Category: Interviews

Questions by Ahmar Wolf and Greyflank

If the name Fred Pattern isn’t familiar it should be, after all he is one of the founding members of the furry fandom. His Bio on Wikipedia is amazing.

Which says in brief.

In 1972, Patten partnered with Richard Kyle to create Graphic Story Bookshop in Long Beach, California. In an interview posted on the (now defunct) website of Pulp Magazine, Patten said he had discovered manga at Westercon, one of the largest science fiction conventions on the West Coast, in 1970. At the time, he had been aware of television shows like Astro Boy, but had no idea then that they were Japanese. Through his bookshop, he wrote to Japanese publishers, asking to import their manga, achieving some success and in the process becoming a pioneer in the anime and manga fandom. He was one of the founders of the Cartoon/Fantasy Organization, the first American anime fan club, in 1977.[2]

During this time, Patten worked in numerous library positions, notably that of technical catalogue librarian at Hughes Aircraft Company’s Company Technical Document Center (CTDC), in El Segundo, Calif., from 1969 to 1990. After leaving that position, he served from 1991 to 2002 as the first employee of Streamline Pictures, one of America’s pioneering anime specialty production companies, founded by Carl Macek and Jerry Beck in 1988. He has been a presenter at major conventions and guest lecturer at universities in the U.S. and Australia.

Patten wrote numerous monthly columns and individual articles for Animation World Magazine, Newtype U.S.A., the Comics Buyer’s Guide, and other magazines, including serving as the Official Editor for the Rowrbrazzle Amateur Press Association, until March 2005, when he suffered a stroke. No longer able to keep his collection, which had grown over more than 40 years, he donated everything – almost 900 boxes (~220,000 item) of comic books, records, tapes, anime, manga, programs from science-fiction conventions dating back to the 1930s, convention T-shirts, paperbacks, and an array of sci-fi fanzines back to the 1930s – to the J. Lloyd Eaton Collection at the University of California, Riverside, which houses the world’s largest collection of science fiction, fantasy and horror.

Has worked on 14 BOOKS, been apart of 5 major comics Mangazine, The Ever-Changing Palace, Albedo: Anthropomorphics, Furrlough and Theriopangrams.

Has been apart of no less than 23 anime series everything from Fist of North Star to Lupin 3

This is why this is the most important article I ever posted here.

1. What drew you into science fiction and later anime.

I’ve been asked this many times, and I don’t know. I do remember when I discovered science fiction. I was always a voracious reader, and I read all the books around my house (I was reading my mother’s Perry Mason mysteries before I got the Dick and Jane readers in elementary school) and the children’s books at the library that were recommended to me. One day my father brought home Sixth Column by Robert Heinlein rom the library. It was a new book that the librarian had recommended he try. My father didn’t care for it, but before he returned it I had read it and loved it. (Sixth Column was published in December 1949, so the library must have got it in 1950 when I was nine years old.) I read all the other s-f in the library, first the juvenile books and then the adult books by Ray Bradbury and A. E. van Vogt and so on. By the time I was through with them, I was old enough to go to the neighborhood newsstand and buy the monthly magazines like Astounding, Galaxy, and F&SF, plus the new paperbacks (only 25¢ or 35¢ at the time), and read the poorer s-f magazines while standing there. This lasted until I entered college and joined organized s-f fandom in 1960.

Why did I like s-f rather than sports fiction or Westerns or mysteries? I don’t have any idea. But I’ve always been interested in the more exotic stuff. When comic book fandom developed in the 1960s, I tried the costumed superheroes and preferred foreign comics. I wrote an article on original Mexican superheroes is 1965. I liked American theatrical and TV animation, but went crazy over Japanese manga and anime in the 1970s.

2. It had been reported you started with Astro Boy, I wonder had you ever seen any of the earlier anime to hit America. Such as Speed Racer, Gigantor, 8 Man. I believe you worked on the later sequel 8 Man After. In your opinion how has anime evolved from those earlier days.

