Your Guide to the World of Furry Fandom
You just know that anything from a publisher called Plotless Comics is going to be interesting, right? Well that’s the home of Walrus-Rabbit, created by Matt Marchetti (the actual title is much much longer but we’ll leave it at that), and SadoCat, created by Cory Patten. Needless to say things are not very serious but are very very strange in these funny animal superhero comics. Read all about these characters and more at their Plotless web site.
image c. 2018 Plotless Comics
Bobby Timony (art) and his twin brother Peter Timony (writing) are the creators of Night Owls, an award-winning series from DC Comics that’s been available in print and on line since 2009. This Roaring-20’s-style adventure tells the story of two humans and a gargoyle who team up to solve supernatural mysteries. It features more than its fair share of non-human characters too, mind you. If you visit their web site (called, appropriately enough, Twin Comics) you’ll see much more of Bobby’s art and the brothers’ work on other comic series they offer on-line now. Among them Goblin Hood, Widdershins Wilderness Scouts, and (furriest of them all) McCool: Sheriff of Dogwood.
image c. 2018 twincomics.com
A recent discovery from the Long Beach Comic Expo. Seung Woo Cha currently works as a director at Dreamworks TV… but he is also a fine artist, known for his imaginative depictions of wild life from around the world — especially gorillas and other apes. Often working in black ink, he paints in broad artistic strokes that nonetheless capture the essence and power of his subjects. Recently he collected several of his works together into a hardcover portfolio book, appropriately enough entitled The Art of Wild Life. You can purchase the book over at his web site, and see examples of his work as well.
image c. 2018 Draw 4 Life Studios
“A polar bear falls in love with a seal, but the seal thinks the polar bear is trying to eat it!” You can’t get a much more straight-forward explanation for A Polar Bear In Love — a new black & white manga from the artist Koromo. Now Yen Press have collected Volume 1 into a trade paperback. Long-running cartoon adventures have come from far less…
image c. 2017 Yen Press
An interesting project we stumbled across at the LA. Comic Con, with the deceptively simple title of Bun. Brought to us by the writing and illustration team of Brian Silveira and Lisa Nguyen, Bun is a graphic novel fantasy/horror series the couple created and published themselves. Their web page describes it like this: “A boy. A girl. An unspeakable evil. A rabbit.” An interview in a local newspaper gave us a bit more description: Bun is “…an intricate tale that follows a young boy and his pet rabbit, the titular Bun. The book picks up after the boy, Milo, loses his mother to cancer. In the wake of her death, his father retreats into alcoholism and depression, essentially making the boy an orphan, alone and struggling with his grief. Milo suddenly disappears, transported to another world where his rabbit Bun serves as the only bridge back home.” The first and second installments of this black & white series are available now.
image c. 2017 by Silveira/Nguyen
According to Previews, a classic British black & white wildlife comic called Marney the Fox is available again, now in a hardcover collection. We got this from Blimey, the Blog of British Comics: “Just to cover the basics; Marney the Fox appeared in Buster weekly from the issue dated 22nd June 1974 to 11th September 1976. This fictional story of a wandering fox cub was written by Scott Goodall and illustrated by John Stokes. The artwork was absolutely superb and many consider it to be amongst Stokes’ best work. (The artist himself regards it as some of his best too.) One thing that made Marney the Fox exceptional is that, unlike most other Buster adventure strips, it played up the emotional content.” The new collection is available now from Rebellion/2000AD.
image c. 2017 Rebellion/2000AD
This one passed beneath our radar (perhaps naturally!) but we managed to catch it at Long Beach Comic Con. Nathaniel Osollo is an underground cartoonist who specializes in black & white… and funny animal noir. His most famous creation is Dark Mouse, “a disgruntled mouse with drinking and violence problems and a penchant for lady mice”. Whew. His first collection on paper is called I Used To Know Dark Mouse, but you can read it entirely on line at issuu.com. His web site, Eye Draugh (get it?) has more of Dark Mouse and other creations.
image c. 2017 by Nathaniel Osollo
Before he (and his wife!) created a world-famous mouse, Walt Disney was already well-known for his Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoons (co-created with the great Ub Iwerks, of course). Now in celebration of Oswald’s 90th birthday Animation Scoop let us know about a new hardcover book dedicated to his legacy. Oswald the Lucky Rabbit: The Search for the Lost Disney Cartoons (whew!) is coming out this week from Disney Editions. From editor David Bossert’s press release: “For the first time ever, all the known material and information relevant to Oswald the Lucky Rabbit has been aggregated into one book, including never-before-seen images, photographs, development art, production artwork, scripts, as well as gag and situation notes are all inclusive. This handsome volume contains a variety of color posters, many of which were found at auction houses and with collectors. This deluxe hardcover edition features an embossed cloth spine and is profusely illustrated with many rare images that reconstruct many of the still lost cartoons in the series.”
image c. 2017 Disney Editions
As you may have heard, a couple years ago Berke Breathed once again fired up his seminal comic strip Bloom County. Well for those among us who remember the first go-round, IDW has brought together a special box set called Bloom County: Real, Classy, & Compleat, 1980-1989. Here’s the press release: “Presenting every Bloom County daily and Sunday strip in chronological order from the first to the last! Bloom County debuted in late 1980 and ran until August 1989. Featuring an exceedingly quirky cast of characters, including the sweetly naive Opus the penguin, the flea-bitten Bill the cat, womanizing attorney Steve Dallas, Milo Bloom, Cutter John, and many others, Bloom County soon became one of the most popular comic strips in history, appearing in over 1200 newspapers. Then, at the peak of its popularity, Berkeley Breathed did something unprecedented… he walked away. Now, more than 25 years later, the complete collection of the Pulitzer Prize-winning comic strip is collected into a deluxe, two-volume box set.” It’s available now at your local comic book store.
image c. 2017 IDW Publishing
