FurStarter
9-10-15 Furfunding Highlights
How Patreon saved Nerd Rock, and lots of new projects
Illustration from “Pixel Monsters” on Kickstarter
MC Frontalot
Nerdcore is one of my favorite musical “genres,” if it can be properly called that. I guess I’m more a fan of Nerd Rock, which steps out of hip-hop and into quirky female voices, chiptunes, video game remixes, but for the most part Nerdcore’s umbrella covers all that. The rhymes are clever, the snark flows like fine wine, and once in a while, there are ponies.
For a few years, when life got me down, I turned to my good friend Z, whose podcast “Hipster Please” made a painful administrative assistant job into something survivable. Until, like a Joss Whedon series on Fox, he folded. Not enough time, too many other projects, not enough energy.
I was so very thrilled to see him return to podcasting in Hipster Please 2.0, a tumblr-driven series that’s part of the Geekdad Network. At the heart of this was a Patreon, set up as a means to fund a community.
I love Patreon, I really do.
In a not unrelated note, Matthew Ebel, granddaddy of pan-fandom music, mentioned on FA that he’d be moving to Patreon as a funding model, but I’m not talking about Ebel right now. Ignore everything I’ve said about Matthew Ebel, click no links, that’s a different conversation.
Instead, check out the great music on Hipster Please, the old stuff is a lot of fun and the new stuff is fresh and absolutely worth the listen. And join me (and John Kovalic, huh) and in funding great nerd music and the Geekdad network through Patreon. Looking forward to years of geeky tunes. Thank you, “Z”!
Reviews this week: Last-minute coverage of The Fox Tarot and Daphne Lage’s “Thieves’ Tails“! Better late than never…
For a “complete” list of furry/fur-friendly crowdfunding projects, check out the Project Page
New Projects
Art
2016 Literary Cats Calendar (Ends: 9/25/2015)
Costume drama kitties inspired by literature and history. Pretty stuff!
Pixel Monsters (Ends: 10/9/2015)
An 8-bit poster featuring, well, we WON’T call them Pokemon, back when there really were 150 of the darn things.
Nation of the Moon Anthology (Ends: 10/3/2015)
Series of stories exploring a world where 25% of the populace transforms into werewolves one awkward full moon.
The Pride (Ends: 10/4/2015)
An ancient race of dragons wakes from their millenial slumber into…modern Los Angeles.
Past its hefty $12K goal!
Funny Farm – The First Collection (Ends: 10/5/2015)
Web-to-print collection of the 1999 webcomic, Funny Farm
Good Dog – A Canine Paladin’s Story (Ends: 10/9/2015)
A young and noble puppy paladin takes on evil in this short, D&D-inspired graphic novel.
I’m a little on the fence about the art on this one. It’s cute but a little bit not-ready-for-prime-time.
BlackOut: The Comic (Ends: 11/9/2015)
Feral characters in an ancient world, a comic series vaguely reminiscent of Red XIII. Art by Xserzus.
Confection Creatures and other charms (Ends: 9/27/2015)
Cute little neopolitan-flavored kitties and doughnut bear charms, icing-flavored paw charms, and other cutesy pieces
Over goal. I didn’t know Kickstarter had an $80 goal level.
Memento Cat (Ends: 10/1/2015)
Art and apparel combining cat skulls, “Dia de los Muertos” imagery, and a buzzy Tim Burton energy.
Past its lowball goal!
Unleashed: The Movie (Ends: 10/2/2015)
Indie film–an awkward software developer moves to San Francisco, with only her cat and dog. Through a magical happenstance, they transform into The Perfect Men. Comedy ensues.
Second time out for funding this one, and it’s not doing badly.
Beloved Prey: Traveling Opera (Ends: 10/19/2015)
A light, transportable version of Japanese Opera, opening with a Japanese-style opera of an antelope raised by a lion.
Draco Magi Expansion (Ends: 9/17/2015)
Card game with nearly photorealistic fantasy dragons.
Okay, we’ve seen these guys many times before, I’m always impressed with this company’s work.
Dracucat: A Vampire Kitten Card Game (Ends: 10/3/2015)
A light little card game with vampire cats and angsty artwork.
Toys
Bellzi: Anything and Everything Cute (Ends: 10/14/2015)
Simple, charming and colorful, semi-customizable, plush toys. A bit of a Sanrio vibe to them.
Cold Horizon (Ends: 10/15/2015)
A story-driven 2D platformer featuring a polar bear on a journey of survival and rescue.
Echo (Patreon ongoing funding)
A virtual novel with science fiction overtones: A young otter in a small town digs too deep in a city that has deep, buried secrets.
Demo available, and more art on Chase’s FA page.
Laika Dosha (Patreon ongoing funding)
Another sci-fi virtual novel with furry notes (and a very pretty German Shepherd character!) More about the story on the game’s home page.
Blackgate (Patreon ongoing funding)
A bit Welcome to Night Vale: A sleepy little town with a population of monsters. Non-linear story, multi-platform. More about Blackgate on FA.
F- me at Freddy’s (Offbeatr Prevote Period)
Busty female lesbian Manga parody of the Five Nights at Freddy’s series.
This one’s gone to Offbeatr a few times. It’s a dying platform. My $.02 anyway.
Ferrofluid Jewelry (Ends: 9/23/2015): Hypnotizing, nerd-tech jewelry, with weird and spikey ferrofluid. So strange and pointy.
Australi Comic Series (Ends: 9/27/2015): Sort of Australian/Miyazaki, a fantasy comic series exploring a strange dreamtime world.
Megalixer gaming art objects (Ends: 11/7/2015): Quirky little art objects from a Zelda-like universe–potions, heart containers, duku nuts. It’s dangerous to go alone. Take this.
Matthew Ebel on Patreon (Not Yet Launched): All-around musical everything Matthew Ebel plans out his branding on an upcoming Patreon launch.
What’s Corbeau Backing This Week?
Oh, indie tabletop role-playing games, you sweet, seductive creature. The art in this is kind of reminiscent of “Lilo and Stitch.” Yes, please.
A Game of Wolves: Lage’s “Tall Tails”
Action-filled fantasy from the Golden Age of furry comics, and a return of one of the fandom’s foundational artists…
Lage and Calderon’s “Tall Tails”
Kickstarter ending 9/16/15
(So I know this book is by JD Calderon as well as Daphne Lage, but in a fandom graphic novel project, particularly a “flashback” project like this, leading with the graphic artist seems more appropriate…and we’ve covered Calderon’s kickstarters already :)
Collecting over 20 issues of the original “Tall Tails” comic and clocking in at a whopping 550+ pages, Lage and Calderon’s Tall Tails: Thieves’ Quest is a massive blast from the past. This fantasy/anthro comic’s original print run began in 1993 and wound all the way through 2002 through various indie comic publishers. Lage and Calderon’s Kickstarter project collects the first, and arguably primary, arch of the story in one huge book, a happy return to print for a comic that’s only available in back issue boxes at conventions.
The story is strong-but-standard fantasy fare: an adventuring party searches for the Lost Something of Somewhere (Wikifur suggests that the comic was, at least in its dusty origins, a furry pastiche of Monty Python’s “Holy Grail.” I can’t confirm or deny it, but there ARE universal fantasy tropes, and the Search for the Magical McGuffin is a proud and honorable plot thread.) But over and above the traditional content, Lage’s artwork, with its lifelike and natural poses and expressive characters, makes the series stand out as a very strong part of the furry graphic storytelling world.
This kickstarter itself has a fair amount of RL backstory. Life and artists are complicated. While I love Lage’s work and am quite happy to see this Kickstarter launch, there was some initial back-and-forth for me. Lage had edged away from the Fandom a decade ago. There are very good reasons for this. Entitled and snarky fans (and bloggers), the occasional genuinely evil online cretin, the frankly weird culture that goes frankly weird places, the difficulty in being “professional” and “furry” at the same time, the challenge of being an artist with a strong adult portfolio illustrating in a professional capacity.
So, I was prepared to spend 50 words or so (but only 50!) grumping about an inside/outside approach to the fandom. I can understand the choice, Lage’s retreat from the fandom was in 2000-2002, what I consider the Dark Ages of the fandom—hostile media coverage and no shortage of internet hate. Not just from external sources.
I hereby withdraw my grumping.
For the first time in ~14 years, Mrs. Lage returned to the Fandom, attending Anthro New England as an artist, along with Calderon. It’s exciting to see an artist from the Furry Golden Age return in the post-millennial era, where furries have been partially mainstreamed. And maybe it was specifically to help with the book launch, but you know, that’s okay, it’s still a welcome return, and shows that the fandom has value to the artist. It’s also worth pointing out in the project video that she specifically references Tall Tails as a furry comic. Involvement in the community is a good thing, it helps ensure that there’s a community, and one with a history and a legacy.
Re: The Kickstarter itself, it’s lacking in some of the stuff I’d hope for, namely fan-service inclusion and commissionables. This is primarily a reprint-focused Kickstarter, and if you look beyond the awesome sample pages and solid infographics, it’s a very spare project story, only perhaps three paragraphs of text. It’s unreasonable to make “backer-created content” a condition of a successful kickstarter, but that is the driving force behind the higher pledge points in projects like Anubis: Dark Desire and Expanding Horizons: Artist’s Journey to Africa. There’s also some choices in the pledge points that strike me as a little weird, and clearly weren’t successful—the digital versions of just issues 1-9 or 1-15. You could argue that including these oddball pledge points didn’t hurt the campaign, but something that doesn’t help AND takes up extra screen real estate is overall a detriment to the project. Do what you can to avoid standing in the way of your customer spending money. But hindsight is 20-20.
Graymuzzles and fantasy fans that enjoyed the original series have an additional reason to support this project. With Tall Tails online with updates, Lage making some steps back into the world of the fandom, and the suggestion of a new title, and two more story arcs yet to be seen, supporting this project even at a “hug” level is strong encouragement for future furry work.
Follow @furstarter on twitter for the latest fur-friendly crowdfunding projects!
You Drew the Six of Fluffy Tails: The Fox Tarot
A 78-piece full tarot, inspired by the traditional Rider-Waite deck, but this time, FOXES.
Kickstarter ending 9/15/15
I’m sure I said this before, but “creating my own tarot” must be one of those challenges that every fantasy artist picks up, dusts off, puts back on the shelf, picks up again, thinks about donating to Goodwill, puts back on shelf, thinks “Well, I’ll use this someday…”, puts back on shelf…it’s like a copy of Ulysses, existing more as a challenge than something that should actually be pursued. I mean, it’s 78 individual pieces of art. That’s a lot of art! And like covering the entire Beatles catalog, each piece has its own expectations and challenges. You could just say “Oh, well, I’ll just draw a piece that is my concept of stagnation and hierarchy and call it The Emperor,” but the Rider-Waite deck is so compelling, it’s a symbol set that’s the defining image of tarot.
Mary Hoy (DeviantArt) has taken on the quest to slay the dragon—no offense to any dragon readers—and created the Fox Tarot, now on Kickstarter. Her work has a delicate, haunted quality, as if she put a few drops of liquid Tim Burton into the mixing bowl, though it’s solidly in the cartoony camp. If you’d like to see the heart of the deck, you can check out her Major Arcana on Deviantart. I particularly like The Fool and The Magician.
