted in an attractive three-volume Intégrale set, which I applaud and recommend.

Today Le Lombard is having new adventures produced of many of its most popular comic strips of the French-Belgian “Golden Age” of the 1950s and 1960s, by the most prestigious artists of today. (You should see what has been done with Mickey Mouse!)

Both Cornette and Hausman have had long careers in the French-Belgian comic-book industry as both artists and writers. I will speculate that the main attraction of Chlorophylle and the Monster of Three Sources is Hausman’s detailed watercolor art.

I can appreciate it intellectually. But on a basic emotional level, it seems wrong. It’s like seeing a Donald Duck or Uncle Scrooge story by Jack Kirby or Art Spiegelman in their own art styles – or, contrariwise, a Captain America adventure or a Maus episode drawn in Carl Barks’ art style. But this is being done deliberately.

Macherot made Chloro’s woodland village in “le petit bosquet” (the little grove) look like a little animal village in the forest. The houses in treetrunks and hillocks had front doors and windows. The mice and rabbits and crows wore scarves and hats. In Hausman’s interpretation, they are all unclothed animals living in bushes and tall grasses that are so spiky with twigs and thorns that it’s a wonder the smaller animals don’t spend their time caught up in tangles.

S. Salin in BDGest says that this is an homage, a makeover; not an imitation. Hausman knew and respected Macherot and his work, and he chose to draw Chloro and his northern European woodland grove in a more realistic style than Macherot did. This is Chloro and Minimum just before they abandoned the grove for the island of Coquefredouille and its animal civilization.

Chloro (dormouse) and Minimum (mouse) have had their adventure in a small human city (Pas de Salami pour Célimène, 1957) and returned to the little grove. Minimum has gotten a crush on Particule Piquechester, the youngest and prettiest of the three Piquechester mouse sisters. Particule has chosen to leave her sisters and build her own cabin on the shore of the lake of three sources (three small riverlets feed into it), where she goes swimming.

“‘Particule, do you know that we’re swimming in an enchanted lake?’ Minimum asks. ‘Do you know the legend of the lake of three sources?’ ‘No! I’ve never heard of it.’ ‘They say that the three riverlets are those of friendship… of love…and of separation. The water of the three riverlets mixes in the lake. When someone swims in it, they have to go to a place far from friendship and love to find separation.’” (pgs. 9-10) The next day Particule is missing and her cabin has been smashed to rubble. Chloro leads a rescue mission of Serpolet the rabbit, Particule’s sisters Olive and Vinaigrette, the beaver family, and others to find her (Minimum is too distraught to do anything practical).

To give away a major spoiler, Particule has been kidnapped by Caczor, a genuine Frankenstein’s monster sewn together from a badger and a hedgehog. But like the monster in Shelly’s original novel, Caczor is more a creature of pathos than of horror. The bittersweet ending leaves Minimum free to go with Chloro on future adventures.

Chlorophylle et le Monstre des Trois Sources is successful on its own terms as an-homage-and-not-an-imitation. It’s interesting to see Chloro the dormouse, Minimum the mouse, Serpolet the rabbit, Torpedo the otter, and others drawn in – well, not a realistic style, but more realistically than in Macherot’s funny-animal style. I certainly wouldn’t have recognized them if they hadn’t been addressed by name in the dialogue. Get it as a sample of René Hausman’s — a major European cartoonist’s – art style, in a rare example of his talking-animal art.

– Fred Patten

• Buy on Amazon

La souris Pâquerette a disparu. Chlorophylle et Minimum comprennent très vite qu’elle a été enlevée par le terrible monstre du lac. Sans perdre un instant, les deux compères et leurs amis se lancent sur les traces de la créature. Mais la chasse au monstre leur réserve bien des surprises… René Hausman et Jean-Luc Cornette unissent leurs talents pour rendre un éblouissant hommage au héros culte de Raymond Macherot.

