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Fluff Pieces Every Week

Tag: comics

August 18, 2016

Dream Jumper: Book One, Nightmare Escape – book review by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

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

71+62fmn3iLDream Jumper. Book One, Nightmare Escape, by Greg Grunberg & Lucas Turnbloom.
NYC, Scholastic Press/Graphix, July 2016, hardcover $24.99 (203 [+1] pages), trade paperback $12.99, Kindle $7.99.

In this adventure fantasy recommended for grades 5 to 8, middle school student Ben Maxwell is failing because he keeps falling asleep in classes from exhaustion. He has nightmares every night about monsters chasing him and his school friends. But his friends also have nightmares, and Ben is in them. A rabbit named Lewis tells Ben that he is really a Dream Jumper, with the power to enter others’ nightmares that are sent by the hulking monster Erebus, the lackey of Phobetor, the Nightmare Lord. Lewis teaches Ben how to fight Erebus and his nox minions that thrive off people’s fears.

But it’s all more complicated than that. As Ben’s mother insists that he be tested at a Sleep Clinic for his “disorders”, and Ben demands that Lewis in the Dream World tell him more about what is going on, details emerge that are more science-fictional than fantastic, such as the government’s top-secret Office for Dream Warfare. Just who are Phobetor and Erebus? Who are Lewis and his friends, who are clearly more than just cute furry and feathery talking animals? Will Ben’s classmates from Taft Middle School play a more important part than needing saving from their nightmares? Stay tuned for Book 2.

Fantasy and s-f stories about a separate waking world and a dream world, with a protagonist who is able to travel between the two, go back to at least the 1940s. Two 1940s examples, both for adults, are the novel Slaves of Sleep by L. Ron Hubbard and the short story “Dreams Are Sacred” by Peter Phillips. By making their Dream World more fantastic, with friendly Dream Jumper talking animals like Lewis the rabbit and Mrs. Geomy the gopher, author Grunberg and illustrator Turnbloom have produced a comic-book-format novel that can help preadolescents to discover the worlds of furry literature.

– Fred Patten

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January 18, 2016

Big Beefy Sparkly Tigers, and tributes to furs we have lost – NEWSDUMP (1/18/16)

by Patch O'Furr

Headlines, links and little stories to make your tail wag.  Guest posts welcome. Tips: patch.ofurr@gmail.com. 

Zootopia marketing inspires visions of a feature length Orangina commercial. This short article shares a new image and says the movie is having “aggressive marketing”. And Reddit furries discuss hot tigers:

  • “There’s no denying that they know who they’re marketing to.”
  • “Big, beefy, sparkly tigers. They know what they’re doing with stuff like these, and nobody’s gonna tell me otherwise.”
  • “And people still claim they’re not marketing to us. ha. ha. ha.”

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Marketing meets Rule 34.  “How Esurance Lost Its Mascot to the Internet.” Not furry, but this will ring some bells.

Puzzle Cheetah in Subway ad (via Greenreaper.) Puzzle is a UK fursuiter. Put this on the list of mainstream marketing featuring furries.

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December 10, 2015

College Catastrophe, by Jan – comic review By Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

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

ccbookCollege Catastrophe, by Jan. Illustrated.
Hong Kong, Tiger Knight Comics, November 2012, trade paperback, $12.95 (unpaged [127 pages]), e-book $3.95.

This is the collection of the online comic strip that Jan (this book gives away his real name as Chun Yan Miu) published from November 2000 to January 2013. The early strips were remastered between 2009 and 2012, so they all look “current”. He retired it to concentrate on his later, more popular Medievalish fantasy Swords and Sausages strip, although he has just started a College Catastrophe sequel: Nine to Nine, showing what is happening to its cast one year after graduating from college, beginning on November 1, 2015.

If you want to know what Jan did before Swords and Sausages, here it is – all 202 strips, plus fillers unavailable elsewhere.

College Catastrophe is a slice-of-life college comic strip with seven anthropomorphized students as the main characters: Jan, a lion computer science major; Wolf, a wolf physics major and Jan’s roommate; Phil, a horse math major; Amber, Jan’s vixen girlfriend; Shiera, a lioness Japanese major; Tor, a tiger fine arts major; and Andrea, Tor’s arctic fox girlfriend. Tor and Andrea were added to the strip shortly before it ended, and have been reused as the main characters in Jan’s fantasy Swords and Sausages.

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December 7, 2015

Friend of community dies in shooting, Zootopia and animation – NEWSDUMP (12/07/15)

by Patch O'Furr

Headlines, links and little stories to make your tail wag.  Guest posts welcome. Tips: patch.ofurr@gmail.com. 

Friend of the community lost in mass shooting in San Bernardino CA. (Tip: Bosn Otter.)

EP-151209804The tragedy on December 2 is described as terrorism-related, and left 14 dead and 21 injured.

