Dogpatch Press

Fluff Pieces Every Week

Category: Media

March 17, 2017

Franko: Fables of the Last Earth, by Cristóbal Jofré and Ángel Bernier – review by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

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

Franco_front-cover_SC-lgFranko: Fables of the Last Earth, by Cristóbal Jofré and Ángel Bernier
St. Paul, MN, Sofawolf Press, July 2016, hardcover $39.95 (v + 128 pages), trade paperback $19.95.

Franko: Fables of the Last Earth is a collection of six cartoon-art fables written by Ángel Bernier and illustrated by Cristóbal Jofré, printed in full color on glossy paper. The word “fables” is carefully chosen; these are gentle, mystical adventures in the tradition of “magic realism” favored by many Latin American authors.

Franko is a young anthropomorphic lion adolescent living in the Atacama Desert of Chile at the “end of civilization on Earth”, with his slightly older lion friend Shin. The Atacama is known as the driest place on Earth, but as backpackers and other travelers will tell you, the deserts have their own special beauty. These six short fables display it with a quiet wonder.

Franko and Shin are lion farmers at the opposite ends of adolescence – Franko appears to be a thirteen-year-old, while the more irresponsible Shin appears about nineteen (and is addicted to gambling). Both embody the exuberance of youth. They and Mana, the ghost of Shin’s grandmother, are the only recurring characters. Mana is the voice of wisdom who tempers the rashness and naïvete of the two youngsters.

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March 16, 2017

What’s Yiffin’? – March 2017 edition of syndicated furry news.

by Louis Kohn

Good afternoon, Dogpatch Press readers. Last month was pretty big for us – it had our news satire show What’s Yiffin’? debut on this website. Nobody tried to kill us or call us mean names or whatever, so I guess that means it was well received. If that’s the case, then today ought to be a great day for some of you, because we’ve got the March edition of the series ready to go. Thank you for making What’s Yiffin’? a part of your entertainment routine.

AND NOW THE NEWS

More details and some additional insight from the show’s writers:

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March 15, 2017

Dazzle Resplendent: Adventures of a Misanthropic Dog, by Scott Bradfield – a book review by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

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

41vJbrcNeyLDazzle Resplendent: Adventures of a Misanthropic Dog, by Scott Bradfield.
London, Red Rabbit Books, January 2017, trade paperback $9.99 (174 pages), Kindle $4.99.

Scott Bradfield has been a professor at universities in California, Connecticut, and London. He is also a literary reviewer, and an author of short stories. This is a collection of his eight Dazzle stories, originally published in literary magazines and Fantasy & Science Fiction between 1988 and 2011. Many of them have been also collected in earlier Bradfield collections, but this is the first collection of all eight of them.

Dazzle has been described as a wise-cracking talking dog, but he is more accurately a sardonic motor-mouth who talks incessantly whether anyone is listening or not. Here is how I described “Dazzle Redux” in my review of Bradfield’s Hot Animal Love: Tales of Modern Romance, for Anthro #10, March/April 2007:

“Dazzle, now living as a feral dog in the mountains around Los Angeles with a complacent bitch and her pups, is happy; but could be happier if he would learn to just shut up!

“Maybe I’m not all I should be in the family skills department,” Dazzle confessed that night to his erstwhile mate, Edwina. “But getting through to those kids of yours is like having a conversation with a block of wood, I swear. If I try to instruct them in the most basic math and science skills, they’re not interested. If I try to teach them which way to look when crossing the street, they’re still not interested. If I try to point out the most obvious cultural contradictions of multinational capitalism, why, just forget about it. They’re really not interested. If you can’t eat it or fuck it, it’s not important; that’s their attitude.”(Etc., etc.; Edwina is sleeping through all this. pg. 31)

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March 14, 2017

Vote now for the 2016 Ursa Major Awards!

by Patch O'Furr

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

419893_189786951121868_189782644455632_235270_39724323_n-e1331832247101Voting for the 2016 Ursa Major Awards, for the Best Anthropomorphic Literature and Art of the 2016 calendar year in 12 categories, is now open.  The voting is open from March 13 to April 30.  The awards will be announced at a presentation ceremony at Anthrocon 2017, in Pittsburgh, PA on June 29 – July 2.

The twelve categories are:  Best Anthropomorphic Motion Picture; Best Anthropomorphic Dramatic Short or Series; Best Anthropomorphic Novel; Best Anthropomorphic Short Fiction; Best Anthropomorphic Other Literary Work; Best Anthropomorphic Non-Fiction Work; Best Anthropomorphic Graphic Story; Best Anthropomorphic Comic Strip; Best Anthropomorphic Magazine; Best Anthropomorphic Published Illustration; Best Anthropomorphic Game; and Best Anthropomorphic Website.

Voting is open to all!  To vote, go to the Ursa Major Awards website at  http://www.ursamajorawards.org/ and click on “Voting for 2016” at the left.

