Review – Furry Nation: The true story of America’s most misunderstood subculture, by Joe Strike.
by Patch O'Furr
Furry Nation: The true story of America’s most misunderstood subculture, by Joe Strike.
Cleis Press, October 2017, paperback $17.95 (288 pages), Kindle $10.99.
Here’s what I wrote for a cover blurb:
Like herding cats, gathering the history of furry fandom has been called impossible. Furries love impossible things, so this is long overdue. I’m happy to say it was worth the wait. Joe Strike puts solid ground under the legs of the Furry Nation – genre, subculture, and yes, even kink – with his experience of watching it grow. This book is for original 1980’s fans, new ones looking back, and outsiders drawn to the weird coolness of talking animals. There’s many ways to get into it, but this is a unique view of how furries are breaking out.
Joe’s book isn’t the perfect bible for everyone – but expecting that from one book is unrealistic. It’s just the kind of book that comes from a devout fan, and that’s why I recommend it.
I’ll summarize some reaction to the news that this book will exist: “It’s gonna suck! Who is Joe Strike?” – I knew who Joe was before I knew he was a furry, from his animation journalism. He does scriptwriting and his own comic too. He brings us a history that can live beyond bit-rot, supported by a firmly established publisher. Cleis has a 36-year history as “the largest independent sexuality publishing company in the United States.” It’s smart to focus on the word independent, which means open-minded support from the first ones to take the chance.
Let me get something out of the way.
You can’t have one bible if there’s a problem of basic definitions. This one should be standard: Furry fandom is “1 part genre fandom, 1 part DIY sub/counterculture, and 1 part kink community.” (Equivamp said it and I’ve been loving it ever since.) In Joe’s Preface, he embraces this trinity with no apologies… perhaps to the shock of those who claim “it’s just fandom, we don’t support the porn”. (I’ll suggest that anything less than the full story is a lie.)
Joe weaves the parts together seamlessly. There’s smooth logic in the introduction to the concept of anthropomorphism. It mentions earthy mythology, like the god Zeus’s sexual encounter with Leda as a swan. That isn’t disposable titillation; it’s cultural DNA. Joe goes on to say that furries aren’t modern overgrown children, they’re rescuing furry from a “dungeon” of low culture to where it’s been banished. (Sure, some of us like dungeons, but who forged the bars?)
Stigma isn’t just the larger culture’s fault. There’s a fandom complex about it. Why not just admit furry porn is simply hot? Like junk food, you can say too much makes you sick, but don’t say it isn’t delicious. That’s a tastefully visible, yet not overdone vibe in the book, mostly in one chapter.
What you won’t notice is some infighting and filtering I heard about behind-the-scenes. That’s why some notable events from the early days can’t be fully credited. (Who really created Rowrbrazzle?) Cue the herding-cats analogy, and don’t blame Joe – blame stigma. Inclusion may rub some people the wrong way, so it may not be the furry book some want, but it’s the one we need.
Some chapter by chapter points.
- Furriness. Trickster animals like Coyote begat Bugs Bunny. “When we draw them or dress up like them, we’re claiming a little of that freedom for ourselves.” (p17). Some furs “identify with animals on a deeper level, with a growing awareness of a ravaged environment, and a way to distance ourselves from the humans who seem intent on destroying the planet; a sense of kinship with the natural world.” (p19) And “it’s also just fun to pretend you’re someone—or something—else. For some people it might be a Hollywood celebrity, a rock star, a superhero, a pro athlete or a business tycoon.” (p19) Animals are for uninhibited imagination.
- In on the Ground Floor. Joe found the fandom in 1988. Here’s why he has such a good perspective – he was a “proto furry” before knowing they existed, and watched things get started. Zines and anime brought fans together at first. There was an early connection when West Coast/San Diego Comic Con furry parties were brought to science fiction cons in the east.
- Biodiversity. Suiters catch the spotlight, but there’s many more ways to express furriness. Dr. Kathy Gerbasi of the Anthropomorphic Research Project/Furscience is interviewed. Anthrozoology inspired her and she was amazed to find a group for it. Joe talks about the personality of fursonas and how he found his. “No one is in charge of furry” and it’s not about degree of furriness, but about your unique expression. Joe talks about discomfort with Boomer the Dog and lets Boomer talk about being comfortable as himself.
- Founding Furs. At The Prancing Skiltaire house, Mark Merlino talks about early 1970’s sci-fi fandom with a gentle hippie vibe. Fred Patten talks about discovering anime with Mark, and funny-animal media. “Funny animal” comic books once thrived, went extinct, and came back as Saturday morning cartoons. Underground comix and APA fanzines sprouted up. Reed Waller and Steve Gallaci segue to the 1980’s indie comics boom and its stars like TMNT.