Bosn said Dan Kaufman was “a friend to the furry community… a friend to pretty much everybody he ever met.”

  • ABC7.com: “A coffee shop worker killed in the San Bernardino mass shooting on Wednesday was remembered by loved ones as a caring and compassionate man.”
  • Inside Edition: Kaufman was “named as one of the victims of the San Bernardino massacre after his partner initially thought he’d survived.”
  • L.A. Times: “For victim’s boyfriend, 22 hours of conflicting reports, then heartbreak”
  • SBsun.com: “jovial person who touched lives”
  • The Guardian: “a gregarious free spirit who adored horror films”
  • PE.com: “Kaufman liked dressing up in costume and performed for 16 years in a local Renaissance Faire.”
  • L.A. Times: “dressed as an Italian noble with a stiff lace collar and a pewter goblet, or as a peasant riding a horse”
  • Frontiers Media: “San Bernardino Mass Shooting Took Gay Victim”

His Facebook account gave the impression that he had lots of friends through cons and the Ren Faires.  It was hard to find direct Furry connections, although some of his last pics were from a comic con I went to 1 month ago (Comikaze Expo) where he cosplayed as a wolf.

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October 22, 2015

French Comic: Léonid. T. 1, Les Deux Albinos – review by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

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

91pzQz5K1xLLéonid. T. 1, Les Deux Albinos, by Frédéric Brrémaud & Stefano Turconi.
Toulon, France, Soleil, August 2015, hardcover €10,95 (48 pages).

My thanks to Lex Nakashima, as usual for this French bande dessinée album.

At first glance, Léonid looks like a cute funny-animal comic book featuring cats, roughly similar to Disney’s 1970 The Aristocats. But its story, full of blood and terror, is closer to the German Felidae, either the 1989 novel by Akif Pirinçci or the furry-convention-favorite 1994 animated feature. (Both are good, but the movie simplifies the complex story.)

The locale is the farming district of Deux-Sèvres, in central-west France. “Léonid is a cat, not yet an adult, but not a kitten, either. Just a young cat. He lives in a house in the district, in the midst of trees, pretty far from any city and close to a farm.” Léonid is a young housecat, living with two other housecats (Hoa Mai, a Siamese, and Rosso, an elderly orange Pekinese) and a dog (Mirza, a toy terrier). His household is also the home of Atchi, a mouse constantly sneezing because he’s allergic to cat hairs. Léonid is allowed outside during the daytime to associate and play with the local feral cats; the female black-&-white Ba’on, and the males Bouboule (the fat one), Arsène (the nervous one), and an anonymous one (because he’s almost immediately killed).

Two newborn lambs are slaughtered at night, apparently by a wild animal. The cats inside a house are presumably safe, but the feral cats who spend nights outdoors worry that a fox may have moved into the neighborhood – or (for those who fear the less-probable predators) a wolf or an ermine. Léonid finds out that it was two bloodthirsty albino cats, but at first he can’t convince anyone else. They think that he’s exaggerating to make himself look important; then, when the two albinos kidnap Ba’on, they say that it’s every cat for himself. Meanwhile, the farmer has set Zeus and Apollon, his two killer hounds, loose to safeguard the rest of his flock, and the dogs run bloodily through the neighborhood as a savage danger to all of the cats who aren’t safe in houses.

The Two Albinos is mostly the story of how Ba’on is kidnapped by the two albinos to be their slave, and how Léonid and Atchi, the sneezing mouse, venture outside to her rescue. They’re successful, but not really because Ba’on reveals that while she was in the albino cats’ power, they boasted that they are just the vanguard of “the horde”, “the avant-garde of the terror of Great Attila, our guide” who will kill or enslave all the animals of the district.   Léonid, Ba’on, Aichi, Hoa Mai, Rossi, and Mirza are left wondering what to do when Attila and his horde arrive? Read the rest of this entry »

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October 9, 2015

French Comic review by Fred Patten – Ocelot: Le Chat Qui N’en Etait Pas Un.

by Pup Matthias

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

Ocelot coverOcelot: Le Chat Qui N’en Était Pas Un, by Jean David Morvan & Séverine Tréfouël [writers] and Agnès Fouquart [art].
Paris, Delcourt, August 2015, hardcover €12,50 (48 pages), Kindle free.

Thanks once again to Lex Nakashima for this fine example of the French bande dessinée.

If you think that this story is familiar, it should be. The publisher itself says in its catalogue that Ocelot: The Cat Who Was Not One is “in the fashion of Lady and the Tramp”. Amazon.fr compares it to The Aristocats. (Les Aristochats.) You are advised “To read it with an empty mind and enjoy it”. (A lire pour se vider l’esprit et passer un bon moment.) In other words, just read it for fun. Tour modern Paris, the City of Lights, with a quartet of free-living cats.