No, I didn’t watch the first Americanized anime of the 1960s: Astro Boy, Gigantor, Speed Racer, and so on. I graduated from UCLA and got my first job as a professional librarian, and stopped watching cartoons on TV, in Summer 1963 just before the Americanized anime appeared. I heard about them, but not as anime; they were “foreign cartoons”, usually not even identified by nation. I didn’t discover anime as Japanese animation until 1976 when Mark Merlino, a local fan, began to video-record it on his new VCR from the local Japanese-community channel. It was very obviously in Japanese, subtitled in English. Merlino & I and a few others started the Cartoon/Fantasy Organization, the first anime fan club, in May 1977; it’s still meeting. I self-taught myself about anime during the late 1970s and the 1980s, and started becoming professionally involved with anime when I joined Streamline Pictures in January 1991. Yes, 8 Man After was one of our titles.

3. You have worked on so many projects in the world of Anime. How did you get your start.

During the early 1970s another fan (Richard Kyle) & I started a comic-book specialty bookshop, Graphic Story Bookshop in Long Beach, California, to import and sell the best international comic books. I was in charge of writing to the international publisher and trying to buy their comics. During 1972 to 1975 I wrote to publishers in Belgium France, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, etc., and of course Japan. This was for the manga, but it was how I first became aware of the anime. Merlino & I were active in anime fandom from 1977 on, and I became more knowledgeable about the genre over the decade. By the time Streamline Pictures was ready to hire its first employee in 1991, I was ready.

4. When did you first begin the feel drawn to the anime and/or Furry work? When did you first become active in them?

I first became aware of anime as a fan in 1976 when the first subtitled giant-robot s-f or superhero cartoons appeared on American TV, and I became active when we started the Cartoon/Fantasy Organization in May 1977. I’ve written how furry fandom got started, or a key early event, was at the 1980 World Science Fiction Convention in Boston. I was more of a silent onlooker at that, but when the furry apa Rowrbrazzle was started in February 1984, I was a charter member.

5. Tell me a little about what you were like before you discovered organized fandom.

Before I discovered organized s-f fandom in 1960, while I was in college, I was a loner. I was obsessed with s-f ever since I was nine years old. During my teens I set a goal of reading every s-f book and magazine ever written, which was literally possible at the time. It wasn’t until the end of the 1950s that new s-f books and magazines started appearing faster and in greater quantity than anyone could read it all. Beginning in the 1950s many s-f paperbacks began appearing that were originals, not reprints of hardcover books; and since libraries wouldn’t take paperback books, I started a personal library of “the books that libraries won’t keep”. I must have had thousands of books by the time I had my stroke in 2005.

6. If we’ve done the math right, you began going to SF conventions when much of “First Fandom” still were major players.

Yes. I joined organized s-f fandom in 1960, and I attended most of the World S-F Conventions of the 1960s. Besides meeting many of the authors of the time, I met many of the members of First Fandom like Don Wollheim, Fred Pohl, Sam Moskowitz, Jack Speer, Dave Kyle, Bob Tucker, and so on. The first time I ever left the U.S. was to the 1970 Worldcon in Heidelburg,Germany, where I met many of the European fans.

7. You had a great view of the anime and “Big Foot” sub-fandom as they began to form. Where and when did you see the first panel tracks?

In anime fandom, I think the first anime panels at s-f conventions were just to make the hard-core fans like Mark Merlino and me happy during the early 1980s. We heard that East Coast fans like Brian Cirulnik and Michael Pinto from the New York City and Philadelphia area, from the C/FO New York chapter and the Star Blazers fan club, were doing the same thing at East Coast s-f conventions around 1981 and 1982. I remember when one s-f convention in Arizona called its anime video room “the Fred Patten conspiracy to get you to watch cartoons in a language you can’t understand”. The San Diego Comic-Con was friendly to making an anime video room available throughout the 1980s. I’m not sure when s-f conventions started regularly scheduling anime rooms because everyone expected them at a s-f convention, but I think it was around 1985 or 1986. I’m also not sure when s-f conventions started including anime-subject panels besides the video rooms, but I’d say also around 1985.