One thing that I admire about this set is that it’s inspired by the traditional Rider-Waite deck, but isn’t a strict copy of it. For instance, look at Mary Hoy’s “The Magician” and then glance at the standard Rider-Waite version of the same. There’s some of the same elements (literally! It’s a Tarot joke…), you can see echoes of the older card, but Hoy’s erred on the side of humor, sympathy, and emotion. Her work is a little rough, with sketchy lines and more than a few photoshop effects, but personally, I think it’s an appealing, fresh, and approachable Tarot.
Re: the Kickstarter itself, it’s worth saying, Hoy is using Kickstarter as a selling platform, not a development tool. Much of the special perks are the sort of thing you could get on a produce-on-demand site like CafePress. One pain point I had with the pledge levels is that the level at which you can buy the deck itself is steep—$45—and that’s more than I’d care to pay for a standard tarot deck (which tend to range from $15-$35, depending.) However, Hoy also distributes through Etsy, where you can get one version of the Fox Tarot for under $30, a more manageable price point. But if you like the product and want the extra goodies—poster versions, for instance—then the Kickstarter is a good investment.
On the other paw, the fact that the work already exists and that this Kickstarter is a 2.0 expansion, with bigger cards (or tinier cards, pick your poison), some touchup, and pretty borders, makes it a solid and low-risk project. Given the risks in backing a campaign, a little security goes a long way!
Follow @furstarter on twitter for the latest fur-friendly crowdfunding projects!
8-23-15 Furfunding Highlights
A little bit of grumbling about SWAT Kats, and this week’s new projects…
Illustration from “Cremisi,” Scifi-western Manga/multimedia project now on Kickstarter
I’d probably get boo’d off the stage if I’d really taken apart the SWAT KATS kickstarter project. I’ll be honest, I’m not particularly a SWAT KATS fan. Nothing wrong with the show, it just hit me during that time when a high schooler “grows up and stops being a kid” for like three years before retreating back into arrested development. So that’s really just me, and SWAT KATS ranks high on “90s cartoon awesomeness” that the community gets nostalgic over—so I really was excited to see the campaign pop up, and see that it did reasonably well—but I don’t think it was a success.
The initial goal for the campaign was $50,000, which the project managers made handily, probably by day 2. But there was nothing there that promised a single frame of animation–$50K covered “A new series bible, three scripts…and concept art.” The next goal up, at $100,000, was functionally a teaser/trailer promo, two minutes showing what the series might be like.
It’s hard to say if this campaign was, ultimately, an honest one. If the creator has deep pockets and backers in California over and above the crowdfunding, then they can move ahead with what was likely the actual campaign goal, the 70-minute Netflix movie.
For an established property with some legitimate street cred, it didn’t really roll so well, and I think this might have been due to the dubious nature of the goals. And this is a pretty common trap, worth a second look. How many furries would turn out their pockets to support a sketchbook and 15 pages of background and character sketches that they’d likely never get to see? Not many, I think, love for the original series aside. And how many people would pay money to back a trailer? More perhaps, but those aren’t sellable ideas. The sweet spot for this campaign was $1,000,000—the five-episode miniseries. Expensive, but not exactly a moon shot.
Would SWAT KATS have “succeeded” at this higher goal? Well, maybe. It’s a higher goal. It’s not an unattainable one. If they’d failed, I’m confident they would have failed at a higher level. I don’t honestly know if that’s meaningful, failure’s failure, but something about marketing around a miniseries and delivering internal documents and a 2-minute sizzle reel leaves me uncertain and a little disappointed.
For a “complete” list of furry/fur-friendly crowdfunding projects, check out the Project Page New Projects
Art
The Fox Tarot Card Deck (Ends: 9/15/2015)
Tarot deck featuring 78 (probably more) toony, costumed and fantastic foxes.
I’m a sucker for tarot decks, really want to see this one succeed!
Tall Tails Complete Collection (Ends: 9/16/2015)
A 500+ page bound volume of long, LONG time furry artist ‘s fantasy/sword and sorcery comic series. Okay, in fairness she left the fandom, but still draws anthro material.
Over goal. This really is the year for reprints. I blame “Digger.” I’m not complaining, though, just observing. No custom stuff in the rewards listing, unfortunately.
Space Parasaurolophus (Ends: 9/19/2015)
A comic book by Leonardo Pertuzzatti: A space-age sauropod receivs the gift of rationality after being abducted by aliens. And a wrist-mounted blaster.
The art in this one is abstract and pretty, reminiscent of Hellboy in his ‘toonier phases. Worth a look.
Cremisi (Ends: 9/21/2015)
A scifi/western manga, a little bit Trigun, with two cat-eared protagonists, a fem fatalle and a wirey little guy.
Pretty, and it’s been a slow week. Cat-ears on an anime character are only the tiniest but furry…
Film/Animation/Theater
Bunny and Non-Bunnyness (Ends: 9/21/2015)
A short film about existentialism, the nature of art and commercialism, the media, Pop Art and Pop Culture, and The Easter Bunny.
For an oddball project, this is actually doing quite well on its funding, at 1/3 goal!
Who’s Boss: Animal Riots (Ends: 10/4/2015)
A cartoony card game about fighting livestock and awful, awful bosses.
…Meh
Get Fit In Your Sleep (Ends: 9/23/2015): This product isn’t a bit furry–it’s just another fitbit clone to gamify calories and activity. But their cyborg squirrel mascot is totally worth the click!
8-16-15 Furfunding Highlights
Indiegogo Launchpad’s direct sales to Amazon, and this week’s highlights…
This week’s illustration from Retronator: Pixel Art Academy, now on Kickstarter.
Well, this is pretty darn awesome. A lot of our community’s product is kind of nebulous–digital art, commission work, and so on, so I’m having a hard time imagining how a furry crowdfunder might take advantage of this. Some of the more awesome card games, perhaps. It’s still pretty cool.
Amazon and Indiegogo have a new thing going: If you’ve got an Indiegogo product that’s fully funded and ready to ship, or going to ship soon, you can sell it through Amazon’s startup page, “Amazon Launchpad.” Launchpad is a curated page for exciting new startup projects, and it looks like it’s got categories for groceries, health and beauty, technology–so much technology–home, life, and toys. But the category that’s the most exciting–for me, at least–is “Funded on Indiegogo.”
You can learn more on Indiegogo’s blog or Amazon’s “Launchpad” info page. Looking at it, many of the products have a slick, “ready for Iphone” look to them. But if you’ve got a product that’s slick and clean and ready for prime time, this might be an exciting way to catapult your project from concept to success story.
In fairness, Launchpad isn’t just for Indiegogo, many of the projects there have a “Funded through Kickstarter” logo on them, but the sense of collaboration between Amazon and funding platform is, and one more way that Indiegogo is still the crowdfunding platform that is innovative and trying new concepts. Go, IGG. I hadn’t noticed this before, but they have another partnership with Vimeo to help support indie filmmakers, a group that really is Indiegogo’s original core demographic. Neat stuff.
Reviews this week: Absurdist furry Theatre from Wulfpak, two kids go to their first furcon and build their identities together (oh, spoiler, there’s a chlorine gas attack in there somewhere); Ponies take to the sky and storm the beaches in WWII-era pulp adventure RPG, “Roan.”
For a “complete” list of furry/fur-friendly crowdfunding projects, check out the Project Page
New Projects
Comics/Graphic Novels
Adventures of Young Purrwalker (Ends: 9/10/2015)
A chibi/kitten space cat drama comic from Singapore, a tale of space, rivalries, and catnip poisoning.
On the fence? Download Issue 1 for free!
UberQuest #1 (Ends: 9/14/2015)
A web-to-print of furry, giggly fantasy adventure webcomic, http://uberquest.katbox.net/about/.
Fishy Business (Ends: 9/10/2015)
A low goal for sound effects for a CGI student film, a noir-looking story of a cat chasing a fish.
A little sad this one hasn’t made a single dime. It’s a personal project, but student art films are often pretty cool animations.
Parralax: Warbands (Ends: 9/13/2015)
Realistic action/adventure miniature skirmish game with RPG elements. More dark fantasy than cute furry, but it’s been a while since I’ve seen an anthro elephant!
Wolfbite (Ends: 9/14/2015)
A minimalist matching card game in a “get rid of your cards” mode, but with lots of stylized wolf art.
Over goal! This is a pretty game, but I almost think the project page may be more fun than the game itself? It’s nicely stylized and has an easy concept, looks like a good game to fill a few minutes at a con.
Retronator Pixel Art Academy (Ends: 8/29/2015)
An adventure game AND pixel art tutorial and laboratory, in one product? Neat!
Way past goal, possibly because they were featured by Kickstarter. Cute project with some gentle tongue-in-cheek humor.
…Meh
A Fox & A Squirrel (Ends: 9/26/2015): A mom’s bedtime story of a fox and a squirrel, brought to life in animation (I think?) Mostly I’m posting this one because the fox is kind of cute and butch. This is some of the worst wall-of-irrelevant-text I’ve seen in a project in a long time, but, cute fox. But then I went and posted the image at left. So…never mind?
Soar with the Horses: Roan
High-flying adventure and hoofs storming the beaches in a pulp-inspired, 1940s ponyverse…
Kickstarter ending 9/8/15
Pulp-inspired gaming is, in that very specific sense of the word used by tabletop RPG publishing, pretty big right now, with Spirit of the Century making the rounds in indie gaming and Piazo’s Pathfinder game dipping a toe into the genre (yes, Pathfinder’s a Dungeons and Dragons type game, but the organized explorer’s society backstory? Total pulp!) The MLP community has had remarkable success in funding new pony-focused TRPGs through Kickstarter, with three books funding/funded in the Ponyfinder line. So there’s a certain weird synergy in Roan, now on Kickstarter: a new pony-inspired game from first-time game publisher Night Fox, set in a magical/tech version of the 1940s with a heck of a lot of equines.
Roan—more on their web page—is set around the beginning of the World War II era, arguably the most pulpable six years in history (possibly excepting the Victorian era if you fold in Steampunk, but that’s a stretch.) Not only are the Nazis threatening to take over Europe and opening up zany new roads of crackpot mad science and weird magic (Check Kenneth Hite’s “Nazi Occult” out sometime, a magical alternate universe isn’t that many parallel realities away), it’s a time when the world still had some mysteries to explore and Imperialism still was a thing (Britain still hadn’t quite let go of India). If there was ever a real historical period that cried out “Adventurers! Your time is now!” it’s the 1940s, and Roan has that kind of action on every page.
Mechanically, Roan uses a rules-light, action-cinema heavy system called the Ubiquity system, also used in the popular pulp TRPG Hollow Earth Expedition. It’s a game that encourages daring and flashy action with “style points” and doesn’t get too bogged down in rules. Night Fox tweaks the system a bit with expanded magical rules and aerial combat mechanics, but it’s already a strong system for cinematic pulp action.
Watching the video and reading over Night Fox’s project page, a couple things leap out at me. First, the game is covered in great art, with a strong sense of mood and some fun pics that mash up iconic historical moments and imagery with brightly colored ponies. The art has a lot of visual power and a good sense of fun, and with something like 20 artists on his team, it covers a wide range of style.