Like the article? It takes a lot of effort to share these. Please consider supporting Dogpatch Press on Patreon.  You can access exclusive stuff for just $1, or get Con*Tact Caffeine Soap as a reward.  They’re a popular furry business seen in dealer dens. Be an extra-perky patron – or just order direct from Con*Tact.

Nellie Le is another artist with a watercolor style and a very straightforward cartoony look — which she puts forward to good effect. At her web site she shows off her latest paintings and prints, but as you can see at her Shopify store she also offers her art on a variety of buttons, bags, pillows, and other household goodies. And, as you can see, many of her items are selling out fast!

image c. 2018 by Nellie Le

Jen Ena is another artist we met at WonderCon (it’s good for those!) As you’ll see on her web site she specializes in highly-stylized fantasy portraits of fairy folk and magical women.  But, if you follow the links to her “Miniatures”, you’ll see her other skill: Creating really, really small paintings of kittens, little dogs, and other fuzzy things. Many of which you can purchase at her Big Cartel store.

Image c. 2018 by Jel Ena

Ok, Vivziepop gets a lot of leeway here. Yeah, have to squint a bit for the furry side of this but it's the Die Young animatorso OMG!
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Author and “sit down comedian” Christopher Locke is back with his second novel, Vincent and the Dissidents. It’s the sequel to Persimmon Takes On Humanity, which of course we talked about before. “In Book Two, while Persimmon and The Enlighteners continue their daring efforts to rescue all animals who are suffering, little do they know that Vincent — the cunning mink who helped the team liberate a fur farm — has been assembling an army. Vincent and The Dissidents are conducting their own rescue missions, but their violent tactics against humans are quickly leading to catastrophic consequences.” Vincent is available now in paperback from Fathoming Press.

image c. 2018 Fathoming Press

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

Black Friday, by Jan Stryvant.
Seattle, WA, CreateSpace, September 2017, trade paperback, $9.99 (226         pages, Kindle $3.95.

Perfect Strangers, by Jan Stryvant.
Seattle, WA, CreateSpace, September 2017, trade paperback, $9.99 (240 pages), Kindle $3.99.

Over Our Heads, by Jan Stryvant.
Seattle, WA, CreateSpace, October 2017, trade paperback, $10.99 (252 pages), Kindle $3.99.

Head Down, by Jan Stryvant.
Seattle, WA, CreateSpace, November 2017, trade paperback, $10.99 (250 pages), Kindle $3.99.

When It Falls, by Jan Stryvant.
Seattle, WA, CreateSpace, January 2018, trade paperback, $10.99 (284 pages), Kindle $3.99.

Stand On It, by Jan Stryvant.
Seattle, WA, CreateSpace, January 2018, trade paperback, $10.99 (256 pages), Kindle $3.99.

The first sentence of Black Friday is, “Sean looked both ways as he started across the street, not that there was much traffic during the day here at the University of Nevada, Reno campus this late in the day.” The third sentence is, “Mid-terms had just finished and he was pretty happy with his grades this semester, he’d finally gotten the hang of this whole ‘college’ thing, so what if it had taken him nearly three years!” Sean may be a college student, but I’ll bet he hasn’t been taking any writing courses.

Black Friday is the first novel in the six-volume The Valens Legacy. It is one of the five novels on the 2017 Ursa Major Awards ballot for Best Anthropomorphic Novel of the Year. It has 506(!) customer reviews currently on Amazon (most books are lucky to get 10 customer reviews), mostly five-star and 4-star reviews, although I agree more with the first cited, a two-star review: “Entirely avoidable grammatical mistakes, misuse of terms and DEAR LORD the treatment of adjectives!”

The other four Ursa Major finalists for Best Novel are Always Gray in Winter by Mark J. Engels, Otters in Space III: Octopus Ascending by Mary E. Lowd, Kismet by Watts Martin, and The Wayward Astronomer by Geoffrey Thomas. I have seen all four of these discussed on furry-fandom websites. I have not seen any indication that anyone in furry fandom has been reading Black Friday. Where did its nominations come from?