In furry fandom, my experience in California and the West Coast was that the only furry presence from about 1985 on was around Mark Merlino & Rod O’Riley and their Furry Party table and room parties. In 1989 Merlino & O’Riley started the first furry convention, the ConFurences. Midwest furry fan Robert C. King says that there was a strong furry presence at the DucKon s-f convention in Chicago for years until it grew so large that the DucKon organizers encouraged and helped their furry fans to start the Midwest FurFests.

8. What got you write your very first furry book, and did you have any problems finding a publisher to even look at it.

I had a lot of trouble. I grew up reading all the s-f books that I could find. These included anthologies of s-f short stories like The Year’s Best S-F Stories that editors would select from the monthly s-f magazines. Around the mid-1990s I became aware that several furry fanzines had started that had stories just as good, but because they weren’t known outside furry fandom, their stories weren’t being considered by the s-f anthologists. I assembled an anthology of good stories from the furry fanzines in 1995, took it to a s-f literary agent, Ashley Grayson, and he agreed that it was a good s-f/fantasy anthology. He tried for about two years to find a mainstream publisher that would buy it, including all the s-f specialty publishers like DAW Books and Baen Books, and he finally reported that nobody would publish it. It wasn’t until the first furry specialty publishers began in 1999 & 2000 that one of them agreed to publish it; Best in Show, which Sofawolf Press published in 2003. I think that most furry s-f & fantasy books are still mostly ignored outside of furry fandom.

9. You have worked with many furry publications over the years, how did you find them,or did they find you and where any of them successful?

I found them, in all cases. All the stories that I wanted to publish in anthologies were either reprints of s-f stories that I had read in s-f magazines and books over about fifty years, or once furry writers like Phil Geusz and Kyell Gold began to develop, new stories written especially for me. Once FurPlanet agreed to pay for stories for my books and to publish them, I’ve had almost no trouble. There have been less than a half-dozen stories from the s-f magazines that I could not get permission to reprint. Unfortunately, this includes what I think is one of the best furry stories ever written; “Jerry Was a Man” by Robert A. Heinlein in 1947.

10. Tell us about the Forry Ackerman and “Clifton’s Cafeteria Science Fiction Club,” Greyflank constantly refers to you, not only the Godfather of Furry Fandom but as Furry’s own version of Forry J Ackerman. Can you tell us abit about him and the work that led up to you getting the Forry Award in 2008?

I joined the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society in 1960, so I only met Forry Ackerman for about the last decade that he attended its meetings. We were meeting in various private homes and public meeting rooms like the Palms Park during that time. The LASFS didn’t buy its own clubhouse until 1973, by which time Forry had stopped attending meetings except for anniversaries and other special events. When I joined, I asked questions about the club’s past. The late 1930s meeting at Clifton’s Cafeteria were mentioned a few times, but most of the stories were about meetings at the Bixel Apartments during World War II and at the Prince Rupert Arms basement during the 1950s. One story that I was often told was that the Prince Rupert basement had several high windows that opened onto the street. During one meeting, a woman looked down into the basement and asked, “Who ARE you people?” Ray Bradbury jumped up and shouted, “We are SCIENCE-FICTION fans! And I am MOBY DICK!”

Forry Ackerman was mostly a Historical Figure when I knew him during the 1960s. He was “just a fan”, but he was the editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland, a professional magazine even if it was devoted to monster movies rather than s-f. He had been one of the first s-f literary agents with authors like Ray Bradbury, A. E. van Vogt, and L. Ron Hubbard among his clients. (One time I read a lot of LASFS meeting minutes from the 1940s. One meeting during the late 1940s was described as something like, “the meeting’s program was very interesting tonight, but I was told not to say what happened.” Someone else had added in pencil, “Hubbard hypnotizing people again.”) I was told by several people about the World Science Fiction Conventions from 1939 through the 1950s, and Forry Ackerman was always there.