On the other hoof, I’m also struck by how the product moves away from the pony fandom’s homeland of Equestria. Some of this is the Brony fandom’s fan-canon drift, with kelpies, zebras, and bat-pegasi as viable races in the game. Frankly I’d expect nothing less. Equestria and fan-canon are not the same thing, and one is going to be a bigger playground. I’m actually a bit more surprised by how variable the level of anthropomorphism is in Roan, with some characters the kind of four-leggers we see in early episodes of MLP, and others about as animal-like as your average fursona, and maybe less considering all the period costuming. It’s a step away from Ponyville, and I’m not sure how it effects the mood of the world. Is there a difference between playing “Ponies” and playing anthro horses, in terms of mood and style? That’s really a call for the player, but it does increase the distance between the new game and its original source material.
I do have a concern about the project page itself, there’s a lot of grammar “dings” in the body copy of the page, particularly singular/plural agreement, apostrophes and plurals, that sort of thing—the usual bugaboos of a new writer, which makes me a little nervous about the final product, since this is ultimately a print piece. And there’s a rough edge to the language throughout. Language like “In combat, a wing pony can be a savior, fending off opponents whom mounted your plane…” makes me twitchy about the final product, and I personally would want to see a few pages of sample text before I invested. It’s a reasonable concern: “will the quality of the marketing material reflect the quality of the final product.”
[EDIT: the Creator dropped me a few notes and a Reply talking about bringing an editor/layout person on board, so yay!]
So far as the nitty-gritty elements of the kickstarter go, everything seems pretty well-planned and reasonably priced. $40 is about on par with a mass-market hardcover book of a reasonable size (page count?), and DriveThruRPG is a solid option for game designers who don’t own their own printing press. While I think the numbers makes sense, and are in line with what I’d expect to see, the lack of a sketched-out business plan makes me wary, that sort of thing helps build credibility and trust. Business plan and a strong sense of who the project developer is both contribute to a sense of trust, and I don’t think we’re there.
More than usual, this is a “you’ll have to make up your own mind” project. The art is great and the world-building and theme are spot on, and there are editors in the fandom that work cheap. This project has some compelling elements that might carry it forward to success, and in tabletop gaming, concept is king. All the contenders for fur-friendly RP are rules-heavy right now, and a light, bubbly cinematic game would hold a strong niche. Roan is definitely a project I want to see succeed, but a successful campaign goes beyond fundraising.
Follow @furstarter on twitter for the latest fur-friendly crowdfunding projects!
All the world’s a kennel: Zipped and Pelted
The Wulfden Theatre Company presents
Zipped and Pelted
Playing at the Chicago Fringe Festival, September 5-13, Chicago, IllinoisFunding on Indiegogo through August 21
One thing that Indiegogo does so very well is operate on a local level—as a platform for community groups to raise funds and build awareness for events that might never be able to afford a full advertising spread in the local newspaper. Take the Wulfden Theatre Company.
The Wulfden Ensemble is, at present, and who knows what the future holds, a local drama group active in the Chicago area, with a focus on new artistic voices and found space—single-night short plays in a house or apartment, indie theatre spaces, Wulfden has mastered the art of intimate, zero-budget drama. With the furry-focused short play Zipped and Pelted (now on Indiegogo, on stage in September) Wulfden takes on a bigger stage in the Chicago Fringe Festival, with a play that in so many ways couldn’t have made it to paper, let alone the stage, some ten years ago—old questions of identity and humanity meet the modern furry fandom, the 21st century’s world of arbitrary terrorism, the high-energy space of social media.
Z&P is an hourish-long play by Lucas Baisch, focusing on two new furries, Boomer (“Grizz”) and Mikey, going to their first furry con, Midwest Furfest 2014. In all probability, anyone who’d read this particular blog would remember the strange and horrible chlorine gas attack at MWF2014, and while Z&P isn’t the indie stage equivalent of a Michael Bay disaster film, it’s still informed by those events—a mess of panic and hard questions that the audience can see coming before the play even begins, as Grizz and Mikey make their plans, tweeting and internet chatting and blogging about their new furry identities, building their fursonas, planning their con and constructing their new fandom lives. The play takes place partly over social media, shown with shadows and projectors, partly at the space of the con itself. It’s a gently absurdist play, “two characters trying to find their fursonas in a world of tiki torches, fox wine, rubber ducks, through a chlorine cloud,” a mix of convention culture, high kitsch (apparently Baisch collaborated somehow with the creator of the lawn flamingo?).
Zipped and Pelted is about exploring what it means to be human by exploring what it means to be an animal, and the identity-bending, occasionally stigmatized furry community, their world and their response to the 2014 attack, is a playground for this sort of exploration. It sounds like from some of the lines in the video the play asks questions about what it means even to exist, and that’s a challenging question in a world of neon fuskies, anthro dragonwolves and snaketaurs.
I made up the snaketaurs, I hope.
The Wulfden Theater team was kind enough to share some words from playwrite Lucas Baisch, on the inspiration for his story:
“I started thinking about this play about a year and a half ago. The desire to write about the topic stemmed from a specific instance that May, when I was put in a position where I felt obligated to mercy kill a dying animal. I think what triggered it was this obsession with how humans can completely eradicate any semblance of empathy when interacting (or imposing violence) upon another animal. Maybe that violence is the root of the play. At the same time, I have for a while been thinking about writing a piece involving furries. I am fascinated by the way the community interacts with their own humanity, by layering on another animal identity.
While Baisch’s take on the fandom is playful and absurdist, he’s worked to keep it balanced—”not other-ing the community,” easy to do with a group of marginalized, but cheerful, weirdos. All the while, still telling a story with comic elements, and opening up some of the core ideas of the fandom to explore questions about the animal nature of humans.
If you want to learn more about Wulfden, you can poke around on their Facebook and see what they’re up to, or pop open Tumblr or Instagram for a deeper dive. You can chip in on the show itself on Indiegogo, or if you happen to be a Chicago resident, you can buy tickets to the upcoming show (you can of course buy tickets if you don’t plan to visit Chicago, but that seems a little rude somehow.)
Follow @furstarter on twitter for the latest fur-friendly crowdfunding projects!
8/9/15 Furfunding Highlights
Illustration from “CatTube Famous,” card game now on Kickstarter.
Warning, this ramble is focused on adult content, so consider avoiding the links depending on your context.
One of my focuses for the last year has been crowdfunding for projects that fall outside the Terms of Service. To the best of my knowledge, there is nothing “real” written about crowdfunding for the vague spaces containing suggestive content, artistic nudes, non-adult with nudity, pornography depicting imaginary characters in imaginary acts, pornography depicting real individuals and real acts, and content that claims it’s more ethically sustainable than Big Porn (I believe this is POSSIBLE, but 1) the concept contains a world of moral judgments about pornography and exploitation that I don’t want to unpack, and 2) crowdfunding platforms contain and support user-created projects, and you can’t control that kind of material.) Instead, there are vague Terms of Service, or TOS that are never enforced, or are suddenly enforced halfway through a campaign.
So, one has to rely on precedent—see what’s been acceptable before, and what kind of light that sheds on the practice behind the policies at Kickstarter and Indiegogo. About six months ago I wrote an article on crowdfunding for adult projects, and while I’ve been updating it regularly, these are, like I said, recent and useful examples, worth pointing out.
3/2015: Soft Paws AB/DL Adult Diaper
A babyfur-themed adult diaper for ageplay. This one’s funding was cut two or three weeks into the campaign, but from what I’ve heard, the project manager did go through the steps of asking Kickstarter to review the project. It was still pulled. More than anything else, this underlines the fact that “offensive” is purely in the eyes of the audience, as this project has no actual sexual content and does not break kickstarter’s rules (https://www.kickstarter.com/rules/prohibited) – except, possibly, in that broad category of “offensive material”—which Kickstarter only realized after three weeks of fundraising.
(Ongoing and currently funding) The Naked Pixel series
Gender discrimination creates so many subtle double standards. Take the concept of “art nude.” Personally, I feel that many of the pieces in the “Naked Pixel” collection cross the line from artistic nudity to soft core porn (particularly the artist’s “Jordanlehn” and “Mewes” collections. But in general, female nudity tends to be more safe, more likely to be classified as “artistic,” than male nudity (partly this is because the Patriarchy likes a good excuse to look at naked girls, partly because the difference between male artistic nudity and pornography has something of a binary component. If it points down, it’s probably artistic.) Which is why I think the next project is something of a game-changer, but Naked Pixel does show the generous space that artistic nude can occupy for the female form in Crowdfundingland.
(Currently funding) 700,000 windows into History: The Bob Mizer Estate
Bob Mizer’s name turns up in many discussions on censorship and obscenity. And discussions of male photography. He pioneered the field of posing-pouch photography, and sometimes even got rid of the pouch. His is a proud name in the evolution of beefcake, and to the best of my knowledge, 700,000 Windows is the first Kickstarter project that displays full frontal male nudity and still seems to be within what Kickstarter deems “artistic nudes.” The work has historical context, and it’s playful instead of erotic, although “erotic” is in the eye of the beholder. In the history of gay culture, a lot of homo-friendly imagery rests uneasily on the marble pillar of sports photography or hides itself in camp—when photographing or looking at nekked guys was deemed inappropriate by culture, the trick was to find ways of creating and consuming imagery that were appropriately cultural. It’s an interesting line, and Daniel Harris’s “Rise and Fall of Gay Culture” informs a lot of my opinions here.
6/2015: SNAPSHOT
This queer erotic thriller is unambiguously pornographic, at least in places, though it has a lot of plot inspired by Hitchcock. Waffling a bit on the terminology, director/creator Shine Louise Houston alternately calls this piece sex-positive pornography and “a love story that doesn’t shy away from portraying explicit sexuality.” In marketing, messaging is all about trying to have your cake and sell it too, so more power to her. In a recent long dialog with sex-positive maker and roboticist (!) Dr Kit Stubbs, Kit points out that the Indiegogo Terms of Use do actually have a restriction that I missed: “Do not post images or videos that are sexually explicit or post links to sites that contain sexually explicit material or show people or animals being hurt or degraded.” With almost 400 donors, SNAPSHOT might have been high enough in terms of publicity to get the kind of attention that would cause Indiegogo to need to enforce—or even read—its TOS, and the project creator communicated with Indiegogo—they live in the same town—to make sure the project fit within their framework, and didn’t link directly to explicit content. So, we have a clarification here to our understanding of Indiegogo’s rules: Make sure that you don’t link directly to sexually explicit imagery. Got it! Keep those splash pages…uh…landing pages…clean.
Most of this long ramble was inspired by my conversation with Kit, who is theirselves working on an exciting concept: a non-profit crowdfunding enterprise with a sex-positive philosophy. This concept is linked to her Effing Foundation for Sex-Positivity, and you can read more about it on Kit’s Tumblr. I was very flattered that my own work on adult crowdfunding became a part of their presentation materials, and it sounds like I’ll be able to collaborate more with Kit on their project.
At any rate, “meeting” Dr Stubbs was a treat, and if you’re interested in this intersection, check out their work!
Reviews this week: “Furries in Space” tabletop RPG HC SVNT DRACONES expands their universe with their first supplement, and a gentle point-and-click game of exploration and foxes, “Foxtail.”
For a “complete” list of furry/fur-friendly crowdfunding projects, check out the Project Page
New Projects
Art
Gamera Vs Zine-Ra (Ends: 8/26/2015)
For the Kaiju fans, a 50th anniversary celebration of fan art and indie comic weirdness from the world of Gamera.