Sean Valens has been a student at UN,R for three years. He is walking across the campus when someone tries to kidnap him.

“A van screeched to a halt in front of him, the side door sliding open as a man with his face covered jumped out and ran to help the guy Sean was now struggling with. When a hand came over his mouth as he started to yell, he bit down hard, enjoying the curse of pain from behind him, the guy being distracted enough for Sean to move to his right and slam his hand back into the man’s crotch.

[…]

Sean came to slowly, to the sound of gunfire. In the tight enclosure of the van, it was painfully loud. Grabbing for the hood over his head he gasped in pain, his right arm lit up in agony. Using his left he ripped the hood off and looking around it was complete and utter mayhem. He was covered in blood, and from the bone sticking out of his forearm, it was pretty clear that a lot of it was his.

The van was a complete wreck, the windshield was gone and from the blood and pieces of flesh on the broken jagged edges, he suspected someone had gone through it. There was now a telephone pole where the passenger’s seat used to be. The driver, who was either dead or unconscious, was slumped over the steering wheel, still belted into the seat.

[…]

But that wasn’t the part that was strange; it was what the man was shooting at.

A lion.

He was shooting at a lion.

But this lion didn’t look like any lion Sean had ever seen before, and again, living in Reno, he’d seen quite a few. No, this lion was huge, well wait, weren’t all lions huge?

It hit him, it was a lion-man, and just as the kidnapper fired another shot, the lion-man finally grabbed the arm that was holding the gun, and with a sickening wet sound he ripped it off.” (pgs. 5-8)

The writing may leave something to be desired, but you can’t say it lacks action. This is on the UN,R campus in broad daylight, remember.

Sean and the lion-man escape. The lion-man, who is a were-lion friend of Sean’s dead father, has been shot with silver bullets several times and is dying, so he hurriedly bites Sean and turns him into a were-lion with instantaneous healing abilities.

The rest of the book, and presumably the next five, are about Sean with the aura of an alpha-lion. Everyone knows that in lion prides, the males just relax and let the lionesses do all the work.

“‘Let’s go back to my place,’ Roxy said, grabbing his arm. She could see the conflict raging behind his eyes. His beast was starting to come out.

‘Are you sure?’ Sean asked, because he was totally unsure of himself right now, he knew if he got her alone, well, he was sure to get himself in trouble!

‘Yes,’ Roxy said dropping her voice to a more sultry timber, ‘I’m very sure.’” (p. 22)

Roxy Channing knows this because she’s already a werecheetah. They have mucho macho sex together. Roxy recruits her best friend, Jolene, a tantric (sex) witch, to be part of Sean’s pride.

“‘Also, lycans are looked down on by most magic users and the greater magical community.’

‘Why?’ Sean asked, and then gave her a little nip that made her gasp.

‘Because you’re animals, of course.’

‘Animals?’ Sean growled and gave another, harder, nip, enjoying the way Jolene arched her back and moaned.

‘Oh, they have a low opinion of tantric magic users, too; they say we’re all sluts and whores.’” (p. 110)

Roxy’s father, also a werecheetah, is resigned to her becoming part of Sean’s pride.

“‘Yeah, lions are like that. They fill their prides with kick ass women and then go absolutely mental if anyone even looks at them sideways.’

[…]

Her father shook his head. ‘You know that the different councils that oversee the wizards and other magic users don’t care for us, Honey. They’re not going to want to tell me anything about Sean’s father, and this definitely sounds like the kind of screwed up mess that they’d cause with their politicking.’” (pgs. 115-116)

It turns out that Sean’s father, who was mysteriously murdered long ago, was a rogue alchemist who was friendly to lycans (lycanthropes), and was killed to keep him from developing some magical benefit for them. Now Sean is within a week of his 21st birthday, and these councils of human wizards are afraid that Sean will inherit his father’s power and complete his work. The bad guys who try to kidnap or kill Sean are from the Council of Vestibulum and the rival Council of Gradatim.