The Forry Award is an annual LASFS award since 1966. It doesn’t have anything to do with Forry except being named after him. I got it in 2008 more for all that I had done over 48 years in s-f fandom than for being an author or editor. By 2008 I had written hundreds (probably over a thousand) s-f book reviews published in many fanzines, published a professional s-f literary review magazine, Delap’s F&SF Review, during 1975-1977, worked on many s-f convention committees, was a co-founder of anime fandom when most Japanese animation was s-f or fantasy, and edited one book, Best in Show. The 2006 World S-F Convention had given me a special Life Achievement Award for “a lifetime of service to the fandom”. It wasn’t until after 2010 that most of my books have been published.

11. When did you see people start creating Fursonas? Why did you choose an Eagle?

The furry fans in the 1980s didn’t have fursonas. I don’t think that even when fans started dressing in fursuits during the 1990s that they had regular fursonas; just names for their costumes, that often changed. Fursonas started during the 2000s.

I haven’t really adopted a bald eagle as my fursona. During the 1990s Jim Groat insisted that everyone HAD to have a fursona (he was a goat), and when I refused to pick one, he told everyone that my fursona was a bald eagle. A couple of cartoonists besides Groat drew me as one; Mitch Beiro is the only one I remember. Since then whenever anyone has insisted that I HAD to have a fursona, as Thurston Howl did for his Furries Among Us book, I said that they might as well use a bald eagle.

12. If we recall correctly, you where the first to create a Furry non-fiction book, an index to all Furry stories? AN ANTHROPOMORPHIC BIBLIOGRAPHY from YARF. Can you tell us a bit about that and what the fandom response to it was?

There had been several bibliographies of furry books or animal-related books in furry fandom before mine, but they were all online (and apt to be taken down without notice), they didn’t seem to know about each other, they were all missing titles (different titles in different bibliographies), and most of them included several animal books like Jack London’s The Call of the Wild and White Fang that aren’t about anthropomorphized animals. I decided to compile my own bibliography, and to put it into print so it wouldn’t “disappear”. Jeff Ferris agreed during 1994 to publish it as a Yarf! publication, and it came out in January 1995

During the next few years a lot more books with talking animals were published, and I discovered several more that I had missed earlier, so I compiled the 2nd and 3rd editions. I compiled a 4th edition to 2003, but Yarf! never published it; and Yarf! disappeared completely after 2003.

I never heard what the response to it was, except that Jeff said that it sold well and he was glad to publish the 2nd and 3rd editions. I met a couple of fans who said they had learned about some books that they hadn’t known about before.

13. Furry went thru a heavy period of Virtual Reality when that the home computer became ubiquitous. Did you ever get much into that, and if so, can you tell us about that?

No, I never got into video games or virtual reality worlds.

14. The biggest rift in the Furry community was probably the Burnt Furs conflict. Can you tell us a little about that from your point of view.

I was never involved in the Burnt Furs wars, either. I only read the reports about them in what you might call second-generation websites like Flayrah.

15. Furry remains very welcoming and open about sexual preferences and identity. As a West Coaster who was a young adult during the 60’s and 70’s, would you say you were more progressive on sexuality or do you feel that the less said the better.

As a s-f fan during the 1960s & 1970s, I barely noticed sex. I did notice that a lot of fans were marrying each other; John & Bjo Trimble, Len & June Moffatt, Bruce & Dian Pelz. (They later got amicably divorced and each married other s-f fans.) There were also well-known homosexual fans like Jerry Jacks, who died of AIDS. Gender or sex was never important in s-f fandom. It was more asexual than welcoming. As long as you were a s-f fan, your sexuality didn’t matter.

16. Where to you see the Furry Fandom headed.

Furry fandom is already a lot different than it was in the 1980s. There is much more emphasis on wearing fursuits, adopting fursonas, and embracing and publicly exhibiting a furry identity. There is also a furry literary community now, which is what I’m active in. A few furry fans who are publishers or fursuit makers or artists are able to make their living in furry fandom instead of it only being a hobby for them.