- Furry art – who does it and how. OK, does this make you want to know more? I wanted to summarize 14 chapters, but it’s too much, so enjoy the sample.
Conclusion
I started with Furry 101 definitions. It’s so boring to get nothing more than that from mainstream articles. Furry Nation thankfully has the room to flesh things out with cool trivia and Joe’s own experiences. He delivers good stories about asking furry questions with Hollywood directors – and getting his first fursuit and how it felt to wear.
Fursuiting brings up a dull complaint: “OMG, a fursuit is on the cover! They hog the spotlight!” But it doesn’t matter because this isn’t a bible. It could take overlapping books to dryly cover everything. This fandom is about personal passion, and everyone has a unique story of finding it and why they’re so devoted. What binds them is that feeling of “you too? I was a furry before I knew they existed!”
Personally, if I was going to ask for more, I wish Joe had covered a few more fandom entrepeneurs who turn their love into a job and more. The list could include some Hollywood-level furry creator, or the best cottage industry fursuit maker; maybe someone like EZ-Wolf and his cooling tech that’s been adopted by the military. There could be one or more of the furry specialty publishers. Then Bad Dragon (the biggest company), and Anthrocon (the biggest con.) Out of that list we get a chapter on Anthrocon.
For someone else, what’s missing is coverage of fandom publishing. (OK, I mean our star guest Fred Patten.) He told me:
I am most distressed to see that there’s virtually nothing about furry writing and book publishing. That’s certainly worth a chapter. There are two furry literary awards. Why is the topic omitted?
It’s a worthy topic (and Joe’s in that business). Now, go to a dealer den at a con – publishing has a presence, but expect only perhaps 2-3 such dealers at a large con. Look at the size of the Furry Writer’s Guild – it’s a niche inside a niche. Which brings me back to the niche of fursuiting (and why is that on the cover?)
A book may take a week to digest. That narrows audience a lot. But a fursuit puts a few grand of show value in a 2 second glance. Look at a fursuiter group photo from Anthrocon – it’s over $3 million in custom-designed, hand-made furry craft all in one picture. $3 million. You have to admit there isn’t anything else furry fans do, on their own without mainstream patronage, that approaches that level. That’s where the juice is in this fandom stuff.
It’s not really about suits or spotlight or money – it’s about that shared sense of “we made this”. Joe tells it like that. There should be more books to cover other ways to do it, but don’t miss this one.
- Buy Furry Nation on Amazon
- Book promo card:
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Thank you Joe for this long-awaited (and long-gestating!) tome and thank you Patch for this review!
Two c’s in Gallacci. 😉
I’m glad to see he actually went back to the people who were actually there, and that he’s a furry himself. 🙂
I gave “Furry Nation” a glowing blurb despite my objections about its lack of coverage of furry publishing. Allyson Fields, Cleis Press’ Marketing Manager, replied, “I can appreciate how you are upset that some aspects were left out. The fact is that we had to cut several chapters, otherwise the book would have been too large to publish!”
I hope this means that there will be a followup book, since Joe has basically already written one. Assuming that “Furry Nation” sells well, of course.
Fred –
As Allyson mentioned, they had to cut out several chapters, including one on mainstream, non-kiddie anthropomorphism (theater, literature, performance art, etc.) and a chapter on Pony fandom I’m particularly proud of.
If “Furry Nation” enjoys any kind of success I’m ready to start work on “Furry Planet,” incorporating the above material and adding chapters on furry entrepreneurs and publishers. (Not to mention writing about the Furry Raiders and “alt-fur,” topics that hit the news after I submitted my manuscript.)
Did you know that Lisa Hanawalt, “Bojack Horseman'”s character designer and one of its producers admits to being “technically a furry,” but not a full-fledged one since (she says) she doesn’t find anthro characters sexy? If there’s a “Furry Planet,” I definitely want her to be part of it!
I wrote this originally for Rowrbrazzle in 2008. I hope that it gives some idea of how long Joe Strike has been working on this book:
“There is one project that I have abandoned: writing Animal Masks, the “real book” history of furry fandom. Joe Strike asked at the beginning of January if I would object if he wrote such a book, if I was not going to. Not at all. Since someone asks me every couple of years what happened to my history, here is the sad story.
My Animal Masks book never really got started. Mike Curtis at Shanda Fantasy Arts got the idea for the book in 1997 and asked me to write it. I was enthusiastic about writing a Furry Fandom equivalent of the histories of s-f fandom like Sam Moskowitz’s The Immortal Storm and Harry Warner Jr.’s All Our Yesterdays, and I agreed to write it. I also told him that Moskowitz’s and Warner’s books had each taken ten years to write, and that I would try to finish mine sooner than that but it would still probably take at least five years to do all the in-depth research, interview furry fans throughout the world by correspondence, get photographs & other illustrations, etc. Curtis promptly sent out press releases announcing that the book would be published in two years:
Coming in 1999:
Animal Masks: Anthropomorphics As Modern Totems, the first history of our field, written by Fred Patten.
