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October 8, 2015

The Stone God Awakens, by Philip Jose Farmer – Book Review by Fred Patten

by Pup Matthias

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

The Stone God Awakens, by Philip José Farmer.
NYC, Ace Books, November 1970, paperback #78650, 75¢ (190 pages).

“He awoke and did not know where he was.

Flames were crackling fifty feet away. Woodsmoke stung his nose and brought tears. Somewhere, men were shouting and screaming. […]

He was in one end of a large building of gigantic logs, wooden pillars, and large overhead beams. Flames leaped along the wall toward him. The roof at the other end had just caved in, and the smoke was carried away by a vagary of the wind. He could see the sky outside. It was black, and then, far off, lightning flashed. About fifty yards away, lit by the flames, was a hill. On top of the hill were the silhouettes of trees. Fully leaved trees.

A moment ago, it had been winter. The deep snows had been piled around the buildings of the research center outside Syracuse, New York.” (p. 5)

The protagonist is Ulysses Singing Bear, a young scientist of native American descent in 1985 (fifteen years in the future when this book was published). He discovers that the fighting going on around him does not involve humans.

“The flames from the burning hall and from other buildings combined to illuminate the scene. Furry legs and tails, white and black and brown, danced around. The legs were human and yet not human. They bent queerly; they looked like the hind legs of four-footed animals that had decided to stand upright, like men, and so had evolved half-human, half-beast legs.

The owner of a pair of legs fell flat on his back, a spear stuck in his belly. The man became even more confused and shocked. The creature looked like a cross between a human being and a sealpoint Siamese cat. The body fur was white; the face below the forehead was black; the lower part of the arms, legs and the tail were black. The face was as flat as any human’s, but the nose was round and black, like a cat’s, and the ears were black and pointed. The mouth, open in death, revealed sharp feline teeth.” (p. 6) Read the rest of this entry »

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October 6, 2015

The Suspended Castle – Book Review by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

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

The Suspended Castle, by Fred. [Translated by Richard Kutner.]
NYC, Candlewick Press/TOON Books, October 2015, hardcover $16.95 (53 [+ 1] pages).

The Suspended Castle (Le Château Suspendu) is Book 3 in the Philémon series by Fred (Frédéric Othon Théodore Aristidès, 1931-2013), serialized in the classic French comics magazine Pilote. The weekly strip was collected into 15 books between 1972 and 1987. Fred retired leaving Philémon’s adventures uncompleted, until he wrote/drew a 16^th volume to finish the series just before his death.

Book 1, Cast Away on the Letter A, was reviewed here in January, and book 2, The Wild Piano, in June. Fred’s Philémon was/is a surrealistic cartoon strip in the tradition of Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland and George Herriman’s Krazy Kat. Philémon is a teenage farmboy in the French countryside of the 1960s-‘70s who falls down a well and has psychedelic adventures on the literal letters ATLANTIC of the Atlantic Ocean of a parallel world. The series is only marginally anthro-animal, but it contains many imaginative fantastic animals in bizarre settings that lovers of top-quality newspaper comic-strip art, and furry fans, will want to see. Philémon, and Fred’s other works, have been hits in France for almost fifty years, almost constantly in print.

In the first two albums, teenager Philémon falls down an abandoned old well on his father’s farm in the French countryside and has fantastic adventures on the two A’s of the ATLANTIC ocean of a parallel world. He meets Mister Bartholomew (Barthélémy), an old Robinson Crusoe-like hermit from our world who was cast away onto the first A forty years ago. Philémon returns to his skeptical father Hector’s farm at the end of Cast Away on the Letter A, but he accidentally leaves Mr. Barthlomew behind. In The Wild Piano, Phil’s Uncle Felix (Félicien) turns out to be an amateur magician who knows how to return to the parallel world. (The “portal” is a different fantastic method each time.) He sends Phil back to rescue Mr. Bartholomew, which he does after more adventures on the letter N.

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October 2, 2015

Into Expermia, by M. R. Anglin – Book Review by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

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

Into Expermia, by M. R. Anglin
North Charleston, SC, CreateSpace, July 2015, trade paperback $9.99 (299 [+ 1] pages), Kindle $2.99.

M. R. Anglin’s Silver Foxes series is up to four novels now. She began writing it with Silver Foxes, published in April 2008. You can probably skip that one, but if you are unfamiliar with this series, you should read Winds of Change (June 2009) and Prelude to War (October 2013) for their background before you read Into Expermia.