17. Tell me about what you’re currently working on.

I’ve just completed the anthology Gods with Fur for FurPlanet Productions, and I am working on another, The Dogs of War, to be published either for Midwest FurFest in December or for Further Confusion in January. I have a history of furry conventions, Furry Fandom Conventions, 1989-2015, in production at McFarland. I’m always reading furry books and reviewing most of them, currently for Dogpatch Press. Outside furry fandom, I have my weekly animation column.

To tell the complete truth I only found out about Anthro magazine through an article on Dogpatch Press. I did this because I was doing some research on the different furry publications back in the day for a future article, besides I am a fan of this older furry work.

I then went to Wikifur first, which stated the following: Anthro was a bimonthly furry online fanzine which started with its September/October 2005 issue. The work carried a number of regular features, and a complement of stories, poems, interviews, and factual articles.

Anthro’s editor/webmaster was Quentin ‘Cubist’ Long, who performed similar duties for his other (now dead) fanzine TSAT. Michael W. Bard — Long’s partner-in-crime — initially performed associate-editorial duties as he’d previously fulfilled for TSAT, but stepped down after Anthro #6 (July/August 2006). Neither Long nor Bard considered themselves to be furries when they started Anthro; Bard later came out of the closet, but Long still maintains his distance.

The inspiration for Anthro was a conversation between Quentin and Phil Geusz at the 2005 TSA-Bash about the lack of online furry publications focussing on quality written work. Long’s primary goal for Anthro was to make it a known source of high-quality furry material, including stories, art, columns, fact articles, poetry, webcomics and reviews. The intent was for it to turn into a reader-supported paying market.

Anthro went on “unplanned hiatus” in October 2010. A comeback was announced in August 2011, and the magazine produced two more issues at the end of that year. While no formal notice of the magazine’s end has been published, no issues have been produced since December 2011.

The page also listed a link to their website, which can be found HERE

Wanting to know more I then contacted Quention Long through his website.

Which began simply when I asked why did Anthro magazine ended…

Greets! Why (you ask) has ANTHRO not been updated for five years? Well… a few reasons.

Lack of feedback. Yes, ANTHRO had a lot of readers—the website traffic figures demonstrated that—but said readers never did anything *but* read the netzine, as best I can tell. ANTHRO’s readers may have liked the netzine a great deal, but the number of said readers who ever sent us emails to let us know what they thought? Bloody near *zero*. It was a good month when we got even *one* response from readers. So, nigh-absolute lack of feedback. Not helpful.

Lack of money. I’d been unemployed for an extended period of time, and I was kinda hoping to get some money coming in from ANTHRO. For the most part, this did not happen.

Subscriptions: I offered them. Very few readers ever chose to buy one.

So-called “affinity links” with online retailers, that would send a bit of cash my way when a reader clicked thru and bought something: I made a point of providing affinity links for *everything* I possibly could, that was mentioned in ANTHRO. As best I can tell, *nobody* *EVER* clicked thru, hence no income from this.

Ink-on-paper books: Using the print-on-demand outfit Lulu.con, I produced and sold physical “dead tree” collections of ANTHRO material, and of a couple furry novels. Very few sales.
Posters, t-shirts, other miscellaneous items: These, from Zazzle,com, another print-on-demand outfit. Again, very few sales.

All in all, ANTHRO never generated an income stream anywhere near large enough that I could actually hope to live on it. Exactly why the netzine failed to generate an income stream is a question I don’t know the answer to; maybe it was the economy, maybe I had an unrealistically optimistic concept of how well the readers would like the netzine, maybe my pitiful efforts at advertising were just *that* ineffectual, maybe something else, maybe a combination of factors… I dunno. What I *do* know, is that the money just wasn’t there.

Another factor which didn’t help, and was probably closer to “straw that broke the camel’s back” than a major issue in and of itself: ANTHRO’s founding co-editor Michael Bard died unexpectedly. If the readers had been letting us know what they liked or disliked… if the netzine had been an income stream I could live on… I might have continued even after Bard’s death. But in the absence of either feedback or income?

