Month: June 2016

Originally posted on dogpatch.press where you will find the covers

This is to some extent a “define your terms” question. Furry fandom got started, depending upon whom you ask, with the amateur press associations (APAs) Vootie and Rowrbrazzle. Vootie, “The Fanzine of the Funny Animal Liberation Front”, run by Reed Waller & Ken Fletcher of Minneapolis s-f fandom, lasted from April 1976 to February 1983; 39 bi-monthly issues. Vootie self-destructed when its Official Editors, Waller & Fletcher, grew too disinterested to continue it any longer. A member, Marc Schirmeister of Los Angeles, tried to keep it going, failed, and started its replacement, the quarterly Rowrbrazzle, beginning in February 1984. Rowrbrazzle was designed so that, when the Official Editor steps down or is unable to continue, another member is selected to replace him. Rowrbrazzle is still going after thirty years; the current O.E. is William Earl Haskell of Houston, Texas. So it’s technically a current furry publication.

HUZZAH-Vootie and Rowrbrazzle, and later furry APAs such as the Furry Press Network, Huzzah!, and Canada’s FURthest North Crew, exist(ed) as membership clubs averaging 25 to 30 members, whose members print their own fanzines in enough copies for all members, and send them all to the O.E. for assembly into a super-fanzine of 25 to 30 copies that are sent to each member. The only way to get a copy is to join the APA and publish your own pages. Private membership APAs are traditionally not counted as furry publishing.

The earliest generally available publication in furry fandom was the fanzine FurVersion, published by Kyim Granger (real name: Karl Maurer) of the San Francisco Bay area. FurVersion ran for twenty-one issues from May 1987 to November 1990. It began as a simple mailing list of furry fans’ names and addresses, so they could keep in touch with each other in pre-Internet days. Fans began sending in their sketches and amateur fiction for publication, and FurVersion quickly turned into an amateur magazine for furry art & fiction. It had a cover price and subscription. FurVersion was the first of many amateur magazines published by furry fans from the late 1980s through the early 2000s. The most famous and successful was Yarf!; the Journal of Applied Anthropomorphics, edited and published by Jeff Ferris of the San Francisco Bay area, with the help of Bay Area furry fandom. It lasted for 69 issues, from January 1990 to September 2003. Yarf! is currently being republished as five-issue volumes by Jarlidium Press of Seattle (see below).

Other notable furry fanzines were PawPrints Fanzine, edited by Conrad “Lynx” Wong & T. Jordan “Greywolf” Peacock; FurryPhile Magazine, edited by Brian L. Miller and later Bryon L. Havranek; Steam Victorian, edited by Zjonni Perchalski; Mythagoras, edited by Watts Martin & Bill Biersdorf; Zoomorphica, edited by Watts Martin; FURtherance, edited by Runé (Ray Rooney) of the Funny Animal Anti-Defamation League; Gallery, edited by Richard Chandler; The Ever-Changing Palace, edited by Lex Nakashima; Fantastic Furry Stories, edited by Mike Curtis; Tales of the Tai-Pan Universe, written, edited, & published by a furry writers’ & artists’ collective in Seattle; Fang, Claw & Steel, edited by Terry Wessner in Canada; Fur Scene, edited by Martin Dudman in England; South Fur Lands, edited by Jason Gaffney and later Bernard Doove in Australia. Kyim Granger ran Fauxpaw Productions/Publications from 1996 to 2006; two fanzine-format magazines, Fur Plus and Fur Visions, and several fanzine-format novellas, notably the Fornax series by Matt J. McCullar about the misadventures of four ratel sisters trying to become a hit quartet in the sleazy pop-music industry. A couple of these fanzines lasted for fifty issues or more; most lasted around ten issues; a couple lasted only one or two issues. Tales of the Tai-Pan Universe is the only one still being published, and it is a special case. It does not accept general submissions; all stories have to fit into and are carefully edited to fit into its fictional interstellar universe. (The Tai-Pan is a merchant spaceship with an anthropomorphic crew.)

These and other furry amateur magazines/fanzines ranged from home-mimeographed to professionally printed. In almost all cases, their editor was also their publisher. The individual publications disappeared for different reasons – in one case, a minor government official who did not believe in furry fandom threatened to have its editor arrested for fraud if he did not discontinue it, and the fan could not afford to fight it – but in general, in the early 2000s two things happened: (1) rising printing and postage costs meant that the publication would be sold at a loss unless the cover price and subscriptions increased so much that people would stop buying it; and (2) fan writers and artists switched to posting their works on Internet websites, and the free submissions of furry art & fiction that the publications relied upon dried up.