Ocelot opens with the titular ocelot looking at the Eiffel Tower, all lit up at night. He hears another cat fighting with dogs and races across the rooftops to watch. He saves her, a fluffy white cat (“Une ragdoll!!”) with brown ears and tail, more by accident than design. The cat, obviously a sophisticated lady, is more amused than grateful. “You’re rather bizarre…” “I’m UNIQUE. That’s different.” She’s Olympe. He’s “Doudou de la Gür Gandine!” (Gür Gandine’s Cutie). She laughs in his face. (More specifically, a doudou is a young child’s favorite toy or plush doll, usually well-worn.) Read the rest of this entry »

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October 5, 2015

Patreon hack blamed on furries, news from Culturally F’ed – NEWSDUMP (10/8/15)

by Patch O'Furr

Headlines, links and little stories to make your tail wag.  Guest posts welcome. Tips: patch.ofurr@gmail.com. 

Patreon Hacked, Furries blamed, journalist downloads porn for “work”.

Patreon user info was compromised by a security breach.  A Twitter user claiming responsibility offered an online-politics grudge motive, and shared claims that Patreon account data was being misused by the “Yiff.party” website.  The prankish claim seems really far fetched to me up front, and the site itself denies any responsibility.  But the prank was successful enough to convince the journalist (for a big digital media brand) to download from the site, and seriously report finding nothing but sexy animals.  

UT club encourages students to find ‘fursonas’

Whines, from FurAffinity.

Whines, from FA.

A standard introduction article from the University of Texas at Austin student newspaper. It adds nothing unexpected, but reads nicely.  Congrats to the Longhorn Furs social club.

They have involvement with Whines.  It led me to learn the info below, and request a submission for The Furclub Survey of Furry dance parties. Expect more about it soon.

Starting in 2013 and inspired by descriptions of the Frolic in California, Whines started organizing small furry dance events and has held them once every 2-3 months since them. They tend to have an attendance in the 20-40 range with a handful of fursuiters. Most recently the dance was held on UT campus in partership with the University of Texas ‘Longhorn Furs‘ group.

New from Culturally F’ed

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October 1, 2015

French comic: Une Aventure de Chlorophylle – Book Review by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

Belgian, to be accurate. Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

Une Aventure de Chlorophylle. T.1, Embrouilles a Coquefredouille, by Godi & Zidrou.
Brussels, Belgium, Le Lombard, September 2014, hardcover €10,60 (48 pages).

My thanks to Lex Nakashima again for this French-language bande dessinée.1507-1

So they’ve started another Chlorophylle series. Whoop-de-do. Raymond Macherot (1924-2008) began Chloro the dormouse’s adventures in the weekly Tintin comic-book magazine (1946-1993) in 1954, continued it through 11 or 12 adventures (depending on how you count), and wrote/drew his last Chloro story in 1966. Since then, his Chloro stories have been reprinted umpteen times, alone and in collections. Lombard has tried to continue the Chloro series, in Tintin serializations and in albums after the magazine’s demise, with new stories by a variety of cartoonists: Hubuc & Guilmard, Greg & Dupa, Dupa & Bob De Groot, Bom & Walli. Nothing really caught on. Now here is another attempt, by Belgian comics artist Godi (Bernard Godisiabois) and writer Zidrou (Benoît Drousie). Is this one any different?

Oh, yeah…

The other post-Macherot stories continued Chlorophylle’s adventures in the Belgian Tranquil Vale woodland. The supporting characters were Minimum the mouse, Mironton the dormouse and his wife Mirontaine, Torpedo the otter, Serpolet the rabbit, Clacky the crow, and the usual gang of Chloro’s friends and neighbors. The stories varied in quality, but they were all more of the same.

Complications in Coquefredouille, the first album in the new series, returns to the funny-animal island-kingdom where Chloro had his (arguably) most popular adventures. It’s the 33rd annual International Coquefredouille Film Festival; it’s opening with a new movie about when the kingdom was almost taken over by Anthracite the black rat and his two cannibalistic ferrets, and was saved by Chloro and Minimum (Les Croquillards); and King Mitron XIII of Coquefredouille sends invitations to Chloro and Minimum in the Tranquil Vale to attend. It’s a glitzy film festival; Chloro and Minimum get to meet the movie stars; the real Anthracite died in prison years ago so they don’t have anything more to worry about; so why not? But they arrive to find that there is a new terrorist movement that King Mitron’s government is trying to downplay. The FLF is trying to split Coquefredouille into two nations, the Kingdom of Coque in the west with its traditional capital at Le Fourbi, and the new (kingdom? republic?) of Fredouille in the east with its capital at La Turbine, the island’s second largest city and industrial center. The supposed revolutionists claim they want to stop the royalist government’s exploitation of the east, but nobody in the east seems to feel exploited or want to secede. King Mitron and his advisors suspect that the real reason for the FLF is that all of Couqefredouille’s mineral wealth is located in the east, and that independence for Fredouille would allow the “revolutionists” to set up a corrupt government to milk the eastern resources for themselves. Chloro tries to uncover the truth behind the terrorists, while at the same time dealing with the social complications at the film festival centering around the actors playing himself (Luigi Starletti, a mega-handsome small gray rat) and Anthracite (Antonio Caméo, a tall squirrel who specializes in playing villains).