Children’s Product
Mission to Cataria (Ends: 9/3/2015)
Strange and almost collage-like sci-fi cat journey into space children’s book. If nothing else, skim the project page for the illustrations.
Rescue Cats #1 (Ends: 8/28/2015)
An action/superhero comic, but instead of crime-fighting costumed humans, the heros are empowered, non-anthro, cats. Hmm.
The Samurnauts: Curse of the Dreadnuts (Ends: 8/31/2015)
Quirky sci-fi fantasy martial arts monkey comic. You know, I can’t do this one justice, but you can get an idea of the plot on their web store.
“Monkey King” inspired comics are weirdly common on Kickstarter. Is this a Thing or just a thing?
Red Fox #2: Destiny’s Chewtoy (Ends: 8/31/2015)
This is *almost* a comic book version of UK furry puppet hit Mongrels. Grunge fox, offensive humor, yep :)
Nip and Tuck Redux (Ends: 9/1/2015)
Colorizing the Nip and Tuck webcomic.
This one falls into the “If you want to do this, just do it, don’t Kickstart it” bin for me.
The Pelted Universe (Ends: 9/18/2015)
Fundraising for MCA Hogarth‘s Pelted Alliance universe. This Kickstarter was almost entirely a low-goal “your character here” project and the goodies are mostly snapped up. Good product though!
Met the artist at Anthrocon and fell in love. She ran the “Business for Artists” panel and owns the furry/biz intersection. #bizcrush
Costumes/Clothes/Accessories
Buddy: The Dog Collar Reimagined (Ends: 9/2/2015)
I know it’s for dogs, but I WANT this collar! It’s black and sleek with an awesome color-shifting glowing rim.
Also my mate can track me on GoogleMaps and figure out where I am and how much exercise I’m getting during Furry Fiesta. So I’m not sure if that’s a good thing.
Weston Super Sonic 2016 (Ends: 8/29/2015)
A United Kingdom Sonic the Hedgehog convention in its third year, January 2016.
Past its somewhat low goal.
Zipped and Pelted (Ends: 8/23/2015)
The Wulfden Theatre‘s absurdist take on the chlorine gas attack at Midwest Furfest and its aftermath, a play exploring identity, our relationship to animals, and other concepts the furry community does a good job of unpacking.
I have a lot of questions about this one and would like to unpack it in an article, but I don’t have a lot to go on yet. Digging for more information!
Pokémon: The Movie (Ends: 8/31/2015)
A gently tongue-in-cheek live-action British short film about Ash Ketchum, all grown up.
Is this the Sean of the Dead of the Pokémon world? THEY didn’t say it, but…Check out one of their videos.
Hc Svnt Dracones Extended (Ends: 8/26/2015)
More from the heavily-illustrated and intricate furry sci-fi game HC SVNT DRACONES, an expansion to the universe and core rules.
Way past goal! If you want to learn more about HSD check my article on their last successful kickstarter.
Kittens Mafia (Ends: 8/28/2015)
If you like Werewolf but don’t like slobbery canines, maybe this cats-only party game is for you!
CatTube Famous (Ends: 9/3/2015)
A card game about blasting out the most popular cat videos on CatTube. Great illustrations!
Ponyfinder: Forgotten Path (Ends: 9/4/2015)
Arcane lore and adventure from the dusty past of Everglow, the My Little Pony-inspired Pathfinder RPG setting.
Over goal! You know, I would never have guessed that the intersection of Dungeons and Dragons and Ponies would be this robust. This is probably why I’ve never been able to win the stock market.
Werewolf Tokens (Ends: 9/8/2015)
High quality, carved wooden tokens for your next game of Werewolf.
ROAN: Pony pulp adventure (Ends: 9/8/2015)
A tabletop rpg set in the pulp 40s, with ponies going to war and exploring strange mayan ruins.
If there isn’t an opportunity to fight against blond, blue-eyed ponies wearing Nightmare Moon’s cutiemark on a black armband, this product is seriously missing a beat. More info at RoanRPG.com.
Daemon (Ends: 9/14/2015)
Tabletop RPG v-e-r-y inspired by the “humans with externalized animal souls” ideas of Golden Compass. But with a dark and artistic Euro-Steampunk aesthetic.
I’m torn. This is a good idea and the pages look wonderful, but the language of the project page is quite strange.
Toys
Big Game Cat Toys (Ends: 8/26/2015)
Horrifying but cute toys for cats and cat owners. Antelope, but after the lion got to them.
Is there any point to seperating pet toys and human toys in this fandom?
Beasts, Wings and Warriors (Ends: 9/13/2015)
Male nude photography with a generous serving of costuming and make-up effects, including a faun and griffin.
Dings against this project: It’s quite pricy, with a calendar at $90 and book at $260. And I can’t tell where it is on the vague continuum of cosplay/art-nude/smut, it seems to trend towards cosplay more than the other two categories, but it’d be good to know.
Star-Crossed (Ends: 8/25/2015): A sweet animated film about two strange and abstract alien scientists who look for the stars and find love. Pretty stuff.
Oni: A Card Game (Ends: 8/27/2015): A light, chaotic game about Japanese trickster spirits. Fun and cute.
Sparking Unicorn Poop (Ends: 8/31/2015): As a community, I think a glittering rainbow unicorn poop is very much in line with our sense of humor.
Arthur Abridged (Ends: 8/30/2015): A trimmed and revoiced, adult humor version of the PBS children’s show Arthur. What surprises me is that “copyright law coming down on us like a ton of bricks” isn’t listed as a risk. I know Fair Use and this really isn’t it.
The Space Safarians (Ends: 9/2/2015): Sci-fi furry comic series not likely coming to a comic convention near you. If there was a furry kickstarter drinking game, I would be so drunk after the video.
Bucky O’Hare Reboot (Ends: 9/6/2015): This is very on-topic, so I couldn’t NOT mention it, but this reboot of the Bucky O’Hare sci-fi rabbit series and world is a $50K project with no reference to intellectual property, and possibly the worst project video in the history of project videos.
What’s Corbeau Backing This Week?
While I’m really tempted to back the rainbow “Buddy” dog collar, I don’t think I’d get around to using it as a rave accessory at the next furry dance. Super-cute though. I did back the DRACONES supplement—I missed the first campaign, so glad I could support this one on their next go-around!
Space Hyenas and Metal Mice: HC SVNT DRACONES returns
A return to exploration, politics, culture, survival, and furries in space…
HC SVNT DRACONES: Core Extension
Kickstarter ending 8/26/15
As I have said a number of times, I am a sucker for a good tabletop role-playing game. And the semi-unspellable HC SVNT DRACONES has every chance of becoming the darling of the v-e-r-y small furry TRPG “industry.” The artwork is, pun intended, stellar—loaded with full-color illustrations (much art by Vader-San, if you’re not at work check out his FA) and crisp modern artwork. The layout is clean and modern, reminiscent of the more stylish books from White Wolf Game Publishing (graphical margins, a heavy emphasis on two-page spreads that tell full stories, and layout that doesn’t feel cramped.)
It’s perhaps a little unfair to compare the two, because HSC has a hardcover print-on-demand pricetag of $50 or so, compared to Ironclaw’s…um…$55. Well, never mind. HSC looks forward into RPG history, with online appage in the works and a healthy style-to-substance balance, and its competitor honestly just isn’t that much to look at, with the look and feel of a mid-90s indie game (and, heck, some of the same artwork.) It’s really time for furry tabletop to catch up with the rest of the hobbistry, and HSC is that kind of leap forward.
Dracones? You could say I’m a fan.
Now on Kickstarter, and way over goal and tearing through its stretch goals, a huge expansion for the HSC universe.
I’m not sure I want to go into detail on HSC right this minute—if you like, you can read my previous article on HSC, “Here There Be Latinate Constructions,” which talks about the world(s) and some game mechanics. In superbrief, humanity created its anthro “children” as explorers, servants, and colonists, and then promptly ended its own existence as a race. If there ARE humans, they’re whiskered…or robotic. It’s a world with ‘taurs, androids, and the whole spectrum of anthropomorphics. And the newest book, the HSC Core Extension, expands the list, with new families–including…
wait for it
Okay, maybe that’s more a me thing. There are rodents and ursines, both sadly left out of the previous volume, presumably in the interest of space. Printed page space, not, you know, cosmos space.
It’s a chock-full-of-weird expansion to an already huge universe, with new races, robot rules, new body types, new dramatic situations and settings, and some new mechanics (I think the video mentioned some mental breakdown rules?) And there’s also a bunch of “FAQ” materials, now that the game’s been around for a few months of community playtesting. All good things. If you missed the first book, and have the pockets for it, there’s a “buy it all” option for $150 with both the previous hardbound, the current hardbound, and other fun print products.
It’s hard to say anything negative about this Kickstarter, and looking back at my earlier write-up, I didn’t have anything to “ding” that one on, either. The prices are a little bit high, but totally on level with any other high-end TRPG—and honestly, their PDF-on-Demand product is amazingly inexpensive ($3? Really? No seriously, is that a typo?) so the whole “price” thing really isn’t that much of an issue. The material is available for next-to-free. I do wish they’d left a few more of the $400 “your character here” level, which seems to have sold out pretty quick. But these things happen.
Okay, go! Back this one so I have some people to play with when I get my copies!
Follow @furstarter on twitter for the latest fur-friendly crowdfunding projects!
What a long, cute, road it’s been: Foxtail
After a crushing break-up, a young fox goes on a point-and-click journey into her past.
Foxtail
Kickstarter ending 8/30/15
A part of me did not want to review this one, because the world of 8-bit homage video games is a crowded one. But several of my furry crowdfunding friends have fallen in love with it, and there is most definitely something there to love—a beautiful journey into a forest that’s as mysterious and strange as anything Miyazaki ever put on film, and an antagonist that’s stylish and compelling. and 400-something supporters on Steam Greenlight can’t be wrong.
Foxtail is a point-and click journey, the story of Lea the fox on a journey home. Her life at the University of Natural Sciences fell apart after an ugly breakup with her boyfriend. Facing academic failure and expulsion, she goes on a therapy trip to a friendlier place, her grandmother’s tiny mountain village.
This reminds me more and more of some of my favorite anime movies–particularly Wolf Children and Spirited Away. Anyway…
The happy childhood return is spoiled by an NPC with a Quest. Grandmother is sick, and the local herbalist says that the only way to stave off the deadly disease is a potion made from the rare and titular mushroom, Foxtail.
What follows is a solid 12 hours of puzzles, character interaction, things to explore and uncover, and a fair bit of education—after all, Lea is a science student on a mission for an herbalist, so expect to learn a fair bit about medicinal herbs, geology, and anything that’s got levers and wheels to pull and turn.
The game is really quite pretty, with images that are artsy while still being retro. The game is being designed using Wintermute,a platform for developing point-and-clicks (and here I thought it was a world-controlling AI. My bad.)
The kickstarter’s been on an interesting journey. One of the reasons I was biased against it was that it started as an expensive project on Indiegogo, using Flexible Funding—the promise that if we get even $10 of our $65,000 goal, we’ll still make the product. So in some ways, their move from Indiegogo to Kickstarter shows exactly how much of an impact the Flexible Funding trust deficit can create—with Kickstarter’s all-or-nothing funding the project is at twice the pledges it had on IGG. A good test case.