The bottom line is, I put a *lot* of work into ANTHRO. Never got much of anything back from it, beyond personal satisfaction at a job well-done. And eventually, that just wasn’t enough.

“Bewitched” + “Charlie’s Angels” – Charlie = “At Arm’s Length”

Read the webcomic at At Arm’s Length. net!

If you like “At Arm’s Length”, support it at click here.

I then followed up with a series of questions.

1: What is your background?
I’ve been a science-fiction fan pretty much all my life; I actually saw the original Star Trek series during its first run! To be sure, I was so very young at the time that the only bit of it I remember from back then was the glittery sparkle of the transporter effect. In elementary school, I recall reading Time of the Great Freeze (Robert Silverberg) and The Runaway Robot (Lester del Rey).

Later on, I got into tabletop roleplaying games. The first, when I was in high school in the late 1970s, was Dungeons & Dragons. Back then, D&D existed solely in an edition of three saddle-stitched main booklets, plus a couple of saddle-stitched supplements. I bought a first-edition copy of Champions (superhero RPG, precursor to the current Hero System rule-set) in 1981, and I’ve been playing RPGs more-or-less continually ever since.

I’ve been part of the filking community—the musical branch of SF fandom—for some time, even going so far as to self-publish a cassette of filksongs, King of Filk, in the early 1990s.

Late 1990s, I discovered TSA-Talk, a mailing list for TF (transformation) fandom; in addition to the mailing list, there was a netzine called TSAT, whose exact relationship to TSA-Talk I’ve never been clear on. Back then, there were a fair number of stories posted to TSA-talk, and I often posted comments on what I felt was good or bad about these stories.

A couple years after I joined TSA-talk, TSAT’s founding editor, Jeff Mahr, decided to move on to other things (primarily ebook publishing under the name Infinite Imagination, if memory serves). TSAT would have died if nobody took over the editorial reins, so TSA-Talk member Michael Bard got in touch with me, asking if I wanted to help him keep TSAT alive (me, because my comments on posted stories had impressed Bard).

Mahr’s last issue of TSAT was #18; Bard and I took over as of #19, and we kept it going for five years of bi-monthly issues, ending with #48. TSAT was still running when I started ANTHRO.

2. What drew you too the furry fandom? I know wikifur says you came at it from a distance, but really there had to be something there.

I’m really much more of a TF fan than a furry fan; I consider myself to be, at absolute best, no more than a casual fur. Of course, a Venn diagram of the furry and TF communities would display a *heck* of a lot of overlap, and I’ll cop to falling squarely within said region of overlap. The closest thing I have to a fursona is my cheetahmorph character Jubatus, in the Tales of the Blind Pig shared-world—and however much I enjoy *writing* about him, Jube is so messed-up a person that I flatly *do not ever* want to *be* him.

I’m not sure why I’m into TF, nor yet why I skew towards the furry end of TF…

3. What was the fandom like back in those days?
Dunno. Again, I’ve always been more a TF fan than a fur. As far as Keeping My Finger On The Pulse Of Furdom is concerned, pretty much all I ever did when I was editing ANTHRO was try to keep on top of upcoming furcons.

4. What lead you to the creation of Anthro magazine?
Back in 2005, I attended an event known as the “TSA Bash”, an informal annual gathering of TSA-talk members which started out as a sort of sleepover party in the home of (TSA-talk member) Phil Geusz, and quickly grew to the point where it had to be held in a hotel. Phil is very much a fur; like me, he falls into the overlap region of a TF-and-furdom Venn diagram, but Phil is a fur who skews towards TF.

Phil was (still is, if I’m not mistaken) concerned that the furry community is *plentifully oversupplied* with furporn. He’s also one of the authors I worked with for TSAT, and he talked to me about the possibility of my doing a spooge-free furry netzine that had actual *standards of quality*. Thus, ANTHRO.