This is from a ConFurence 9 (January 1998) convention report by Watts Martin:
The History of Furry Fandom panel was also interesting, although it was mostly stuff I already knew. Its host was Fred Patten, who’s putting together a book for publication next year called Animal Masks that will be a fifteen-year history of the fandom, apparently a coffee-table compendium useful both to give older fans a clear idea of where the fandom actually came from and to be an introduction to new fans. This is a welcome idea; some of the complaints batted about relating to fan behavior, online and off, trace back to people having very little idea what furrydom really is. The very small number who are ongoing problems seem to take a perverse pride in having no interest in the fandom’s history, though–but I suppose the book really isn’t aimed at fuggheads. It was also nice to see Mark Merlino at the panel looking relatively relaxed, a state I don’t think I’ve seen him in for years.
This is a letter that I wrote published in Mike Glyer’s File 770 #127, November 1998, when I had just stopped giving the project top priority but still planned to write it eventually:
The Fur Frontier
Fred Patten agrees, “Yes, I am writing a history of furry fandom, and Joe Rosales is also planning a ‘Brian Aldiss’ history of furry/talking animals in popular culture.” But he feels that Taral’s comments about these projects, quoted in File 770:125, while accurate in general are erroneous in detail. Neither Patten nor Rosales feel their books are “revisionist” views of the same topic, any more than one would claim that Aldiss’ The Billion-Year Spree is a revisionist view of Harry Warner’s All Our Yesterdays. Rosales will focus on literature and popular culture, and Patten will chronicle furry fandom.
Patten will only supply a broad overview of the history before moving on to his main topic, furry fandom:
There is an Egyptian tomb painting ca. 1500 B.C. of a lion and a gazelle playing whatever the Egyptian equivalent of checkers was. This is a bit more indisputably ‘funny animal’ than animal-headed gods, or neolithic cave paintings of what might have been anthropomorphized animals but could equally well have been tribal shamans dressed in animal skins. Parables featuring talking animals can be traced from the tales of Aesop and Terence through the Medieval ballads of Reynard the Fox to the refined literary fantasies of the 18th century French Court and the ‘Uncle Remus’ Afro-American folk tales of the 19th century. (And don’t forget the Monkey King tales in the Orient.)
Anthropomorphics have especially proliferated during the most recent 200 years, with the popularization of talking animals in children’s’ literature (Lewis Carroll, etc.); talking animals in political cartoons (which predate Thomas Nast’s Democratic donkey and Republican elephant); advertising mascots like Tony the Tiger and the Trix rabbit; movie and newspaper funny-animal stars like Krazy Kat, Mickey Mouse and Pogo Possum; and so on. I will summarize all this in a very broad overview as the Introduction to my history of organized furry fandom. Rosales will concentrate entirely on the history of talking animals through 5,000 years or more of popular culture.
My thesis is that furry fandom coalesced out of sf fandom and comics fandom, blending elements from both of them and achieving its own critical mass in 1983/1984. The first clear signs of the independent furry fandom were the creation of its first apa, Rowrbrazzle, and the decision by some fans to self-publish furry comic books because there seemed to be enough fans of stories with talking animals to support them (as distinct from earlier attempts to self-publish comics which had to hope for sufficient sales from the general public alone.) Some key titles in this evolution of ‘furrydom’ were Cutey Bunny (which first appeared in October 1982 but attracted attention during 1983), Alan Dean Foster’s Spellsinger novels starting in mid-’83 (influential in establishing funny animals as respectable reading for adults), and the Rowrbrazzle apa and the comics Albedo, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Usagi Yojimbo all during 1984. Critters and Captain Jack weren’t until 1986.
Rowrbrazzle started in February 1984. Since it was specifically an apa for writing and drawing funny animals as a genre and discussing the new fandom that was forming about them, it is a handy landmark to say that ‘furry fandom existed at this time.’ I do not claim, as Taral implies, that furry fandom was started by the birth of Rowrbrazzle. But I have asked whether anyone can supply an earlier date that can be clearly identified as belonging to furry fandom, as distinct from being an isolated furry event within sf fandom (such as the preview of the Watership Down movie at the 1978 Worldcon) or comics fandom (such as R. Crumb’s Fritz the Cat in 1968 or Marvel Comics Howard the Duck in 1976); and so far nobody has.
Considering that the worthwhile histories of fandom such as Sam Moskowitz’s The Immortal Storm and Harry Warner’s All Our Yesterdays and A Wealth of Fable have each taken about a decade to write, I will be very surprised if my book (working title: Animal Masks) is ready for publication as soon as next year.