The kickstarter itself is a simple one—not too many perks, and the upper-level ones are thematically appropriate: a bow-tie like the one sported by the herbalist, and a nice traveller’s notebook, the kind Lea takes on her journey. Nothing huge, and a bit classier than a tee shirt.
Unfortunately, Lea’s journey is a long and complicated one, and not just because she doesn’t know what order to click the boulders. The Indie game market is saturated, and similar products with a stronger fan base have struggled and passed into the long night. That being said, Foxtail’s $40K goal is achievable, and the enthusiasm of the Steam community might just help Lea get that mushroom for granny.
Follow @furstarter on twitter for the latest fur-friendly crowdfunding projects!
7-25-15 Furfunding Highlights
Illustration from Fearsome Creatures of the Night, now on Indiegogo
A sincere apology for the recent unplanned hiatus. I went from a period of unemployment to getting a new job—with the first, it’s hard to concentrate on writing and creativity. With the second, there just isn’t time for it! So it’s been almost a month of no updates and there’ve been a LOT of new projects. So consider this post the blogs I wish I could have written, and thank you for your patience over the month.
This is my 10 things I missed. In no particular order.
1) SWAT KATS
The big news, furry-wise, would have to be the upcoming relaunch of SWAT KATS, which launched yesterday and blew past its lowball goal. This franchise is super-popular with furries that grew up in the 90s, which is, as I understand it, most furries. Is it a full series reboot? Not really, it’s five episodes of a mini-series, and maybe if it reaches the breathtaking super-goal of $1.5Mil, a direct-to-internet movie. But it’s a great return to a beloved commodity. I have to say I do not like the Kickstarter page, which uses huge graphics that don’t have a lot of text to them, so it’s hard to figure out what’s going on. But to each their barking points, ignore me, go love the thing.
2) The Cutest Umbrella in the World, Probably.
Oh…my…dog. It’s covered with tiny kittens and chibi puppies, and there is a huge rainbow. If I bought this, I would just be waiting for it to rain, all the time. And it never would because I live in Texas. I would have to put my sprinkler out in the front yard just to have an excuse to use this amazingly cute accessory. Click it. “Awww” with me.
3) Heaven’s Butcher.
I’m not particularly a pig fan. Abstractly, “Babe” is pretty cute, but “Babe” has, you know, a make-up artist. But in real life, pigs are kind of awful. And Oink, grim, action-packed, amazing train wreck of a comic does not pull punches on that front. The art is amazing, easily up there with any of the fantasy/comic illustration greats. You can, of course, get Oink on Amazon in paperback, but if you want the full collectible art edition, this is going to be your chance.
But…but you better like pigs.
4) Squirtle! Use Watergun on Tokyo!
If you love pokemon, or Kaiju, take a look at Popzilla, a “what-if” art book of giant, city-stomping monsters that evolved from Pokemon classic critters. The main publicity spread has Charizard, Bulbasaur, and Warturtle, and they are…actually…frightening. Great detailed illustrations, pretty high quality stuff. One question I would ask the creator is, “are there non-pokemon in this collection?” He’s being cagey about what’s actually in the artbook and portfolio, with some wiggle room on the content. Probably to keep Ash’s Lawyermon off his back. Lawyermon’s “Cease and Desist” attack is strong against derivative-type pokemon, seriously.
5) Fox on a Journey
There’s an image on Foxtail’s project page that really sings for me, showing the main character, Leah, in a bus station or train station. The lights of a moving vehicle strobe through the windows. She blinks. It’s lovely. That one image makes me think of the gentle world of Miyazaki films like Totoro and Spirited Away, which can afford to be evocative without being filled with constant action. They have a beautiful stillness. There’s probably a Japanese word for it.
All that said, are we, as a culture, ready for 8-bit graphics? Really? I’m not. I love my cyan and magenta graphics, thanks, I can’t handle this advanced technology.
The main character is a really nicely done anthro fox girl, visually appealing, with a world you could fall into. Does this game have anything new to say? I don’t know, I’m not enough of a gamer to know honestly, but it is a nice bit of visual.
6) Hazel…look…the table…it’s covered with blood!
In some ways, the faintly post-apocalyptic game, The Warren is part of a long lineage of rabbit role-play, beginning with Bunnies and Burrows, which at 1976 is only scant months after the invention of the tabletop role-playing game as a concept. Playing helpless creatures is compelling! Steve Jackson released the game again as a license in 1992, and other games—Mouseguard stands out in particular, as does the new “Secrets of Cats“—invite us into the small furry world of nature. So is The Warren new? No. But it doesn’t need to be.
7) “More bunny than bunny” is our motto.
Nice to see a return to classic cyberpunk. Metazoa is a graphic novel/series set in a dark dystopian future, where animals have risen to sentience, but the lion is most certainly not laying down with the lamb (unless the lamb has a few hundred nuyen to part with.) The art style is grungy and crude, selling this as a furry comic is kind of tricky—our art standards for animal people are pretty high. But as a gritty sci-fi indie comic, it holds its own.
8) Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Fans
No, I don’t think this one is going to succeed, because it crashed and burned at a $1500 goal and it’s not doing so good at $6500…and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a failed Kickstarter increase its goal on its next trip on the merry-go-round of funding! “Fan Con History” is a graphic novel format telling of the history of convention culture, running from early Sci-Fi fandoms through the rise of the Bronies. I’m actually wondering why they focus as much as they do on the bronies, I like bronies but it’s just one fandom in an age of dozens of microfandoms. But it’s an interesting test case study, if nothing else.
Like any project of this nature, it’s going to have a powerful spin based on the narrator’s personal beliefs and approaches (there’s a category for media fandoms that includes furries but doesn’t include bronies, which is just peculiar to me, not to reiterate.) But if you’re interested in the greater community of fandoms–I like the word “fendom,” it’s nicely collective–this project is a fun investment.
9) Dale of Merchants
Dale of Merchants is a fast-moving deck-building game which looks a fair bit like a furry, simplified version of Dominion, a product which launched the deck-building game concept. I’m on the edge of investing in this one. The art is simple and engagingly rough, but the colors are particularly fantastic, rich watercolor which double-underlines the antiquated feeling of the game.
10) Triumph of the BananaThis is absolutely a just-me thing. I know it. But last year I wrote an article about crowdfunding for adult projects, it’s kind of a focus for me and for our fandom generally, so I have been watching—and DO NOT CLICK THIS LINK, it’s just, you know, seven specific inches of guy—this Indiegogo project pretty closely, to see if or when it gets taken down. It hasn’t yet, which kind of amazes me. Does this set the standard for nudity on Indiegogo? No, not really, it may just have gone under the radar. But it’s interesting about what it could say about how Indiegogo polices adult projects. Yes, it’s just a picture of someone’s wang, but it’s been up for well over two weeks. The project page, not the wang.
Seriously, I’m interested in this for the crowdfunding aspect. Not the product. Promise. Although it is a quality product.
For a “complete” list of furry/fur-friendly crowdfunding projects, check out the Project Page New Projects ArtPopzilla (Ends: 8/3/2015)
Pop culture Kaiju art! Pokemon upgraded to Godzilla status stomp merrily through Tokyo…
Oink (Ends: 8/6/2015)
Fantastic illustrations in this action-fantasy comic about an axe-wielding pig and his quest for vengeance.
Over goal! Great illustrations. I regret not doing a full blog piece on this one, there really isn’t time now :(
The Battle of Blood Moon #4-6 (Ends: 8/11/2015)
A graphic novel of wolves vs werewolves in an apocalyptic/paranormal world. More at thebattleofthebloodmoon.com.
Illustrations are a little rough at times, but project is past its modest goal.
Tabby Sketchbook Graphic Novel (Ends: 8/18/2015)
Cat fans might have backed Kok’s last graphic novel, “Tabby“, a story of romance, action, and so many cats. This graphic novel is a bit more “behind the scenes” of the artist’s process, but just as cute. With a new story, “War and Peas.”
Over goal!
Fan Con History (Ends: 8/22/2015)
A graphic novel history of the greater fantasy fandom, with special nods to Pittsburg, Anthrocon, and Bronycon.
Second attempt at this one, and a project I’d love to see succeed!
Metazoa (Ends: 9/5/2015)
An indie comic set in a dark cyberpunk future, claustrophobic and Blade Runner-inspired, where animals have evolved sentience–but not a peaceful society.
Dragon and Fox Plush Shoulder Packs (Ends: 8/2/2015)
Cute stuffed animal dragon and kitsune backpacks.
Animal Safari Socks (Ends: 8/22/2015)
A cute one-note kickstarter with blue and black animal-themed socks. That’s it, just socks :)
Raining Cats and Dogs Umbrella (Ends: 8/22/2015)
Hands down, this umbrella loaded with charming chibis is the cutest umbrella in the world.
Over goal!
Build (and burn) the Minotaur! (Ends: 8/6/2015)
A fun art project from the world of Burning Man, a giant (and flammable) minotaur to build and burn.
Marcus & Kitchen (Ends: 8/15/2015)
Funding an animated series about an action-packed (indeed, slightly overstuffed) rhino and his possibly wombat companion. Video game humor is thick on the floor.
Dust Bunnies (Ends: 8/19/2015)
Short film project, 3 minutes of friendship, bravery, and an evil maid with a featherduster.
Over goal!
SWAT-KATS Revolution (Ends: 8/22/2015)
An animated return to edgy 90s animated series, SWAT-KATS. Over goal and accelerating!
Dale of Merchants: (Ends: 7/31/2015)
A game of cunning animal merchants and clever traders.
Pretty game that seems inspired by the German resource-management games of yore. Nice soft colors and animal characters.
The Warren (Ends: 8/4/2015)
A tabletop RPG about intelligent rabbits navigating a dangerous world.
Over goal! This may be another iteration of the old game from 1976, or something new and wonderful.
Roadkill Rivals (Ends: 8/20/2015)
A fast-paced multiplayer card game of animals vs. fast-moving, oncoming vehicles. There can only be one survivor.
Blue Octopus (Ends: 8/23/2015)
A Flux-esque animal themed card game, lots of fun illustrations and changing rules.
Furball Rampage (Ends: 8/29/2015)
A card game of mechanized animal monsters, mayhem, and silly illustrations.
As a grammar nazi, there are elements of this project page that trouble my dreams…
War And Rabbit (Ends: 9/22/2015)
A strategic matching game very loosely based on “War”, with bunnies locked in battle with…carrots?
Fearsome Creatures of the Night (Ends: 8/9/2015)
A dark and tim-burtony sidescroller/explorer of a Jackalope and the scary creatures of the night.
This is a pretty game, and it was daring of them to use “fixed funding.” I’m sorry it didn’t work out, it looked like it should have done better.
Four Realms (Ends: 8/14/2015)
An 8-bit sidescroller inspired by trading card games, with animal heroes moving left to right through a rich fantasy world.
Nyx: The Haijun Chameleon (Ends: 8/23/2015)
Fast-paced sidescroller with a ninja chameleon and animal antagonists. Cute lead character!
FoxTail (Ends: 8/23/2015)
Point-and-click old-school adventure game with a nicely done female anthro fox lead character.
Pretty graphics on this one! Still very pixelated and 1992, but moody and compelling.
Naughty Tails 3D (Patreon Ongoing Funding)
Interactive adult gaming with 3D graphics by Janet Merai. Kemono critters with very large bosoms!