The climax (which has a double meaning in this case) has Sean, Roxy, and Jolene attacked by lightning elementals:

“‘So,’ Sean asked, ‘does a lightning elemental look like a ball of static electricity?’

‘Huh?’

Sean pointed down out the doorway and into the area they’d just left. There coming down the staircase was what could only be described as a ball of lighting [sic].

‘Shit,’ Jolene said and pulling out a piece of chalk she started drawing on the floor. ‘Guys, I know this is rude, but if the two of you could start fucking like bunnies, that would be great.’” (pgs. 213-214)

Does Black Friday (cover by eBook Launch) have any female readers? It seems like such an adolescent male fantasy. The covers of some of the later volumes of The Valens Legacy show that Sean’s harem pride grows. Both Roxy and Sean shift into their humanoid cheetah and lion forms, and there are other lycans seen briefly such as a wereboar, that furry fans will not feel disappointed for that reason. Happy rutting!

Black Friday is a Ursa Major Award finalist! Have any furry fans read it?

– Fred Patten

• Buy Black Friday (Book 1) on Amazon
• Buy Perfect Strangers (Book 2) on Amazon
• Buy Over Our Heads (Book 3) on Amazon
• Buy Head Down (Book 4) on Amazon
• Buy When It Falls (Book 5) on Amazon
• Buy Stand On It (Book 6) on Amazon
• Visit Jan Stryvant’s Website

Like the article? It takes a lot of effort to share these. Please consider supporting Dogpatch Press on Patreon.  You can access exclusive stuff for just $1, or get Con*Tact Caffeine Soap as a reward.  They’re a popular furry business seen in dealer dens. Be an extra-perky patron – or just order direct from Con*Tact.

Yeah, we've all been there .... probably.
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We set up the Auction Art Contest for this year’s Furrnion.
Visit this form (link⇒) to cast your vote!

The entry Auction Art Contest for Furrnion 2018 appears first in FurryFandom.es.

Fred Patten started off with a message to Patch O’Furr:

This is a rant, as much as anything.  I wrote, as Secretary of the ALAA (AKA the Ursa Major Awards) to the AnthrOhio Committee, to invite it to host next year’s award presentation ceremony.  AnthrOhio is the new name of former Morphicon in Columbus, Ohio. They presented the Ursa Majors in 2008, 2011, and 2015.

I got a very nice reply from Danny Travis, this year’s Director of Programming for AnthrOhio.  He thinks it’s a great idea and has agreed.  But his reply implies that he’s never heard of the Ursa Major Awards, and that he was unaware that they have been presented at Morphicon/AnthrOhio in the past.

This makes me wonder how many of today’s furry conventions are being organized by people who are mainly interested in putting on a big party with fursuits, and little interest or knowledge in furry fandom beyond their own convention, including their own con’s history.  Some like Anthrocon with Dr. Sam Conway and CaliFur with Rod O’Riley (and any con with staffers who have been around for a while) know what’s going on. But how many are being organized by young people who only use the trappings of furry fandom to have a good time?

You have been following not only the conventions but a lot of the smaller furry parties and raves.  Do you get the impression that most attendees are more interested in partying then other active fandom?

Patch wrote back:

I think part of that may be the reach the Ursa Major Awards have. This award has been around for 17 years or so, before some new furries were born.  The growing population of new, young members are less likely to know the founders. They might not be uninterested with everything else fans do – they might just be out of reach.

Kyell Gold’s books, for example, are really popular with young people. Kyell was so successful with the awards that he had to bow out. I’m not sure how many of his fans are even aware about that.

For more reach, keeping a more active presence for the awards year round would be much better than taking it out of hibernation once a year. It would take hard work, like updating a Twitter regularly. That’s why, a while back, I suggested doing a regular “where are they now” series about award winners (and maybe con guests) from the past. There could be an interesting feature about them once a month to sustain regular interest.