You will receive instructions on how to register to vote.  You do not have to vote in every category.  Please vote in only those categories in which you feel knowledgeable.

This final ballot has been compiled from those works receiving the most nominations that were eligible.  The top five nominees in each category are the finalists.  Please make sure that your nominations are only for works published during the calendar year (January through December) in question.

2016 FINAL BALLOT

Best Anthropomorphic Motion Picture

Finding Dory (Directed by Andrew Stanton and Angus MacLane; June 17)

Kung Fu Panda 3 (Directed by Jennifer Yuh Nelson and Alessandro Carloni; January 29)

The Secret Life of Pets (Directed by Chris Renaud and Yarrow Cheney; July 8)

Sing (Directed by Garth Jennings and Christophe Lourdelet; December 21)

Zootopia (Directed by Byron Howard, Rich Moore, and Jared Bush; February 11)

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March 13, 2017

Housepets! Don’t Ask Questions, by Rick Griffin – book review by Fred Patten

by Patch O'Furr

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

housepets_book7_cover-preview-237x300Housepets! Don’t Ask Questions (Book 7), by Rick Griffin
Seattle, WA, CreateSpace, November 2016, trade paperback $13.95 (52 pages).

Here, right on schedule, is the new annual collection of the Housepets! online comic strip by Rick Griffin. Housepets! has appeared each Monday-Wednesday-Friday since June 2, 2008. It has won the Ursa Major Award for the Best Anthropomorphic Comic Strip for every year since! – for 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015.

Book 7 contains the strips from June 16, 2014 to June 1, 2015; story arcs #78, “Heaven’s Not Enough, part 2”, to #90, “All’s Fair, part 1”, plus the one-off gag strips before and between these.

Housepets! presents the adventures of the dogs, cats, ferrets, rabbits, and other pets of Babylon Gardens, a typical residential suburban neighborhood – in an alternate universe. The animals are larger than in our universe (but not human-sized), can talk, are usually bipedal, and address their human owners as “Mom” and “Dad”. Their status is somewhere between pets and children. Points established over the years are that humans can bequeath their belongings to their pets, who do not need a human guardian; human storekeepers are not allowed to sell catnip to cats; human police forces have an auxiliary of Police Dogs who are not all police dogs; the pets comment sardonically on how they can go naked in public but their human “parents” can’t; and – lots of other stuff.

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March 10, 2017

Sythyry’s Journal: A World Tree Chronicle of Transaffection, Adventure, and Doom, by Bard Bloom – review by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

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

9781451562934_p0_v1_s192x300Sythyry’s Journal: A World Tree Chronicle of Transaffection, Adventure, and Doom, by Bard Bloom
Seattle, WA, CreateSpace, April 2010, trade paperback $25.00 (626 pages).

The opening paragraph of this dense, 626 pages of small type is:

“My exceedingly old and exceedingly famous grandparent just gave me this notebook as a going-to-school present. Zie says that zie wishes zie had had one when zie was growing up, but of course nobody knew how to do enchantments then, and there probably wasn’t time to do a lot of writing, what with all the fighting cyarr and nendrai and everything.” (p. 5)

Sythyry is a small, pale blue dragonet (actually a Zi Ri) “of impeccable lineage, considerable wit, and overwhelming inexperience, off alone at college for the first time. Zie must face terrible dangers: roommates, friends, courses in enchantment and flirtatious dance, deadly monsters, minor nobility, war, and, most dreadful of all, romance.” (blurb). The Zi Ri are hermaphrodites with pronouns to match, avoiding the “him” or “her” of the single-sex genders. The cover by Tod Wills shows zir at an Academy Buttery party surrounded by zir roommates Dustweed the Herethroy (the green grasshopper-like being at lower right) and Havune the Cani (the overdressed dog-like being at upper left), and friends Oostmarine the Orren (the otter-like being at upper right) and Anoof, another Cani (at lower left).

When Bard Bloom and his wife Victoria Borah Bloom created the World Tree role-playing game in 2001 (its cover by Mike Raabe was a finalist for the first Ursa Major Award in 2001 for Best Anthropomorphic Published Illustration), LiveJournal was just getting started. Bloom explains in his “Author’s Forward” [sic.] that his own life made uninteresting reading. “So I decided to write from the point of view of a World Tree character.” – Sythyry the young Zi Ri. This book consists of Bloom’s LiveJournal entries from 2002 to 2007, as edited into novel format by Victoria Borah Bloom. Further LiveJournal entries to 2016 have been novelized in four Kindle books; Dragon Student, Ambassador to a Monster, Wizard’s Vacation, and City of Advanced Magic.

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March 6, 2017

Interlude: A Series of Shorts, by M. R. Anglin – Book Review by Fred Patten

by Pup Matthias

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

51rarobPhyLInterlude: A Series of Shorts, by M. R. Anglin.
Seattle, WA, CreateSpace, August 2016, trade paperback $5.99 (79 [+ 1] pages, Kindle $1.99.