Wolfsong (Ends: 8/13/2015): A fantasy JRPG style game in the style of, well, other JRPGs. With three anthro races (snake, wolf, cat) and some decent artwork I think it’s include-able, but it’s a long way to goal.
Random Encounters – The RPG (Ends: 8/17/2015): A silly cooperative RPG card game with bosses and loot and a distinctly vintage Nintendo feel. And hey, there’s a furry character!
Negger’s Graphic Novel (Prelaunch): If you’re a lion fan or like cute South American critters, you probably already know about Negger (nsfw). With the good dogs at Sofawolf Press he’ll be launching a kickstarter soon!
Another BadFurry Misadventure? (Prelaunch): Okay, I don’t know what this one is going to be! But BadFurry had a lot of success with their unguide to the fandom last year, and they’re up to something, coming soon.
What’s Corbeau Backing This Week?
I can haz job! Yay! The first thing I’m dumping money into is the Fan Con History graphic novel, the history of the fandom of fandoms. Except, really, I’m not, because I don’t imagine it will make goal. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to get a copy of this one! But I’m not worried about missing a rent check over it.
7-1-15 Furfunding Highlights
Illustration from Cats Royale and Dogs Royale card decks, now on Kickstarter.
One of my private retreats from the bad projects and crude jokes that periodically flood Indiegogo and Kickstarter is the tumblr feed, Your Kickstarter Sucks. It is sadly not possible to do anything about Bad Kickstarters, except point on them and laugh. Or maybe cry. Thankfully, there’s a website that does both of these things.
I’m not sure I consistently agree with all their submissions—one of the little joys of crowdfunding is soaking your feet in a big vat of style over substance, and the YKS gang loves to deflate hipster-driven design fluff. The dark secret Kickstarter doesn’t want you to know is that if they stop hosting 30 minimalist wallet campaigns a week, the entire manufacturing economy of China collapses, resulting in worldwide chaos. We need fluff.
Anyway, check ’em out, die a little inside. It’s fun. And I’m not suggesting that “Maan Singh: The Wolf-Child” should be on YKS, but they need to have words with their art director.
Reviews this week: Comic fun with all-ages post-apocalypse adventure, The Road North and fursuit/zombie horror comedy, Dawn of the Furries.
For a “complete” list of furry/fur-friendly crowdfunding projects, check out the Project Page New Projects Comics/Graphic Novels
Tales of the Wolfman (Ends: 7/20/2015)
What happened to Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf? They got married.’ Cute and cartoony comic collection binding the four issues of Tales of the Wolfman, with new material from the comic community.
The Road North #1 (Ends: 7/25/2015)
A masked refugee and her dingo-y companion travel north in an all-ages, post-apocalypse sci-fi adventure.
Dawn of the Furries #2 (Ends: 8/3/2015)
Foaming, savage, mindless furries lay waste to Pittsburg. Meet the artist at Anthrocon this year!
Unleashed: The Movie (Ends: 7/10/2015)
Quirky magic romantic comedy: A solitary San Francisco ap designer’s pets turn into perfect boyfriends and the strangest love triangle of the year.
So, you probably shouldn’t have had him fixed. This one’s cute but its funding is going nowhere. Sad, sad.
Big Cats Anatomy Models (Ends: 7/23/2015)
From artist Jun Huang, 3D models showing musculature of great cats, including sabre-tooth tigers!
Cats and Dogs Royale Playing Cards (Ends: 7/17/2015)
Two playing card decks with detailed animal nobility imagery, one for cats and one for dogs.
Veil Fall Dark Future Miniatures (Ends: 7/20/2015)
Dark, savage, and armor-plated wolves and werewolf tabletop miniatures from a gritty sci-fi future.
Concept art by Edward Delandre. This world seems heavily inspired by White Wolf’s dark game, Werewolf: The Apocalypse.
Video Games
Ninchanese (Ends: 8/1/2015)
Learn Chinese with cute kittens and snakey dragons in this gamified language-learning app
Mecedorra (Ends: 8/23/2015): A German-language furry action comic, with wolfweaselotters and the genesis of their world.
What’s Corbeau Backing This Week?Certain dogs are still discovering new career opportunities, and are keeping their credit cards in their minimalist wallets. However, if we were backing a project, we would totally back White Wolf’s new tabletop game, “Beast: The Primordial.” I grew up on White Wolf’s “X: The Y” game series, and probably White Wolfed my way out of a doctorate back in college, so it’s neat to see the company releasing a new World of Darkness game :)
One girl, one dog, TWO apocalypses: The Road North
All-ages Comic: A child and her canine companion journeys north in a hellish land to find her brother and a better tomorrow…
Kickstarter ending 7/25/15 (past goal!)
Okay, this one’s not that furry, it’s more the “desert wasteland with a trusty canine” trope, well established in films like A Boy and His Dog and Mad Max.These are not all-ages films and you shouldn’t share them with a pre-teen…well, Mad Max, maybe, if it’s not your kid.
But seriously, this is a really cute dog.
It’s the year 2055, and humanity is in a very bad place. The world is a blasted dustbowl, the pages of the comic are saturated with a veil of orange haze and only symbolic creatures remain–crows, locusts, Kansas farmers. It’s very much like photographs of the Great Depression, but red-brown instead of sepia. Take one burned-out world, and one species on the edge of survival, and add a malign alien force, the Pure, who seem to be hellbent on just one thing: wiping humanity out and claiming earth as their own.
Again, not a good time to be a human. Or a dog.
This is the bleak backdrop for the story of I, a child travelling across the barren and dangerous land looking for her little brother, alongside her canine companion, Z. I want Z to be a dingo, and in fairness all blasted apocalypse films are set in Australia where there are dingoes, but I think we’re actually somewhere in the American Midwest, so he’s probably some sort of Labrador/village dog mix. I don’t care, because he’s intense, suspicious, and well-drawn. Cute character!
This is an all-ages project, and not the artist’s first all-ages comic. Joshua Covey created Baako, which looks like another blasted wasteland with a strong female lead, also funded through Kickstarter. Baako feels like an entirely different period, reminiscent of the edgy and frankly sleazier 70s-80s style of Mike Ploog’s work on “Wizards” and Oscar Martin’s “Solo” (okay, yes, that is a 90s comic, but there’s an unmistakable Frazetta vibe that runs through a certain flavor of 70s-80s fantasy.) The Road North is more kin to the slick young adult titles on the lower shelf at today’s comic shop, clean lines and bold character art.
Finding myself wondering about the choice of the name “I” for the main character–well, the non-canine main character. The anonymity of her mask, the ambivalent pronoun “their” in the project header (“A young refugee and their canine companion search for hope and a better tomorrow…”) suggest that “I” is there for anyone to relate to, boy or girl, which is not a bad way of handling things. Boys are in quite a lot of action titles, and having a more relateable character for girls might help open the comic up.
Keeping this review short and sweet, I would like to take a look at the complex backer points—there are at least 15 backer levels, including a print copy at $10 and a signed copy at $15, a sketch cover at $35 and a retail 10-pack at $35. Combining that with the luxurious amount of space used for sample art gives a lot of mouse-scrolling to get to the text, it’s self a bit hard on the eyes (nonstandard font, all caps…) It’s a bit hard to skim for information. There are some nice little infographics explaining the pledge points, and generous sample art really helps show off a comic book project, but I think Covey may have erred on the side of complexity instead of simplicity in planning out his pledge points–this seems to be a recurring problem when an artist wants to fold an unrelated project in with their rewards. My $.02, do with it what you will. Some minor communication issues; the Stretch Goals not being “unpacked” yet is a little frustrating, it’s hard to build goals around them if you can’t see them, and the campaign has a lack of updates, even past goal, but those aren’t quite as big as the TL:DR issue with the pledge points.
Again, all kinds of sample work on The Road North kickstarter, and a very available artist—you can find him on DA and his personal webfolio. This is issue one of a four-issue series, we’ll see what the next year brings for the title!
Follow @furstarter on twitter for the latest fur-friendly crowdfunding projects!
Instead of Hugging You, They Try to Kill You: Dawn of the Furries #2
Survival-Horror Comic: When the furpocalypse breaks over Pittsburgh, there will be no survivors…
Kickstarter ending 8/3/15
If you’re safe at home reading this, be glad you didn’t go to Anthrocon this year.
Zombie Corbeau :)
Either ironically or appropriately, “Zombie” is the meme that just won’t die. The Zombie Apocalypse is an end-of-days scenario for the common man, It transforms everyday life into a horrifying scenario of shambling terrors: city streets become dark and alien, and Joe Citizen looks in despair as the world he thought he understood becomes a surreal waking nightmare.
Unrelated, Anthrocon 2014 was pretty cool, and if you’re there next weekend for AC 2015 look for artist Jeff Outlaw in the Artist’s Alley. Furries, it seems, do have a sense of humor about the fandom. Last year Outlaw launched his indie comic series Dawn of the Furries on Kickstarter, just passing his goal. And there was some tension. He asked himself hard questions like “how will furries feel about a comic that depicts them as destroying Pittsburgh? Will they take it as an insult?”
Apparently not. [Editor’s note: I was going to insert a picture of macro furries trampling Pittsburgh into the ground, but I can’t find one. I can find a lot of evidence that macro furries really…love…Pittsburgh, but I want to keep this post worksafe.]
Anyway, zombie fursuiters on aisle 4! If you’re at AC, look for Jeff, and ask him about his new project, Dawn of the Furries #2. Or if you aren’t going to Pittsburgh, because of financies, time, or concern for life and limb, check the DOTF art tumbler for sample material and some color work!
Here’s the micro: The main character, Ethan, is your typical Pittsburgh cubicle farm employee, mucking through life with his friends, sort-of friends, and possible dates, when HELL BREAKS LOSE in the form of rabid, mindless, razor-clawed fursuit monstrosities. One bite and Pittsburghers are transformed into these fluff-leaking, deeply uncute beasties—
Jeff, I’m pretty sure you’re reading this, and given how expensive fursuits are, I want you to know this doesn’t seem like that bad a deal.
Anyway, these murderous zombie costumers sweep through Pittsburgh, and life for Ethan turns into a grim game of survival as he and his office colleagues fight for their survival in a world where death could wait around any corner—death or, arguably, worse. We don’t know, it’s debatable.
Things are looking good for Dawn of the Furries #2, which launched today and is at about 20% of its modest goal after its first few hours of funding. Looking at the Kickstarter pledge points, one thing really stands out—custom art at only $35, and “your rabid fursona in the comic” at just $110. Custom work is a staple of the indie comic kickstarter, but not usually at such a low price point!
So, check it out. The plot’s a little Shaun of the Dead, a little George Romero, and the art’s excellent horror/humor, particularly given the low goal for the project! Here’s hoping for a successful campaign, and maybe a deluxe graphic novel down the road!
Follow @furstarter on twitter for the latest fur-friendly crowdfunding projects!
6-17-15 Furfunding Highlights
This week’s illustration is from”Child of the Daystar,” fantasy/action novel now on Kickstarter
It’s another lazy summer day, and you know, I haven’t seen that much from furry crowdfundingland that really amazes me. I’m a little curious about “Furries: The Movie,” because it’s a surreal love story and I’m not sure it has anything to do with furries at all. But nothing is just jumping out at me. So I’m gonna take a moment to look at what’s new at IndieGogo: Campaigner Profile Cards.