Fred answered with an update about recent Ursa Major Award voting:

The voting for the 2017 Ursa Major Awards is closed, and this year’s voting statistics are in. 1,247 people requested a ballot. 882 actually voted. 250 of those waited until the final day to vote.

That isn’t very good. It’s really bad! The ALAA has statistics back to 2009 for the 2008 awards, the first year that the ballot was completely by e-mail (rather than people requesting a paper ballot to be voted upon and physically mailed in). The number of people actually voting, rather than requesting a ballot, have been:

• 2008 = 273
• 2009 = 1,150
• 2010 = 1,372
• 2011 = 1,782
• 2012 = 1,112
• 2013 = 856
• 2014 = 2,851
• 2015 = 1,157
• 2016 = 1,446
• 2017 = 882

The nominees for 2014 included Guardians of the Galaxy for Best Anthropomorphic Motion Picture, and Furry Force for Best Anthropomorphic Dramatic Short Work or Series. Furry Force was broadcast on College Humor and was one of the few movie or TV productions to acknowledge its Ursa Major nomination. Maybe that was the reason for the unusually large number of votes that year.

Furry fandom supposedly has hundreds of thousands of members and is growing. Theoretically the number of people who know about the Ursa Major Award is also growing each year. But that isn’t reflected in the number of voters each year. It’s been stagnant at 1,200 to 1,300, and took a sharp nosedive this year for reasons unknown.

Some Internet creators ask their fans on their websites to vote for them in the UMAs. We may get a few votes for that reason, but the number of voters still doesn’t go up each year. This year, the Ursa Majors initiated a GoFundMe campaign, and while that has been successful financially, it has not brought any increase in the number of voters. It’s frustrating.

The votes vary from complete ballots – votes in all twelve categories – to votes in only a single category. Most ballots contain votes in about half of the twelve categories. The most popular are Motion Picture, Dramatic Short or Series, and Game – the three that would fall the most if the Ursa Majors were turned into an award for furry fandom creators only.  Movies, TV, and games tend not to be created within furry fandom.  I’m afraid that Best Anthropomorphic Magazine, where Dogpatch Press qualifies, is consistently one of the least voted-upon categories.

Patch thought about it:

This could involve saturation. It’s math – while audience grows, their attention span stays the same. If a group goes from 1,000 to 10,000, but each spend the same hour a day on media, and many of those 10,000 people are also creating media themselves – you see the problem of falling attention span to watch everything.

Creating costs time and money and those who grow a fanbase invest extra effort beyond just enjoying a hobby. If a pool of creators shares revenue among individuals, when they grow, a more-or-less basic share to everyone gets more expensive. Value per person falls and entry cost gets more prohibitive. I think that’s why Youtube creators had ad revenue they depended on cut this year. Only larger producers with more views get it now.

Mainstream book publishing is like that with a few high-traffic bestsellers pulling weight for thousands of “wallpaper” titles. There also used to be the midlist thing with authors who were productive and reliable, even if rarely bestsellers, but I suspect there’s been a lot of polarization with Amazon killing competitors and gaining a monopoly. Furry authors may know the challenge.

Saturation goes with electronic media that can repeat infinitely compared to printing paper. It can go out of control and test the human brain and learning. Black Mirror is a great TV show telling dark futuristic stories about society changing that way. On a down-to-earth level, that saturation can just make a slippery business with a race to the bottom nature.

This is why I think conventions and parties, and the popularity of fursuiting are important community glue. It’s valuable to have real, tangible experiences you can’t download. That’s why this fandom is great compared to others. In fandom there can be advantages for media that’s tethered to a real foundation (like book sales at cons). Engagement can also benefit from the timing of getting it from each other independently of corporate media production schedules.

I think the Ursas could harness that energy from face to face groups and events. How about more focused con panels, workshops, parties, contests, regional awards, or even book clubs? It takes team work, but I hope that helps for ideas about how to keep the awards active. Instead of parties competing against fandom creativity, putting them together could improve both things.

