Funny-Animal Fictions: Comics Fandom and the Late Introduction of Furry

In the 1985 introduction to Critters, editor and funny animal fan Kim Thompson proclaimed that funny animal titles had returned. Beginning as the genre had as a way to extend vaudeville-minstrel humor into news print, the funny animal of Walt Kelly’s Pogo and George Herriman’s Kazy Kat & Ignatz saw new life by the 1980s, with direct distribution distinctively making room for fans and independent creatives to produce their own titles, nostalgic as they might have been. For Thompson in particular, “Funny-animal comics are possessed of an enchantment almost mythical in nature. The inherent irreality of the concepts gives them an instant fantastical quality, and, paradoxically, a reality that far exceeds the dulled naturalism of ‘realistic comics.’” They connected one back to childhood summers and newsstand visits, though newer titles such as Steve Gallacci’s Albedo Anthropomorphics and Reed Waller and Kate Worley’s Omaha the Cat Dancer took more adult-centered venues to task. Often forgotten, funny-animal fans’ numerous discussions across fanzine and Amateur Publication Associations (APAs) similarly allowed fans to think back and sit with their colleagues on whether or not the funny-animal should in fact be of humor or otherwise.

Thompson’s introduction of Critters at a seeming height for the funny-animal would be late to the party, however. While works such as Ramzi Fawaz’s The New Mutants and Darieck Scott’s Keeping It Unreal have shown how fans took to superhero titles as a means of dialogue amidst America’s coming changes, during the 1960s and seventies, fans of Walt Disney and Dell Comics’s funny-animal titles continued to love their favorite forms despite the growing enthusiasm in works by Marvel and DC Comics. As the preceding letter shows, in the 1965 issue thirteen of Dr. Jerry G. Bails’s CAPA-Alpha, historian and comic fan Michael Barrier would begin his journey of documenting every funny-animal title with “The Publishing History of the Walt Disney Comic Books,” “The cutoff date for [the] index [being] 1962.” Similarly, contributing member Rick Weingroff in “Whiz-Bang” would poke fun at the seeming decline of interest in funny-animal titles with a satirical story that follows as he supposedly harangues a young fan over producing a funny-animal fanzine of his own. With the 1970s, fans such as Fred Patten Leslie Luttrell, Ken Fletcher and Reed Waller and Shary Flenniken would continue to depict and document their allegiance to a genre still circulating in underground projects or otherwise.

It would be the funny-animal’s ability to represent questions of difference with warmth and humanity that allowed the genre to succeed into the late twentieth-century, fans argued. To co-editor of science fiction APA Starling Lesleigh Luttrell in issue twenty-eight, funny-animals’ ability to “talk means they can tell us something about themselves and their life in the comics” beyond their stand-in for humorous, sometimes problematic representations. For artist and contributor Charles Chasmith in Vootie (letter seen above), the 1970s APA devoted to funny-animals and otherwise nonhuman organisms, “Funny animal comics and cartoons are a valid means of expressing oneself. The humor of funny animals is itself only traditional to us raised on endless doses of Underdog and Crusader Rabbit [but] can also be used to explore sf themes, expound timeless philosophy, and record inner visions.” As artists moved into the 1980s and its generation’s growing contention with American politics following Civil Rights, Feminism, and Gay and Lesbian Liberation and Vietnam, works including Omaha the Cat Dancer and Stan Sakai’s Usagi Yojimbo would no less take to community and difference as assets in a changing world.

page from Leo Magna’s Fur-Piled (Sofawolf Press 2006)

My own attachment to the funny-animal comes wedded to my family’s interest in Disney films, but raised in a conservative-leaning household that nevertheless had access to the World Wide Web following the twenty-first century’s turn, web comics including Steve Domanski’s Circles, introduced me to new funny-animal characters that resonated with my introduction to queer and transness. Building as they did from the funny-animal fan spaces of the 1980s including Schirmeister’s Rowrbrazzle, what is known today as the furry fandom is a community of artists, writers, performers, musicians, general fans, and critics sustaining the underground ethos of late-twentieth century indie comics. With the AIDS Crisis and 1980s neoliberalism having pressed home and racialized postmodern America into further conservatism, the characters that artists like Magna, Scott Fabianek, and Terrie Smith would create remade the funny-animal’s communal heterogeneity into a means of considering my own difference from normative and hegemonic interests. As well, titles like Domanski’s Circles iterated how to imagine new, queerer futures for Gay and Lesbian subjects in the 2000s would always mean to be followed by the AIDS Crisis and its extension of 1950s queer-panic into the neighborhoods believed to be more accepting.