One thing I like about Indiegogo is they emphasize creative teams. So if there was a tabletop role-playing game out there by Dicewolf, and I got to consult with her on the Indiegogo campaign, and all the art was by PencilPanda, somewhere near the bottom of the page, you could see all three of our mugshots. I like the sense of community—particularly good for IndieGogo, since they do a lot of work with nonprofits.
So, as of recently, all this information on the people behind the project recently bumped its way to the top of the screen, just under the mission-critical stuff like “title,” “goal.” and the project video. Which, as it happens, was pretty much where Kickstarter put it, so “great minds think alike” and all that.
Where it gets kind of special is there’s that little note about “8 team members…” and it expands outward when you click that “see more details” button.
Now, in addition to having a nice little bio for the project creator to say a few words about herself, the revised pop-up has a biography, contact link and a more extended profile, and their ongoing contributions to Indiegogo as a whole–both Kickstarter and Indiegogo have this in their profile, in fairness.
I’m really more excited by the team window. In their example, they call out eight team members–marketing consultants, writers, producers, artists. Neat! If you go to an active page with a team, say this popular “micro-drone” project–you can see several team members, perhaps the consultants they’ve worked with, recent updates, and a large list of relevant websites–pretty awesome! Kickstarter only gives you one or two links and a single bio, so you have to wrestle with your personal identity vs. your corporate business name. This is, seriously, a better way of framing the narrative.
Why is this worth spending like a thousand words on? It’s a tool to build credibility. If a project has a team, it shows that there’s been some planning and logistics. If it has a strong, active team, with well-filled-out biographies and some interesting titles, all available at the click of a button? There’s a wealth of information about the resilience and resources you, the project creator, can bring to work to complete your goals. And it’s tightly presented, just a single click presents so much detail about the campaign–it’s a pity it’s not a little bigger!
Learn more about this feature from Indiegogo’s recent blog, “Campaign Profiler Cards.” “Indiegogo: We’re Still Innovating.”
Reviews this week: Photomorph/activisim project “Faces of the Wild“.
For a “complete” list of furry/fur-friendly crowdfunding projects, check out the Project Page New Projects Art
Pet Portrait Prints (Ends: 7/5/2015)
A commish-kickstarter with polished “your pet head here” anthro portraits, art by Michael Thompson
Tarot of the Mice (Ends: 7/13/2015)
From Califur artists Wolfenbahr Arts, a lightly furry tarot featuring mouse tarot cards.
Feel like this might move a little better with more examples of artwork, as it is very little detail to guess what you’re getting (color, B&W, detailed, sketched?) Still, tarot decks are fun on their own and a lot of work goes into them. Not a lot of solid examples on the artist’s FA Gallery.
Baby Bestiary
Baby Bestiary 2016 Calendar (Ends: 7/14/2015)
Super-cute “parents and kids” monster calendar. Gargoyles, ki-rin, and a vote for your favorite monster.
Into the Wild: Coloring Book (Ends: 7/14/2015)
A gently abstracted coloring book for adults, with some nice imagery. Particularly that wolf!
Faces of the Wild Photo Book (Ends: 8/3/2015)
A photo project focused on the “silence of captured animals,” with photo morph and make-up effects
This is perhaps too scary to be compelling. With no backers after launch, this interesting project isn’t going anywhere.
Child of the Daystar (Ends: 7/11/2015)
Novel: A dragon/reptile mercenary on a quest for vengence and…
Is there an …and? Is this just another Gritty Killer Haunted By His Past? He’s a real hottie, so I’ll let it pass, but worth asking.
Shit Flingers: Bestiary (Ends: 7/6/2015)
Graphic novel anthology: A troop of 15h century French soldiers find themselves cursed and transformed into apes, and fight the occult battles of the Church.
More on the comic’s archive tumblr
Torsobear #2 (Ends: 7/8/2015)
The latest entry in the noire-plush comic anthology category, “toy-on-toy crime in a fantastic city of playthings.”
Osamu Tezuka: Storm Fairy, Unico (Ends: 7/16/2015)
A translation and localization of Tezuka’s “Storm Fairy” and reprint of “Unico”
The Heart of a Star (Ends: 7/24/2015)
A young deity comes to earth to fight her nightmares and play a game/romance of cat-and-mouse. Art by Sahtori Kamaya.
Nice work in a lush anime style, though the wall of text and personal narrative is hard to wade through.
Furries: The Movie (Ends: 7/17/2015)
NOT another documentary, a strange indie film, a sort of surreal Wes Anderson-esque journey into strangeness. I’ll be asking the artist about the actual furry interest level of this one, I’m not sure!
Midnight Mares (Ends: 7/20/2015)
Brony-inspired animation in a world between dreams and reality. Second tilt at the funding wheel.
The Juicebox Crew (Ends: 7/30/2015)
80s style animated series with an anthro cast, including a gothic possum.
Very high goal of $150K doesn’t seem realizable without a strong product, I’m not sure they’re there. More about the characters..
Tabletop Games
Mythic Instinct Playing Cards (Ends: 6/30/2015)
Handsome playing card deck with stylized and tribal mythical creatures for Royals, including werewolf, satyr.
Sheep Happens (Ends: 7/1/2015)
Card game: The endless war of sheep vs. goats. Lots of internet referential silliness and pop culture.
The Isle (Ends: 7/4/2015)
A simulation/survival game with strategy elements, players represent a faction of dinosaurs or humans.
By Don Wittich, the developer of Primal Carnage, with art by LeviaDraconia
Scout’s Honor (Ends: 7/11/2015)
Side-scrolling platformer, an artsy gypsy cat becomes the focus of a galactic conflict.
Cute cat, very Young Furry Artist. The low $500 goal is good for start-up funds for a personal project, may never be a polished final piece though.
Beast’s Fury Fighting Game (Ends: 7/23/2015)
Another tilt at the crowdfunding wheel for Beast’s Fury, the furry fighting game
Campaign #3 for this game. With a $185000 goal and very little result so far, I wonder if they’ve squeezed that lemon as much as they can.
Briar Nexus Safe Haven (Ends: 6/28/2015)
A furry/Therian/LGBTQ/Physical Illnesses safe space social network.
Hmm. I’m not sure that “furries/abused/Therians/illness/Queers/people of color” is really a target audience. It’s a good-hearted idea, but a bit all over the place.
…Just for fun
Alice and the Flowers Giclee Prints (Ends: 7/13/2015): Sumptuous and horrible flowers inspired by Alice in Wonderland and her journey through the garden of monstrous flowers. Neat stuff! Dragon-lovers might get a kick out of it, in particular.
…MehPokemon Metal Playing Cards (Ends: 7/12/2015): I really wanted to like these stainless steel cards, and a fandom riff on them sounds fun, but the artwork just doesn’t carry the project for me. Can’t find other work by the artist.
The Nacent (Ends: 7/14/2015): Not sure what’s going on with this, a kind of snarky metroidvania/RPG. It’s there, it’s got a very high goal, and it mentions Furry Fuel. Kind of an MST3K-driven exploration game? Good luck, guys. Fox fursut in the video.
Silence of the Llamas: Faces of the Wild
Photomanipulated portraits and digital make-up effects to discuss the challenges of imprisoned animals…
Faces of the Wild
Kickstarter ending 8/3/2015
So…in terms of recommending this project, I don’t think I can. It doesn’t look like the artist himself is promoting it, and there’s little or nothing a page on Kickstarter can do to salvage a project that the artist doesn’t even mention on his own Facebook page. I rarely write about projects that haven’t at least taken a bite out of their goal after the first few days. But this is a handsome project and at the intersection of animals and art, and it’s worth a mention and a visit—even though it’s sitting at a miraculous $0 in pledges. Dude. At least mom should have chipped in!
Faces of the Wild is the work of Devin Mitchell, who successfully crowdfunded the “Veteran Vision” project earlier this year, a photo book of veterans, their stories, their challenges. In Faces Mitchell takes a more activist role, representing the pain and insanity of large animals trapped in a zoo environment through photomorphs and digital make-up merging humans and animals in poses suggesting blindness and silence.
The images are compelling and tragic, some are quite beautiful, a few aren’t as effective, but that’s art for you–you can see an expanded gallery of Mitchell’s work on graphic/everything blog-board “boredpanda.” He’s got some strong photo manipulation skills, and I particularly like the places where the image is mostly human, just stippled with its animal side. Or maybe I just like scruffy beards.
So, why the stark lack of crowdfunding success? The images are a little strange and unsettling, but that’s kind of the point.
I’m seeing three things here. First, and likely the biggest culprit, a simple lack of promotion on the part of the artist. Bare minimum, Mitchell’s facebook and the Veteran’s Vision web page should be calling out for the new project, that seems like the Big Obvious. And if he didn’t get a callout from the “Zoochosis” film that finished crowdfunding in April, that was a seriously missed opportunity. Secondly, price point may be an issue: with a base cost of $90 for the book and little incentive to buy through Kickstarter. Not having a convenient “shopping cart” pledge point can hurt your pledges.
But thirdly, I wonder if the subject matter and the specific nature of his protest is hurting him.
I do enjoy going to zoos—it’s hard to find a chance to encounter, say, a hyena or a tiger in its natural habitat, and I’m not sure I’d survive the experience if I did. But they’re not happy places generally. Particularly in small rescue zoos or old-school concrete constructions, the animals are obviously not happy. Furries are, as a community, pretty empathic toward animals, we see the human side in them and the animal side in ourselves, and it’s hard to watch a wild creature going insane from boredom, like a prisoner in solitary confinement—that’s the meaning of “zoochosis,” BTW. And certainly harder on the animal.
Is the public willing to let go of their zoos, or to make the financial commitment to the alternative? From Mitchell’s Kickstarter page:
“I believe in zoology, and the study of ethology. However, I also believe that large majestic animals should be kept in free range, land reserve environments, where there are no fences for dozens of miles. After all, this country owns so much land and I just wondered how I can spark a conversation about it.”
Zoos, unfortunately, are for humans, not for animals. They can do good work in preserving animals who are on the road to extinction, but can never really be the animal’s home. And that’s true for the majestic and glamorous tigers and lions, but it’s true for scruffy little meerkats and foxes, too. There’s probably a great German word for “a feeling of ambivalence for killing or capturing something to observe it.” (Google suggests Ambivalenz-Käfige, the uncertainty of cages.) While it is a topic that needs some serious conversation, it doesn’t seem like Mitchell and his photo project is ready to open that dialog.
Follow @furstarter on twitter for the latest fur-friendly crowdfunding projects!
6-1-15 Furfunding Highlights
This week’s illustration is from “Fell,” tabletop players-vs-board game now on Kickstarter
I’m curious about how to approach the game, “Fursuit Frenzy.” There’s a lot about it that I can agree on—the creator wants to make a nice, streamlined little game for conventions that isn’t based on Furotica’s weird harem-building dynamic and that isn’t fundamentally pornographic. On the other paw, the creator has a lot of the dark snark that makes it hard to know whether a project’s serious or not. That, and there’s the masochistic hate-love-hate relationship some people have with Furry that makes them sit at the edge and mock it.
Dear 4chan and friends, the only thing less cool than splashing in an inflatable wading pool is sitting at the edge of a wading pool making fun of the people in it. Just saying. Either way everyone involved is a bunch of children, but at least the wading pool’s kind of fun.