This did not matter too much, because by then, what most people mean by “furry publishing” had finally started. The first furry specialty publishing companies had appeared, usually getting their books printed through new print-on-demand technology. They had a rocky beginning, but by the early 2010s, several furry small presses were firmly established.

FurrKidd_-_Mus_of_Kerbridge_Coverarty fandom can thank Paul Kidd of Australia for this. Kidd has been a fanatic furry fan for decades. He submitted his earliest furry novels to mainstream publishers, who universally rejected them as too weird to sell. Kidd joined Rowrbrazzle in April 1989, and immediately started serializing one of his unsalable manuscripts; the furry 17th-century Mus of Kerbridge; so there is proof of when he started. Kidd did finally sell Mus of Kerbridge, published as a TSR Books paperback in April 1995.

The first furry book publishers began with Paul Kidd novels. Darrel Benvenuto, a grandiosely-promoting furry entrepreneur during the 1990s (he published four issues of The American Journal of Anthropomorphics, and advertised it as the leading furry professional magazine), announced around 1999 that he was starting the first furry professional publishing company. He did publish two trade paperback novels: Paul Kidd’s unsold A Whisper of Wings, with cover and illustrations by Terrie Smith (Vision Books, October 1999, vi + 348 pages), and the commissioned The Rats of Acomar, also with cover and illustrations by Smith (Vision Novels, October 2000, 197 pages). The Rats of Acomar was written to be the first novel in Vision’s Tales of the Mornmist series, and Benvenuto announced that the next three were finished, each by a different author, but they were never published. Benvenuto launched a comic-book line slightly earlier, Vision Comics, with four titles. Most never got past the second issue.

Meanwhile, Martin Dudman started United Publications as a bookstore near London. United Publications was primarily a mail-order service for importing American books and fanzines, more comic books than furry titles, for sale to British fans. But Dudman did want to publish furry books that were high-quality that no mainstream publisher would buy. In April 2000 United Publications released Paul Kidd’s furry Arabian Nights novel Fangs of K’aath (also serialized in Rowrbrazzle during the 1990s) as a hardbound book with a dust jacket and interior art by Monika Livingstone (iii + 364 pages). Furry fandom assumed that Kidd gave Dudman the manuscript for free just to get it printed. It was (and is; it’s still available) a beautiful book.

Unfortunately, Dudman decided that publishing a “real book” was too much work. United Publications’ next announced book was Tales of Perissa by Brock Hoagland; a collection of eleven furry pastiches of Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian sword-&-sorcery adventures featuring a teenaged leopardess assassin. But when it was published in July 2001, it was little more than an 80-page comic-book format stiff-covered pamphlet of the first five stories. UP followed it up in January 2004 with Tales of Perissa: Book 2, also 80 pages with the six remaining stories; but only UP’s publicity considered these “books”. United Publications still exists, primarily as a British mail-order importer (a specialty today is American editions of Japanese anime & manga) but still publishing the occasional furry role-playing-game or furry comic-strip booklet. It does have three more “real” furry books to its credit: the novel Fangs of K’aath II: Guardians of Light, by Paul Kidd (January 2006, 337 pages); the collection Tales of the Fur Side, stories by Vixxy Fox, art by Dark Natasha (June 2006, 187 pages); and the hardcover Sabrina Online: A Decade in Black and White, by Eric W. Schwartz (April 2012, 164 pages). UP also publishes the annual trade paperback collections of the Sabrina Online Internet comic strip by Eric W. Schwartz; currently up to #14.

United Publications is still going, but it publishes new books so seldom that it’s not usually considered one of the successful publishers. Those are all in the U.S.

This article released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license

My dream of preserving the past suddenly blossomed into something that has left me totally stunned. No it wasn’t legal issues, it was discovering where we furries started. We all like to think maybe the 2000s, if you’re a Greymuzzle you might even say when the Disney animated version of Robin Hood when it came out in 1973.