Like the article? It takes a lot of effort to share these. Please consider supporting Dogpatch Press on Patreon.  You can access exclusive stuff for just $1, or get Con*Tact Caffeine Soap as a reward.  They’re a popular furry business seen in dealer dens. Be an extra-perky patron – or just order direct from Con*Tact.

OMG! So may growlithe!
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Braden Duncan is an illustrator who creates watercolor-style works under the name Clockwork Art. According to her web site, her main artistic muse is a black kitten named Diesel. The kitten certainly turns up in much of her artwork! (There are a pair of grey kittens who just joined the household, and they’ve been making appearances too.) She also has an affinity for birds — and, as you can probably guess from her moniker, a thing for steampunk. Much of her work is available as prints or ‘fridge magnets from her Etsy Store.

image c. 2018 by Braden Duncan

Welcome to Bessie, of Marfedblog, a comics review and criticism site. There’s furry stuff there, and much more, with devoted curation by a fan doing exactly what they love. If you like this, give it a follow. And expect more syndicated content reposted here. (- Patch)

Even in a room full of people wearing cartoon animal costumes, a guy lugging a box of old vinyl to his table is going to stand out, especially when he starts drawing and painting on them. This is what caught my eye the first time I saw Eryshé Falafe, also known as Joe Meyer, at Pittsburgh’s Anthrocon around 2011. I ended up getting one myself that still takes up pride of place in my office, and eventually ended up carting a not insubstantial pile of vinyl across the pond for him to deface on my latest pilgrimage to Pittsburgh. One of them was the bawdily British  “Sinful Rugby Songs” which was quickly snapped up by a commissioner who also saw it’s parody potential.

Alternating between his three fursonas, cat-bunny hybrid Eryshé Falafe, red roo Divvy and rabbitdeer Galahad he has been producing comics since he was a kid, discovering furry around 2001, with a number of published works including. Slammin Buneez, the autobiographical In the Meantime and his scathing, satirical and unrelenting look at the fandom, Furry Nuuze Teevee. The strips feature Twiggy, a dumb overly enthusiastic canine TV reporter and host of his own show who diligently reports on the fandom. As a character reserved for lambasting and commenting on internal politics and drama that flair up in the fandom with alarming regularity he usually ends up reflecting the positive side of the fandom while making fun of the negative elements and people.

Running since 2006 and the flip side of the coin to FNTV, Destroying the Illusion is Meyer’s series of diary comics about his daily exploits, conventions and the absurdity of everyday life. Instead of the general drama and negativity this series is more introspective autobiographical comics about Joe’s time in the fandom and goings on in his life. Almost always overwhelmingly positive they often reiterate what anyone will say about the furry fandom and tell you makes for a great con experience: the people. Befitting the immediacy of the travel, diary comic  style, Joe’s art on the strips, mostly in black and white have a cartoony look to them and a sketchy quality.

My favourite of his work though has to be his defaced vinyls. Maybe it’s the same feeling that comes from graffiti, that thrill of doing something you’re not supposed too. Don’t worry for the most part the ones he uses are some truly awful records. Inspired in part by a tumblr group featuring vinyl that had been found defaced in simple and random ways. Scribbles, scrawls and misplaced labels from the original owners, the majority of them are ‘found art’ curiosities discovered in charity shops and yard sales. Taking the idea one step further and with more care and attention Joe has altered and tinkered with  them in various ways, reinterpreting them as unique pieces of artwork. Painting over aspects of the cover, usually the figures with a commissioner’s fusona. I love how fun they are and how even within the confines of what’s already on the sleeve he can capture the personalities of the people behind the characters he paints onto them.

The site hosting the older comics is currently down but newer Destroying the Illusion comics (fondly dubbed DTI2.0) are currently hosted on his own site.

Macro crabs .. ? Sure, why not?
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