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September 24, 2015

The Three Jaguars: A Comic About Business, Art, and Life, by M.C.A. Hogarth – Review by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

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

The Three Jaguars: A Comic About Business, Art, and Life, by M. C. A. Hogarth. Foreword by Ursula Vernon.
Tampa, FL, mcahogarth.org, August 2015, trade paperback $15.99 (vi + 136 [+ 1] pages).

51wGE4NLrmL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_M.C. A. Hogarth was one of the first creators in furry fandom. She had art as a young teenager in Yarf! #1, January 1990, as Maggie de Alarcon. Her first novel, a fixup of furry short stories, was Alysha’s Fall (Cornwuff Press, September 2000). Since then she has had over twenty books published, as trade paperbacks and electronic books, by furry specialty publishers and through CreateSpace, often under her own imprint as Studio MCAH. She has won an Ursa Major Award for Best Anthropomorphic Short Fiction of the year, and been nominated for a Gaylactic Spectrum Award for a fantasy novel with a LGBT theme. In May 2015 Hogarth was elected Vice President of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA).

She has also had an active online presence since the 1990s, often raising funds for publishing her books through Kickstarter and similar campaigns. She has regularly answered questions about how to become a successful creative artist or writer. In January 2013 she began presenting this advice/her experiences in the form of a Monday-Wednesday and sometimes Friday web comic strip, The Three Jaguars, which ran through that August. It took the form of conversations, and sometimes arguments, between three facets of her creativity personified as three anthropomorphic jaguars; Business Manager, Marketer, and Artist. Business Manager is the most practical of the three, trying to limit the creativity to what will sell. Artist is the most imaginative, wanting to create what she wants to create when she wants to create it. And Marketer tries to figure out how to make what Artist wants to create saleable.

The Three Jaguars: A Comic About Business, Art, and Life presents the totality of that comic, plus a four-page epilogue drawn for this edition. In an Afterword, Hogarth analyzes why The Three Jaguars did not work as a comic strip. Readers don’t read a comic strip for objective business advice, and the format of three separate characters kept segueing into dramatic storylines, which was fine for evolving the comic into an adventure serial but was not its original purpose. Read the rest of this entry »

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June 13, 2015

French anthro comic: De Cape et de Crocs. T. 11, Vingt Mois Avant – review by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

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

Previously: De Cape et De Crocs is back! French anthro comic announcement, by Fred Patten.

De Cape et de Crocs. T. 11, Vingt Mois Avant, by Alain Ayroles & Jean-Luc Masbou.
Paris, Delcourt, November 2014, hardbound €14,50 (48 pages).

1590_couvThe book has a back-cover quote from Hercule Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac’s 1654 comic play Le Pédant Joué that roughly translates as, “What the devil are you going to do with this mess?” An excellent question, both for this book and to indicate the setting.

“The faithful rabbit Eusebius, once sentenced to life imprisonment, finally reveals his past.” (blurb) The De Cape et de Crocs series (With Cape and Fangs) has been set in a mid-17th-century Europe (and on the Moon), starring the gentlemen-adventurers Sieur Armand Raynal de Maupertuis (anthro French fox) and Don Lope de Villalobos y Sangrin (Spanish wolf). In the first “Act”, The Janissary’s Secret, they rescue Eusebius, the cutest bunny-rabbit in the world, from life imprisonment as a Venetian galley-slave. Eusebius becomes their loyal squire all through Europe (and on the Moon) in the next nine, but he never reveals how he came to be chained as a rower in a Venetian war galley.

With “Act” 11, the series switches to Eusebius’ story before he met Sieur Armand and Don Lope. The setting is Vingt Mois Avant – Twenty Months Earlier. This pastiche of Alexandre Dumas’ title of his famous sequel to his The Three Musketeers, Vingt Ans Après, establishes this bande dessinee’s new direction as both a parody of French 17th-century heroic action-adventure in general and of The Three Musketeers in particular.

Eusebius is not only the cutest bunny-rabbit in the world, he is the most naîve. He does not set out, as d’Artagnan does, to join the King’s Guard, but the Cardinal’s Guard! The King and the Cardinal are friends, aren’t they? Eusebius is introduced on page 1 as addressing a field full of peasant serfs as “My good men”, a well-meaning insult to them. The story, and Eusebius’ prospects, go downhill from there.

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