This fifth book in Anglin’s Silver Foxes series is only eight connected short stories of about ten pages each. It is an interlude, taking place between the action of the third and fourth novels and, presumably, the next to come.

The first five stories are set at the Isle de Lossierres, the Kingdom of Drymairad’s most exclusive resort. Xenatha (Xena), the adolescent Silver Fox (it’s a secret) who was the protagonist of Into Expermia, and her family are the “guests” of her foster father J.R.’s unwilling sister Chloe, the wolf businessman sister who owns the island.

The Isle is a rich, luxurious vacation spot, but they are there to hide out, not to enjoy themselves. It’s J.R.’s old family home. Xena wears an illegal image generator to pass as an ordinary gray-furred fox.

Although they are hiding out, they also have their first chance since they all came together to relax a bit as a family. J.R., a notorious criminal to the world, is their wolf Daddy. Xena and her younger sister Katheraine (Kathra), a white fox 11 years old, are his foster kits. Xena has an extremely rare genetic disorder that makes her build up metals in her fur, giving her the Silver Fox appearance and an attraction/control of electricity. Karalaina, a vixen with salmon-colored fur, is the girls’ mother who has just rediscovered them after ten years and came to claim them. They persuaded her to stay and join their family. Chloe Dunsworth is a rich wolf businesswoman, J.R.’s sister who is outraged when he shows up after so long with the others, asking to stay quietly on the family’s island resort.

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March 2, 2017

The Art and Evolution of TwoKinds, Volume 1, by Thomas Fischbach – review by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

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

STL025954The Art and Evolution of TwoKinds, Volume 1, by Thomas Fischbach
Apple Valley, CA, Keenspot Entertainment, December 2016, hardcover $29.99 (89 [+ 1] pages)

This is a large (8.5 x 10 inches) deluxe color artbook featuring Fischbach’s TwoKinds online comic strip cast. Every page is printed in full color on slick, glossy paper.   It is a visual feast for fans of TwoKinds, and of all fans of mild cheesecake featuring anthropomorphic characters.

Despite the title, there is nothing here from the comic strip itself. You will not see how TwoKinds has evolved artistically over the dozen years that it has been running (since October 22, 2003). Instead this is a collection of Fischbach’s recent paintings of his main characters. Most of them have appeared on his DeviantArt gallery with the dates painted, and they are all from late 2014 to 2016. This is disappointing in terms of not really seeing how TwoKinds has evolved artistically over twelve years. But, frankly, Fischbach’s art was pretty crude when he began. Every painting in this artbook is in his current, much higher-quality style. It’s what most purchasers will prefer.

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March 1, 2017

HERO DAD finds sexy art in furry kid’s room, hangs it on wall to appreciate it.

by Patch O'Furr

There’s a frequent topic in furry discussions. Advice-giving furries tell each other: You Don’t Have To Come Out As Furry.  It’s cringeworthy to do that, right?  You don’t come out as a Star Trek fan, do you? Why would anyone act like appreciating cartoon animals is an identity that’s somehow comparable to being gay? Isn’t that insulting to people who face REAL struggles? What’s the worst that could happen?

Here’s a cautionary tale for you. A story of struggle, acceptance, and Wolf Bulge. A reason for a “Best Dad In Fandom” award.

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February 28, 2017

La Saga d’Atlas & Axis, t.4, by Pau – French comic review by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

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

album-cover-large-31145La Saga d’Atlas & Axis, t.4, by Pau.
Roubaix, France, Ankama Éditions, September 2016, hardcover €12.90 (60 + [3] pages).

Lex Nakashima & I again present our conspiracy to get you to read French animalière bandes dessinées; in volume 4 ET DERNIER of the Saga of Atlas & Axis!

If you’ve been following Jean-Marc Pau’s adventures of the two talking dogs since t.1 was published in August 2011, here is the conclusion.

Frankly, this isn’t at all what I was expecting – so much so that I’m tempted to ignore this ending and leave the series hanging. For two reasons. Firstly, it’s much more somber and melancholy than I’d expected. I don’t demand a happy ending, but this is depressing. Secondly, the whole purpose of Nakashima’s and my conspiracy is to present French-language anthro-animal comics that aren’t likely to be published in English; and the publication of this whole series in English has just been announced! More on this below.

For three albums now, Atlas (Afghan hound) and Axis (terrier mutt) have wandered the world of Pangea, searching for the Magic Bone of Khimera (whatever that is) that would prove whether wolves and dogs were created independently, or whether dogs evolved from wolves. It was easy to see Pangea as a funny-animal 10th-century Europe, with Viking raiders and the “where did dogs come from” controversy standing for the religious debates within Christianity of that time. The only thing that didn’t fit were the exploding sheep, and that could be dismissed as Pau being humorous.

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