As one other furry has proven it goes long before even 1973 LINK

As we look at furry art, and fursuits none of ever think of what it was like in the early days…

I got from an eyewitness who told me they went to the very 1st fur con ever ConFurence 0 back in 1989. They told me there was only 3 comic book dealers there and it barely lasted 4 hours. Which you might be surprised was free to get in, but no one there would admit to being a furry. One thing they do remember well, of how this one guy ran across the street to a convenience store and picked up some drinks and started to sell them at the convention.

No one has ever heard this before, unless you were there.

We can’t let furry history just turn into dust or plan be forgotten.

Like this furry comic that started in 1986 it’s called T.H.E. Fox and can be found here LINK

According to Wikipedia T.H.E. Fox is a furry comic strip by Joe Ekaitis which ran from 1986 to 1998. It is among the earliest online comics, predating Where the Buffalo Roam by over five years. T.H.E. Fox was published on CompuServe, Q-Link and GEnie, and later on the Web as Thaddeus. Despite running weekly for several years, the comic never achieved Ekaitis’ goal of print syndication. Updates became less frequent, and eventually stopped altogether.

as originally posted on hackread.com

A well-known and widely followed online hub of furries community called Fur Affinity disappeared from the web. The furries community is a group of people having a keen interest in anthropomorphic animal characters like foxes and wolves. The hackers wiped off all sorts of content including art submissions and user profiles from Fur Affinity website, which actually is an online gallery that allows users to upload music, art, and written content.

Website owners always use a backup for your website!
It is quite possible that they also stole email addresses and hashed passwords. The website’s self-proclaimed Director of Operations, who uses the nickname Chase, stated in an announcement on the site’s discussion forum that “the attackers [gained] access to personal user data, such as encrypted passwords and email addresses.”

This announcement was made on Friday while by Saturday morning, a user having the profile name Fender clarified that the passwords have already been reset. Fender also revealed that the site has been facing issues since early on in May as researchers identified some technical flaws and vulnerabilities in the ImageMagick library. Attackers were able to exploit this weakness and run arbitrary code to hack the website by downloading the site’s source code prior to patching of the website by the admins.

According to MotherBoard, after exactly a week, the site’s administrator, who uses the name Dragoneer, heard that users at an anonymous convention were selling the site’s source code on USB sticks and the same day their site was hacked again. In this next phase of attacks, the site’s content was deleted by the attackers. However, the site’s security team prevented key data like notes and journals from being deleted.

Dragoneer explained on the site’s forum last week that the team was busy investigating the selling of their website’s source code “somebody launched a second attack against the site using information gleaned from the source code.”

“At this time, we do not know who executed the attacks on this site. An analysis of the attack vector used suggests these individual(s) were experienced attackers and not casual bystanders,” states Fender.

Using a backup, the team was able to restore Fur Affinity on 11th may and therefore, the damage isn’t too much.

You might of noticed earlier this week I made a new page for this blog simply titled “Downloads”. Since I have a passion towards early furry material IE comic books, magazines, fanzines and etc. Some of it is absolutely incredible in my opinion, and a lot of it you just can’t find anywhere. So I decided to make it available. But only out of print furry material will be available to either view or download. The Downloads page will be updated from time to time, when I have whatever I am working on finished. There will be no regular schedule, as it does involve quite a bit of work turning them into PDF files. Which is completed by using Open Office.

In addition all work posted will predate 2010, and must be out of print. Otherwise it will not get posted. The only exception to this rule is con books. I plan on scanning and posting the handful of ones collected at MFF. Like usual if anyone has anything they like to see made available to everyone.

Please email me @ yiffytimes (at) G Mail dot com

Like usual if you’re the copyright holder to any of this work, and wanted it taken down. Please feel free to contact me, and we can talk about this issue.

Otherwise the rule I am using is this…

This article released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license

The shocking fact is that over 63% of those involved in the early days of the fandom are no longer apart of it. I have not been able to find them. We can’t let any of this vanish to time. I will even say if you want to submit copies of whatever I posted. Please feel free to share on as many sites as you wish.

On Monday I made a post of how one of my contributors got harassed by a couple of bullies calling themselves furries. That was when I issued the challenge say what you have to say at me, the only problem would be is that I would name names, and exactly what was said. I didn’t get a single email from them, it shows you faced with real life consequences, bullies will cave every single time.

I may from time to time post views and opinions, from not only myself but from other people who have their own views on the world we live in. But I will go on record to say I back up their right to free speech. Have a problem with it. My contact information is for all to see.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIT3ZQ4GsSQ