5. What problems if any you had from the very start?
Lack of time and resources. I did pretty much *everything* on the netzine, with little-to-no assistance from anyone else. Bard was officially co-editor for #1, but he kinda pulled back from editorialness until explicitly resigning those duties around #6, and from that point on, you can remove the “pretty much” from the 2nd sentence of this paragraph. The whole zine was, and is, hand-hacked HTML, and my grubby fingerprints are all over the tags on every page. Okay, the collection of ‘recommended books’ pages were created by software—but *I* wrote that software *myself*.

6. Was the magazine online at first, or was it printed?
Online, with the annual ink-on-paper collections coming later on.

7a. Why is the last issue is the only one on the site.
In truth, *all* the issues are on the site. The wide, shallow ‘pane’ at the top center of the ANTHRO window has a number of clickable links, from “SITE MAP” on the left to “MALL” on the right; the “ARCHIVES” link will take you to a page with links to all 32 issues, and the “INDEX” link takes you to a page which has clickable links to *everything* that ever appeared in ANTHRO.

(Okay I admit I missed that one)

7b. Was the magazine only available online at some point.
I’d always intended to have ANTHRO be available *both* online *and* as ink-on-paper physical artifacts. The plan was that at the end of every 6-issue year, I’d pour the contents of said six issues into appropriate InDesign templates (which I made myself), save it all as a PDF file, and send said PDF to print-on-demand outfit Lulu.com so people could buy it as a physical book. These books were published under the umbrella title “ANTHROlogy”, and I never did get the 4th ANTHROlogy done, let alone the 5th.

8. What problems (if any) did you have during it’s run?
The problems were self-inflicted, for the most part, as I’m not a well-organized person. For instance, I hardly ever uploaded any issues when they were ‘officially’ scheduled to go live…

Manuscripts—submissions—were a continuing concern, growing more so towards the end.

9. I am not focusing all on the bad, what are you most proud of what appeared in Anthro? Anything that is truly memorable?
Proud? Memorable? Hmmm…

New York vs. Great Ape: This was written by Richard K. Lyon, an honest-to-Ghu *professional author* whose other works include a number of collaborations with Andrew J. Offut.

A heck of a lot of Fred Patten’s scholarly reviews.

Predation: The Boardgame. Yes, an actual boardgame, which I designed for ANTHRO’s 25th issue.

The Bastard Assassins From Hell stories (Cleared for Departure; Don’t Forget to Tip Your Assassins; Fish, Barrel, Dynamite; You Say ‘Paranoid’, I Say ‘Adequately Aware’), dripping with over-the-top ultraviolence and black humor, by Corvus and ShadowWolf.

I wrote a number of poems for ANTHRO using a wide variety of verse forms, at least one or two of them being original to me.

Within the Wheel of Wickedness, a delightfully twisted Lovecraft parody by Sean M. Foster.

10. During it’s run, do you any special memories?
Not really. Producing a netzine is a lot of hard work, and that’s pretty much all she wrote.

11.You mentioned to me earlier about your partner passing away. Is there anything you like to say about your time together? I fully understand if you want to keep that private.
Bard and I were partners of the ‘professional’ type, not of the ‘lovers’ type. Since he lived in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and I’ve always been in the San Francisco Bay Area, the straight-line distance between us was on the close order of 2700 miles, which would have been rather an impediment if either of us *had* harbored romantic inclinations towards the other guy!

Bard had a great sense of humor, he was damn smart, and he died for no good reason. We only met in the flesh once, damnit.

12. Since the last issue of Anthro came out in 2011 what have you been up to, and do you believe the furry fandom has changed since you came out.

Given that I’ve never been ‘in the loop’, I really couldn’t say how the furry community has changed.

Since 2011, the most furry thing I’ve done is serve as ‘janitor’ to the webcomic At Arm’s Length. I clean up minor glitches in the art; polish up the dialogue so that the various characters have distinctive speech patterns; and put captions, word balloons, & the occasional sound effect on the strips. Lately I’ve also been working on a tabletop RPG set in the AAL universe.