In the funny-animal world of Clorth, the Age of the Silver Foxes lasted a little over 2,000 years and abruptly ended with their extermination about 1,500 years ago. The Silver Foxes were a mutant anthropomorphic species whose metallic-like fur gave them their distinct silver coloring, and strong bioelectrical powers that they used to make themselves an arrogant ruling class in the semi-mythical past. They were hated, and Clorth finally united to invade their country, Expermia, and slaughter all the Silver Foxes in 3045-’46. In Clorth’s present, 4587, all the Silver Foxes are believed long dead. The previous novels establish the current political tensions between the rest of Clorth, led by the Kingdom of Drymairad, and police-state Expermia which is ending centuries of isolation and about to launch a new campaign for world conquest. One of several protagonists is mid-teen Xena Dunsworth, an orphan gray fox adopted with her younger sister Kathra by J. R. Dunsworth (wolf), a notorious criminal but kindly to them. Xena is aware that she is growing up to become a Silver Fox. She darkens her fur, but she can’t do anything about the bursts of electricity she inadvertently gives off. Simultaneously the charismatic villain Maximilian Descarté (red fox), a powerful industrialist, is maneuvering to replace the king of Drymairad and take charge of the league against Expermia. Max believes that the Silver Foxes were once real (many Clorthians think they were mythical), and he has secretly tried to recreate them in the laboratory. When he learned that one had been re-bred by accident, he captured Xena and Kathra as experimental guinea-pigs. They were rescued by their foster father, who located their long-lost mother. That’s the background.

Into Expermia begins a short time later, after Xena has returned to her home town and Max has consolidated his takeover of Drymairad’s throne. The scene is very mundane, considering its cast. Xena has a quiet 15^th birthday party at home in the small rural town of Justin’s Ridge with her sister, her refound mother and her foster father, her teen boyfriend Hunter, and her pet, Charuse. If you’ve read the earlier novels, you know that Xena isn’t a normal gray fox, her Daddy is a high-profile criminal, her boyfriend was originally the Expermian red fox bounty hunter hired to re-enslave her, and Charuse is …well, read it. Read the rest of this entry »

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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.

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 33^rd 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 29, 2015

Fred Patten Presents – his articles about Furry publishing, animation, and history.

by Patch O'Furr

Discussion of the history of furry fandom with Fred Patten, at ConFURence 9.

Fred Patten is the most valued contributor at Dogpatch Press. He came here during editor down time at Flayrah, seeking a stable place for his reviews and history articles. (For those who aren’t acquainted with Fred’s impressive resume as a fan historian and curator, he has spent a lot of the recent decade in a convalescent hospital. Writing is a major benefit to his life and a good cause to support.)

The “Fred Patten” tag has everything he has contributed here.

Without Fred’s guest posts, there would be no five day a week schedule here. Assisting and formatting his articles takes a lot of work, and five days a week makes a very demanding pace. But I think the promise of regular content should inspire anyone who contributes. It makes this the most active “Furry News” source. It’s all non-profit, so thank Fred for doing what few people can do without being paid – and volunteer helper Poppa Bookworm – and (ahem) anyone else who helps, reads, shares or comments to make this a community thing.

Fred recently shared a bibliography listing an incredible abundance of his book reviews. It covers years of writing and hundreds of posts. At the very least, it’s worth browsing to get an idea about the variety of Furry published work.

“What the Well Read Furry Should Read”: All of Fred’s book reviews at Dogpatch Press, Flayrah, and Anthro magazine.

The list doesn’t include Fred’s other amazing articles that aren’t book reviews. Here’s everything else. You don’t want to miss these, if you’re interested in learning about anthropomorphic art, how furries came to be, and what they do and like.

FURRY PUBLISHING, ANIMATION, AND HISTORY:

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September 25, 2015

Fred Patten Presents: What the Well-Read Furry Should Read.

by Patch O'Furr

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer. WORD COUNT RECORD: 8266!

Art by pacopanda.

Patch has been urging me to make a list of my furry book reviews for fans who want recommendations of what’s worth reading. Okay — but that’s a constantly changing situation. There are a very few books like Animal Farm by George Orwell and Watership Down by Richard Adams that will always remain classics. Otherwise, what’s a hot title this year will become forgotten in a few years. How many people remember New Coyote by Michael Bergey today? — but it’s still an excellent novel.

I have been reviewing furry fiction since 1962, for fanzines and online sites. On one hand, I don’t want my reviews to become forgotten. On the other, I realize that an info dump of 1,000 or more reviews of furry books will turn off the vast majority of fans and never be read. So here are several sections as a compromise.

First, enjoy my pick of Ten Furry Classics that everyone should read. Okay, one is edited by me, but it’s the first anthology of furry fiction; not just stories written to fill a book, but the best stories from the first fifteen years of all the furry magazines, 1987 to 2002. These ten books are all great reading, and all are important for one reason or another. Sirius was the first serious intelligent animal novel for adults. Watership Down was the first adult talking animal fantasy to present a species having its own language and religion. Tailchaser’s Song was the first adult talking-animal fantasy to feature cats. Jonathan Livingston Seagull — a mainstream cult classic in the 1970s, and still one of the best “Feel Good” furry novels. Fangs of K’aath; arguably the first “furry” novel.

Then enjoy my pick of twenty-five more that are still enjoyable, even if they’re no longer current, for fans who want to read more. These are NOT necessarily better than the “dump” below them. They are guaranteed good reading, but they do not include anything above a PG rating, for readers who do not like fiction of a mature erotic nature. Kyell Gold writes excellent fiction, but he does put R-rated scenes into most of them. Read the rest of this entry »

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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).

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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September 22, 2015

Chasing the Phoenix, by Michael Swanwick – Book Review by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

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

Chasing the Phoenix, by Michael Swanwick
NYC, Tor Books, August 2015, hardcover $26.99 (316 pages), Kindle $12.99.

