What Came Before panel talk draft

Hello everyone! Welcome to "What Came Before", a show-and-tell of comics and magazines from the early days of the Furry Fandom. I'm going to give a hopefully short talk, then everyone is free to go ahead and browse the collection here, excepting the adult stuff - sorry, general audience panel and all!

Allright, who here has been in the fandom before 2005? 2000? [Some of this stuff might be familiar to the older folk here.][Man, I feel old...]

Just a quick introduction about myself. My name is Summercat, and I've been in the fandom since 1999. I'm from Southern California, and had the pleasure of getting to know some of the older folk of the fandom, the ones who were around at the start of it all. Through them, I gained an appreciation of the older Furry comics, and began acquring them as I encountered them for sale. The collection available here is my personal collection, which focuses on material made by the fandom prior to 2000.

One of the things I keep running into when talking about my collection, is that few people from my generation of furries, and very few of those who joined after me, know anything about these comics or magazines. Frankly, I don't blame them, I have a few titles here that I didn't know existed until I stumbled across them in a random comicbook shop.

One of the big barriers for finding out about these is their relative scarcity. Print runs of some of the more obscure and smaller titles were tiny, with a very small audience. They're also older, and aside from the publishers or older distribution companies like Rabbit Valley holding onto backstock, they're generally not for sale where people can see them.

So these comics and magazines, they're out there to find, but the chances of stumbling across them are slim, and you'd have to think to look for them to find them - which most people simply wouldn't.

[Insert portion talking about low quanties + low interest = low chance of preservation for future]

That leads to the two big motivations for me expanding my library and bringing it out here; preservation and education. My goal is to try to preserve as much of the furry fandom's early work as possible, as well as do what I can to make people aware the material exists and the relevance it has to the furry fandom.

Now to be clear, I have a particular definition in mind when I talk about "Furry" in this context. I am speaking of media involving anthropomorphic animals originating from a community of fans of anthropomorphic animals. This is the defintion I use when considering purchases for my collection, I'm not going to push it as a definition of what Furry means, that's a whole other subject.

This means that my collection covers primarily the 80s and 90s, as what became the fandom grew out of the Underground Comix and early Anime communities, as well as the very relevant Funny Animal fandom. As with quite a few things, there's no hard and fast date where anything before would be Funny Animal and anything after would be Furry, but Fred Patten, a Furry and Anime fandom historian, pegs the fanding starting in 1984, with the founding of Rowrbrazzle.

Now Rowrbrazzle isn't the earliest piece in my collection that comes under my definition of "Furry", so I'll get to it in a moment. The first item on my list here is Omaha the Cat Dancer. Created by Reed Waller and [Kate?] in [1978?], Omaha was published in Vootie, an Amateur Press Association group that was "Funny Animal" friendly, as a specific response to a question, paraphrasing, "Why isn't there more adult stuff in funny animal?".

A quick short note, an APA is usually a member-only publication where people send their contributions to a central editor, who then compiles them in a format like this [Hold up a Rowrbrazzle], then sends them back out. The contributions are often critiqued and commented on by other members. In a sense, it's a snail mail message board that lets you post four times a year."

Back to Omaha, [Short talk about Omaha]

Now I mentioned that Vootie was a "Funny Animal Friendly" APA? When it closed shop in 1983, Marc Shirmiester put out a call for a new APA that would be Funny Animal focused, called Rowrbrazzle. The first issue was made in 1984, and really constitutes the first time there was a publication specifically for what we would call "furry" content. A lot of notable names from the early days of the fandom were members of Rowrbrazzle, but don't let that fool you, they also let me in for a while, but other members people may know include Chris Sawyer, Ken Sample, Mark Stanley of Freefall, Karno, and Stan Sakai. It also includes people you may not know but whose works you've probably seen or I'll have here, such as Mike Curtis who did Shanda the Panda, or Shawn Keller, who has been an animator for Disney, Bluth, Warner Brothers, and Dreamworks.

The third item I like to bring up is Albedo, by Steve Gallachi. While many people haven't heard of Albedo, it was art of his character Erma Felda, displayed in a [Find specific convention] that led to what would later be called the first furry gatherings, to talk about the subject. By [date], there were Furry tracks at Science fiction and fantasy conventions, leading up to Confurence 0, the first Furry Convention, in 1989.

Pretty much everything else in my collection comes afterwards. There's a few notable titles here I want to mention before we go on to questions and browsing. I could go into more detail on all of these, but I want to be brief for time constraints.

[Usagi Yojimbo]
[Hepcats]
[Furrlough, brief mention of Critters]
[Katmandu]

Now there's a question to ask: Is any of this relevant to today's fandom? After all, most of this was printed almost over two decades ago. It's a fine question to ask, and really it comes down to taking advantage of a shared cultural heritage. These comics and magazines, they're part of what the Furry Fandom was when I joined, and it was part of what I found inspiration in. I've asked some of what I think are popular artists today who they looked up to in the fandom when they joined, who they drew inspiration from - and it comes back to these. This is our heritage, the works that helped build our fandom. All I ask is that you take a look, and see what came before, then think about what can come next. Thank you.