In 2001 Edd Vick offered to publish it as a MU Press book if I ever finished it, but by then I considered the project dead for the reasons given in this unpublished interview:
Interviewer: You mentioned a history of furry fandom in the book [Best in Show]. Can you tell us about it?
Fred: Since it was in the Afterword, it was of necessity only a very brief summary. In fact at one time around 1998, Mike Curtis of Shanda Fantasy Arts wanted me to write a complete book–length history of Furry fandom, to be titled Animal Masks. I said I would do so, but it never got done for two main reasons. In the first place, I told Curtis it would probably take about five to ten years to do, assuming that it would take about as long as the histories of science fiction fandom that were done. Sam Moskowitz’ The Immortal Storm, his history of science fiction fandom in the 1930s, and Harry Warner Jr.’s All Our Yesterdays, his history of fandom in the ‘40s, both took between five to ten years to write. But Shanda Fantasy Arts wanted to publish it right away. I said, “Well, it’s impossible to write a detailed history like you want that fast.” And Curtis said, “Ok if you can’t do it right away then we’ll get someone else who can.” I think they announced who their next writer would be, but the book never came out.
The other problem was that so many fans were hostile to the idea. In science fiction fandom even Sam Moskowitz, who was feuding with practically everybody when he announced he was doing his book, got lots of cooperation. Everybody sent him lots of information, and answered whatever questions he sent them. But when I was asking furry fans outside of Southern California for the history of furry fandom in their areas, which I was not personally involved with, they said “Why should we help you? We’ll write our own history that’d be better than anything you could do. We’ll refuse to give you the information, and when your book comes out without the information we’ll tell everybody how incomplete it is.” Someone accused me of being a phony furry fan because I did not wear a fursuit. So I reported to Shanda Fantasy Arts that any history I would write would be very incomplete. Actually, I could have tried to work around the obstructionists, but I was also getting more and more requests to write articles about anime and manga at the same time, and Shanda insisted on getting the furry history immediately, so I just gave up on it. Anyhow, the history that was in Best in Show was so brief that I was able to summarize without having to go into detail. I could just say there are a lot of furry activities such as fanzine publishing, fursuit making, holding conventions and so on, without having to give lots of names and dates.
Another sort of – I don’t know whether you would call this a problem or not in furry fandom, but more science fiction fans used their real names, or if they used nicknames their real names were pretty well known. Like you could say that Jack Bristol was really Jack Speer but he did most of his fan activities using the name of Jack Bristol. Ted Johnstone’s real name was David McDaniel. But too many of the furry fans have only their fannish names known; and obviously phony names at that. I at least would find it difficult to do a serious history about people who are only identified by names like Gizmo, Vixyy [sic.] Fox and Hyperwolf. So I guess that was another problem with writing a detailed history of furry fandom.
Yet another reason why it would have been very difficult to write a history of Furry Fandom comparable to the histories of s-f fandom in the 1930s and 1940s was that the s-f fans of that time were paper hoarders, not only of fanzines but of correspondence. When Moskowitz and Warner asked for historical information for their books, fans could loan them original letters and old fanzines that included names & dates, detailed convention reports six and eight pages long, and so forth. Too much of Furry Fandom’s history took place over the Internet and nobody has a “hard” record of it; and fans’ ideas of convention reports today is a one-page “I went to the con and it was a lot of fun”. My preliminary questions got too many answers of, “Gee, that happened a long time ago, and I don’t remember the details.”
Most of what I knew about furry fandom’s history is covered in my 1996 Chronology of Furry Fandom in Yarf! which is now on WikiFur. Since WikiFur started a couple of years ago, it has added historical details that I never knew. So a history of furry fandom is even more desirable today than it was ten years ago; but – especially since my stroke has put me into bed and made it impossible to juggle old fanzines, correspondence, conduct interviews, etc. – I am not the one to write it. Good luck, Joe.
Joe Strike, what has happened to your book on the history of furry fandom?”
So now we know, with Joe’s Furry Nation. 9+ years — yes, that’s about how long it takes to do the research and write a good, comprehensive history.
I’m disappointed that Cleis Press has cut a lot of it out, but a complete history of furry fandom (with illustrations) would probably be so large that Cleis would have to charge $75 or more, and nobody would buy it at that price. It would be nice if Furry Nation is just the first of two or three books about furry fandom.
Oh, is it out already?
Not yet. It’ll be released on October 10.
I find it funny how some people put effort into saying “I’m not into the porn, others into that not me” instead of “yes I’m into the porn, what’s the problem and why would anyone care”. Guess it’s easier to appease people’s ridiculous prejudices instead of standing up against said prejudices.