Here is Michael Swanwick’s opening of Chasing the Phoenix:

“Third year, summer, first month, of the royal year. The Hidden King killed his brothers so that there might be no rivals for his throne and continued his preparations for war. In that same month, a stranger unlike any ever seen before came to the Abundant Kingdom.

— The Summer and Winter Annals

Surplus came down out of the north dressed in a Mongolian shaman’s robes covered with multicolored ribbons and hammered copper disks. He was leading a yak adorned with red tassels and tiny silver bells. The yak carried a bundle swaddled in cloth and carefully tied up with ropes.

In the bundle was the corpse of his friend Aubrey Darger.” (p. 17)

I am tempted to end this review here. If that isn’t enough to make you want to read Chasing the Phoenix, nothing that I could say would convince you.

Chasing the Phoenix is Swanwick’s sixth novelette, novella, or novel featuring the adventures of his futuristic con-man team of human Aubrey Darger and genetically-engineered talking dog Sir Blackthorpe Ravenscairn de Plus Precieux (“Call me Sir Plus”). Three short fictions chronicled their steampunk post-utopian adventures in London, Paris, and Arcadian Greece on their way to the Grand Duchy of Muscovy. In the novel Dancing With Bears (reviewed here), they reached (and ruined) Moscow. A later adventure was set in New Orleans.

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September 18, 2015

The Starling God, by Tanya Sousa – Book Review by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

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

The Starling God, by Tanya Sousa.
Old Hickory, TN, Forestry Press, March 2014, trade paperback $12.50 (269 pages), Kindle $9.99.

“Trying to make sense of humanity’s quirky and often devastating behaviors, birds formed a religion complete with mythology, lore and fissured beliefs.

“The tenuous world-view of birds, and perhaps humans too, is about to be challenged by the coming of a Starling of Prophecy and the truth He is called to discover and ultimately share.” (back-cover blurb)

The Starling God is reminiscent of the 1972 novel Watership Down, by Richard Adams. That novel invented a religion and a language for its animal species, the rabbits, as The Starling God also creates a religion and language for birds. It is also reminiscent of the 1987 Japanese motion picture Gokiburi-tachi no Tasogare/Twilight of the Cockroaches, written and directed by Hiroaki Yoshida. That movie shows a detailed animal (or insect) religion based upon their belief of their relationship with humans, which turns out to be completely erroneous.

In the Prologue a nameless woman who is a wildlife rehabilitator, and who wears flower-print dresses, is called to a trailer park. One of its residents is distraught over the park management’s eradication of a starling’s nest. The woman takes three starling chicks home and nurses them. One fledgling survives, which she prepares to release back into the wild when it is old enough to fend for itself.

She takes the young starling outdoors for short practice flights around her yard, where she puts out food for birds. These include Dove L’al and his mate L’in, and a flock of redwing blackbirds led by Rem. L’al is a Teller, a religious leader who tells the birds who their God is and what she wants.

“Birds here called this God ‘Flower’ since she more often than not chose plumage to reflect their shapes and colors.” (p. 3)

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September 17, 2015

French Anthro Comic: Intégrale Chlorophylle – Book Review by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

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

Intégrale Chlorophylle 1, by Raymond Macherot.
Brussels, Belgium, Le Lombard, October 2012, hardcover €25,50 (208 pages).

Intégrale Chlorophylle 2, by Raymond Macherot.
Brussels, Belgium, Le Lombard, November 2012, hardcover €25,50 (208 pages).

Intégrale Chlorophylle 3, by Raymond Macherot.
Brussels, Belgium, Le Lombard, April 2013, hardcover €25,50 (206 pages).

Raymond Macherot (1924-2008) didn’t invent the French-language animalière cartoon strip. Hergé, the creator of Tintin, dabbled with it in his 1931 Tim L’Ésureuil, Héros du Far-West (Tim the Squirrel, Hero of the Far West), and again in his 1934 album featuring the bears Paul and Virginia, Popol et Virginie chez les Lapinos. (The Lapinos were a tribe of rabbit Indians, renamed the Bunnokees in an English translation. Hergé was a fan of early Western movies.) Edmond-François Calvo (1892-1957) created the first memorable animalière with his classic two-volume history of World War II with funny animals, La Bête est Morte (The Beast is Dead, 1944), which resulted in Calvo in France getting an invitation from Walt Disney to come work for his studio in Hollywood. (Calvo declined.) Calvo drew several other comics featuring adorably cute animals during his career, but they were mostly innocent pets. It was Macherot who established talking funny animals as a viable category of French-language comic strips from the 1950s to the 1990s when he retired. Macherot created several other popular series, not all featuring funny animals – his light adventures of human British secret agent Colonel Clifton are still reprinted – but his Chlorophylle the dormouse, serialized in the weekly Tintin magazine from 1954 to 1966, Sibylline the field mouse, Inspector Chaminou (pretty kitty) of Zooland’s Royal Secret Police, Mirliton the housecat (written by Raoul Cauvin), and other funny animals are what Macherot is most remembered for. Read the rest of this entry »

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