I sing a lot. I’m in the baritone section of Schola Cantorum, a SF Bay Area chorus which has been going strong for 50+ years, and I also sing in the choir of St. Bede’s Episcopal Church, which is literally across the street from the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.

13. From this point on you can say anything you want.
Why (you ask) has ANTHRO not been updated for five years? Well… a few reasons.

Lack of feedback. Yes, ANTHRO had a lot of readers—the website traffic figures demonstrated that—but said readers never did anything *but* read the netzine, as best I can tell. ANTHRO’s readers may have liked the netzine a great deal, but the number of said readers who ever sent us emails to let us know what they thought? Bloody near *zero*. It was a good month when we got even *one* response from readers. So, nigh-absolute lack of feedback. Not helpful.

Lack of money. I’d been unemployed for an extended period of time, and I was kinda hoping to get some money coming in from ANTHRO. For the most part, this did not happen.

Subscriptions: I offered them. Very few readers ever chose to buy one.

So-called “affinity links” with online retailers, that would send a bit of cash my way when a reader clicked thru and bought something: I made a point of providing affinity links for *everything* I possibly could, that was mentioned in ANTHRO. As best I can tell, *nobody* *EVER* clicked thru, hence no income from this.

Ink-on-paper books: Using the print-on-demand outfit Lulu.con, I produced and sold physical “dead tree” collections of ANTHRO material, and of a couple furry novels. Very few sales.
Posters, t-shirts, other miscellaneous items: These, from Zazzle,com, another print-on-demand outfit. Again, very few sales.

All in all, ANTHRO never generated an income stream anywhere near large enough that I could actually hope to live on it. Exactly why the netzine failed to generate an income stream is a question I don’t know the answer to; maybe it was the economy, maybe I had an unrealistically optimistic concept of how well the readers would like the netzine, maybe my pitiful efforts at advertising were just *that* ineffectual, maybe something else, maybe a combination of factors… I dunno. What I *do* know, is that the money just wasn’t there.

Another factor which didn’t help, and was probably closer to “straw that broke the camel’s back” than a major issue in and of itself: ANTHRO’s founding co-editor Michael Bard died unexpectedly. If the readers had been letting us know what they liked or disliked… if the netzine had been an income stream I could live on… I might have continued even after Bard’s death. But in the absence of either feedback or income?

The bottom line is, I put a *lot* of work into ANTHRO, and I never got much of anything back from it, beyond personal satisfaction at a job well-done. And eventually, that just wasn’t enough.

Editor’s Note
I plan on contacting more once furry publishers and get their stories.

As I previously reported I got into trouble recently on the Midwest FurFest – Open Chat group on Facebook when I bashed out against its latest member Ryan Hill. I have made my feeling towards this person quite clear. But in my effort not to get banned for bashing I asked a couple of questions and got some rather surprising answers.

The very 1st thing I thought about was the Anthrocon bomb threat. I remember quite clear them mentioning Ryan Hill’s name on the network news as the one who made it. READ THIS in the link they blame the entire incident on a 10 year old looking for their parents. Hey, I know I am not the only one who heard his name mentioned. But is there now cover up?!!!

So then I asked about the Confederate Flag fursuiter, I admit I heard a couple of things. From getting warned about wearing that suit again to actually getting banned. Completely by passed that question.

I did learn on thing when I asked about the 2014 attack at MFF, he did say, “I can not comment on an ongoing investigation”. That is very telling and matches why the Police isn’t commenting on it either.

Then the biggest bit of news when I quote the arrest at BLFC, this is what Tim Woods said after seeing my article. “That isn’t Ryan Hill and he was not the one who was arrested”. Mind you I had to ask him twice to even acknowledge an arrest at that con was made. Then added, “That man is still in custody”.

Okay so how did this man posted on Ryan Hill’s account without his permission. It doesn’t make sense to me either, but I can not help but feel something is up.