Funny-animals would similarly come to speak of the histories of racism and xenophobia still existent in a supposedly more utopian future. A fan of titles like Waller and Kate Worley’s Omaha the Cat Dancer and Marvel’s late-X-Men series Excalibur, artist and writer Shawntae Howard’s Extinctioners would fuse the vernacular and world of funny-animal characters with the science-fiction dystopia and Afro-futurist hope. Introduced to Angry Viking Press prior to the century’s turn, Howard’s comic follows human-animal “hybrid” characters carrying the abilities recognizable to fans of X-Men and its various heroes. However, and learning that their superpowered hybrid allies were being captured by a scientist seemingly out of the past, protagonists Katherine Fella and Scarlet would learn, too, that their worlds were merely the byproduct of Man’s attempt at colonizing a distant galaxy. In this sense, Howard gestures to the continuing history of colonial and imperial violence in a supposedly more heterogeneous and developed futurity. Yes, the funny-animal’s ability to render difference lived on, but funny-animal fans’ interest in better communities disidentified with the genre’s earliest histories and made space for politics and relationships to develop via the comic forms they looked to.

Funny-animal fandom’s transformation with furry expectantly came with its own roadblocks. Prior to the 1980s, the funny-animal form still remained in ways this tool for rendering modern, urban life as seen in Waller and Worley’s Omaha the Cat Dancer and Shary Flenniken’s Trots & Bonnie, featured in Terry Zwigoff’s 1972 Funny Aminals. However, with independent comic artists, including Steve Gallacci and Donna Barr, using the comic fanzine page to play out stories and works yet to be seen within the market, fans such as those in editor Marc Schirmeister’s Rowrbrazzle found themselves needing to think through what their community was for. By 1989, funny-fandom had become its own thing that conventions had come to accept. As fan Lex Nakashima would express in Rowrbrazzle’s issue twenty-three, though furries had become victim to outside critics bemoaning them as adults still infatuated with children’s characters, even to perverse degrees, “the politically savvy don’t really dare offend them,”. San Francisco-located Baycon even seeming to deny “furry prejudice” to the level of what Nakashima describes as “panicked.” Just as well, artist Donna Barr would try to step out of Rowrbrazzle in the 1989 issue twenty-two, stating that she “[didn’t] do funny animals” and wanted to “make room for the next guy.” This question of what Rowrbrazzle exactly was as contributors’ favorite genre shifted resonated with the numerous spaces and fanzines that fans would produce, from Mark Merlino’s late-eighties “Furry Parties” to the more adult-centered APA space of editor Karl Maurer’s 1987 Furversion. As well, comic titles including Thompson’s Critters, Radio Comix’s Furrlough, Antarctic Press’s Genus, and MU Press’s Shanda the Panda gestured to the various directions fans would move in taking the funny-animal as their own.

The question of sex, and funny-animal artists’ depiction of such, arguably severed furries’ connection with the preceding genealogies of comic fans. Since the late-1980s, when furries would first be hailed as deviants by make-shift room-party fliers distributed at conventions such as Baycon, today’s contemporary genealogy of funny-animal fans have had to work against the wider discourse that furry fandom is distinctly a sexual interest. As comic producers and their fans found more space for independent creation thanks to the market’s growth, the funny-animal would no less become generative in helping fans think through sexual practices and supportive relationships. Similarly, fans’ online Multi-User-Custom-Kingdoms (MUCKs) gave room for users to feel out queerness following the 1980s AIDS Crisis and its development. Comic fans, including Jim Groat and Eric Blumrich, would show contempt for furries’ entry on the scene, however, expressing in a panel at the 1997 Philadelphia Science Fiction Convention how furries’ seeming interest in an “endless parade of human debris” “degenerate[ed]” funny-animal fandom from its mores. Artist and fan Paul Kidd would carry on such commentary in Rowrbrazzle’s 1992 issue thirty-one; to him, too many fans were “trying to make furry fandom an indivisible part of their own personal sexual politics or political beliefs.” “It would be to the great, great benefit of us all,” he closes, “if people would try and disassociate their personal politics from furry fandom as a whole.”

Difficult as these conversations were for fans at the time, the funny-animal has nevertheless continued proving itself successful in representing modernity and all its queer dimensions. From webcomics including Albert Temple’s Gene Catlow and Sue “SueDeer” Rankin’s A Doemain of Our Own to more recent works like Cooner’s My Bigger Boyfriend (Figure 4) and reprints of Freddy Milton’s Nuft and the Last Dragons, funny-animal fans have used fandom’s playfulness to circulate and fantasize new titles for themselves, changing as the world will continue to.