Anyway, I just don’t know if this is real or not. If it’s a hoax, the creator spent a lot of time making up rules. They seem kind of complex–a little too much Pokemon, not enough Germany School of Board Game Design. If it’s real, I’d be remiss if I didn’t give it a callout, but there’s some venom here that’s hard to reconcile with the product. I dunno. At $25 out of a $500 goal it may not matter.
Reviews this week: Cutesy fantasy gay dating sim “Fantastic Boyfriends.” Oh, I get it, fantastic. Corbeau is slow on the uptake this week.
For a “complete” list of furry/fur-friendly crowdfunding projects, check out the Project Page New Projects Art
Cam Kendell’s Art Buk (Ends: 6/17/2015)
Fantasy and anthro art by Cam Kendell, artist of Percival Pundragon
Give Life To My Creatures (Ends: 7/26/2015)
Surreal french critters on print and postcard
Children’s Products
Rose: Crowdsourced Kid’s Platformer (Ends: 6/28/2015)
An adorable kitten scampers through a world created from children’s art. Educational, cat-focused.
Kings of the Wasteland (Ends: 6/18/2015)
Web-to-print of #2 of Del Hewitt‘s anthro post-apocalypse webcomic
Dreamkeepers #4: Descent to the Archives (Ends: 6/19/2015)
The latest title in the anthro/dreamscape webcomic/graphic novel series, Dreamkeepers
Fandom Convention History Project (Ends: 6/22/2015)
A “history of…” comic focusing on the fandoms of Maryland and DC, including Anthrocon, Bronycon, Otaku, Furthemore…
Slow start on this one, probably not viable–doesn’t look like the creator is really working all the angles. Neat project if you are interested in the greater Fandom of Fandoms.
SpaceRamblers in print (Ends: 6/29/2015)
Web-to-print of Russian sci-fi space opera, SpaceRamblers
Moonu Animated Comic (Ends: 7/25/2015)
A children’s comic project with 2D animation and a graphic novel layout
While there IS an anthro rabbit-thing, this is more interesting because it’s an art style I don’t often see on crowdfunding sites
Netherworld’s Edge (Ends: 6/18/2015)
An “Anthropophic Epic” of 28mm tabletop minis, primarily rats vs mice locked in a rodent feud
Fursuit Frenzy (Ends: 6/19/2015)
A rock-paper-scissors based fighting card game with lots of fursuit photography
I’m not sure if the artist really has permission to use these photograph likenesses. Regardless, there’s no way to BUY this card game in the Kickstarter itself, which is probably a weakness in the marketing strategy.
Fell (Ends: 6/27/2015)
A mix-and-match boardgame of players vs. huge, primordial monsters
Not super-furry, but the pencil art is good and fantasy/monster is a combination that dips easily into the anthropomorphic.
Fantastic Boyfriends (Ends: 6/29/2015)
A gay-themed mobile JRPG: One young man saving the world with his very sturdy boyfriend.
Cute stuff on the game’s Character Page, including werewolves and a pretty cute world-crushing serpent. Overall kind of Osamu Tezuka in style.
Adult
Miu Print Collection (Ends: 6/15/2015)
A collected reprint series of Miu/Michael Vega art and comics, primarily rodent-oriented cheesecake
SO VERY over goal…
Iberian Wolf Recovery Center (Ends: 7/2/2015): Raising money to buy a 42-acre site in Portugal to preserve a wolf sanctuary for the Iberian wolf.
…Just for funFlash Pup Light Up Apparel (Ends: 6/9/2015): Sound-activated raver and geek formal apparel, a few furry-friendly items, but glowing is always popular
What’s Corbeau Backing This Week?
Certain sad little xoloitzcuintli are still “pursuing employment opportunities” and shouldn’t even be looking at Kickstarter. That being said, the second I get a job, I’m going to dump $100 or so on these guys, because I love the look of the product, I love induction burners and kitchen gimcrackery, and I really love tea. This is a perfect combination of design and tea. So beautiful.
Epic quest? Is that what they call it? Fantastic Boyfriends
An epic JRPG quest/dating sim to find hot guys, save the world from hot guys.
Indiegogo ending 6/29/15
It happens to everyone. You download a fantasy game app, there’s a blinding light, you’re transported to the corner of Waterdeep and Caer Paravel, and a half-dozen hot guys start fighting over you and talking about your “legendary sword.”
Okay, maybe that doesn’t happen, and I’ve been led to understand that dating sims are different from real life in certain important ways, particularly in the number of hot guys throwing themselves at you. That’s probably why they call it “wish fulfillment…”
Fantastic Boyfriends is a mobile JRPG/Dating Sim, currently available in Japan, and crowdfunding for an English translation over on Indiegogo. And it’s pretty darn cute. The basic “You’re the chosen one, Harry!” plot is that [Your Name Here], lonely gay guy, clicks on a link for a new fantasy dating sim, and finds himself in the middle of a fantasy world, quickly in the possession of a legendary sword, and standing by the open gate to a quest to save the kingdom from invading demons. Of course, you’re still a lonely gay guy, but since you’re a chosen warrior from beyond their world, small talk is really more of a formality and “let’s go out!” is the perfect pickup line.
Well, these are gays, so…maybe?
I’m not at all making fun of this game, though it’s got more than a few silly conceits and an internal world where the odds that anyone is completely available and has an avatar with rippling abs is about the same as on Pounced.com. The illustrations are super-cute, with big jovial smiles and big surly frowns, with a look that’s old-school Anime (I think the style is more or less Osamu Tezuka’s, but maybe it’s another artist that’s got the “cute friendly guy built like a smiling brick” thing going on. I confess my manga ignorance here.)
In the prologue video we meet most of the main four–the tough-but-frowny ogre warrior; the noble paladin who’s got a bit of an older-guy thing going on, probably smells like Old Spice and virtue; the “how did you get muscles like that?” bartender; and the beginning of a quest for the dangerously magical dragon/bachelor number 4, Fafnir. You can also take a quick look at the preview trailer, only three minutes long, but sadly just in Japanese. You can also glance over the game’s character profile page, which has some tidbits about the guys you’ll encounter (dragons: amoral but like treasure. Warriors: cheapskates who don’t pay their bartab, but are easy. Elves: Possibly incestuous, no chest. Apprentice blacksmith: EXTREMELY LOW WAISTLINE, though not, in fairness, as low as the barbarian’s.) I’m curious to know if the elf and apprentice blacksmith are available as accessories to go with your Legendary Sword, it’d add some variety to the “built like a brick” look of the characters in the prologue.
Is it furry? Well, yes and no. The artist, BomBom, seems to be a kemono artist, if you skim over his Tumblr—though that’s a pretty NSFW image stream. There’s some anthro imagery, with some werewolves and dragons in various stages of anthropomorphism. Is it relevant? Probably. Games targeted at the LGBT market are pretty rare, and this one’s had some success in Japan–though there’s the open question of whether this form of game is strong enough in America to make its modest crowdfunding goal. Furries aren’t necessarily LGBT, but the majority of us are spread across the rainbow somewhere.
You know, I was going to ask the same question.
I’m a little put off by the backer awards, since you have to go up to $250 to get to a physical product (art book with print version), and the awards at $750 are “book and an illustration of your favorite character.” Unsure what that means. An original piece? A poster? With sharply limited quantities available, they’re likely original pieces, but there’s no elaboration. Further, the game itself is not going to be available as a perk–although as a iphone/android app it’s not likely to be bank-breaking, the game’s plan is to have separate purchasable quests, and it’s hard to guess how much that’s going to cost to get the “whole” story (or at least the one that lets you drag one of those werewolves home.) Still, it’s good to hear that it’s expandable. It does feel like $50 for digital perks and $250 for print is a little on the high side, and it looks like their backers are having trouble swallowing that pill, too. So this really is more of a “donate to support the cause” project than a “give $$$ get swag” project. That’s okay, it’s just worth knowing what model you’re dealing with.
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5-18-15 Furfunding Highlights
Illustration from Floral Frolic on Kickstarter.
You know, I think the “charm” project is our version of the minimalist wallet.
I’ve mentioned this before, but there’s a recurring project idea on Kickstarter (besides endless versions of the Werewolf card game and crowdfunded salad), and that’s the wallet–usually “minimalist wallet,” which is a sort of up-scale version of holding all your cards together with a rubber band. Like Kickstarter said in their blog, “another day, another slim wallet.”
An unavoidable fact about Kickstarter, it’s very much a popularity contest, and most new artists aren’t going to be able to get the $6,000 or however much to launch their graphic novel. So while Kickstarter is theoretically a great place to trade talent for money without the middle man, in practice, your first project is likely to crash and burn–unless it’s a modest little mini-project. Stickers and charms fit that bill really well–only a few pages of new art needed, a budget as low as $300 to run a slick print job, and a bright and colorful project to capture an audience’s attention.
Then, you come back to them for the graphic novel or webcomic. It’s a nice way to build some momentum!
Right now I’m only looking at two charms–a batch of eevies from Ashbee Illustrations, and some cuddly little cosplay alpacas from Snow-Mishibari. Unfortunately, neither is going gangbusters right now. There’s no easy way to say why–it may be that the eevee card is (heh) played out right now, or that alpacas are just too strange for a fandom that never really gets outside the world of large carnivores. So these are both kind of proving me wrong at the moment. Remember, research before ramble next time. Got it.
For a “complete” list of furry/fur-friendly crowdfunding projects, check out the Project Page! New Projects Children’s Products
Flora Frolic: A Foxy Fairy Tale (Ends: 6/12/2015)
Two super-adorable foxes gather flowers in a rainbow watercolor meadow. Cute foxes and a number of interesting gimmes.
Nearly to goal! But I’m concerned about all the add-ons, it looks like scope creep. Art is amazing, more at the the artist’s FA page.
Tiny Equine Stockings (Ends: 6/8/2015)
brightly colored and obviously not trademarked stockings in the colors and and markings of the Mane Seven (six + Derpy Hoove).
Comics/Graphic Novels
Gamer Girl & Vixen #1 & 2 (Ends: 6/15/2015)
Minimally furry, but great subject: a lesbian supervillain love story in comic form, and at least one weaponized koopa shell.
SpaceRamblers (Ends: 6/29/2015)
The SpaceRamblers project returns in its colorful manga space-opera glory, with a stronger business plan and a print version.
Cospaca! Cute Alpaca Cosplay Charms (Ends: 6/15/2015)
A miniproject of extremely floofy alpacas in costumes, from artist Snow-Mishbari.
Cats In Space Suits (Ends: 6/12/2015)
A silly little mobile puzzler, a bit Angry Birds, but with cats and planetary gravity wells.
Minimally furry, but ?the graphics are pretty cute.
Loco the Firefox (Ends: 7/2/2015)
Iphone platformer with a bouncing, spinning red panda springing through a world of high-definition barrels
Shiba Prom (Ends: 7/12/2015): A virtual dance party for dogs and other small mammals to raise money for Shiba Inu rescue groups and puppy mill awareness campaigns.
…Just for funHarris Dies on Page 32 (Ends: 6/15/2015): A collection of tweets and shorts from the world of @AwfulFantasy
…Meh2020 AD (Ends: 6/10/2015): An incoherant project with a LOT of tame and NSFW original and fan/commission art. The graphics are good, but the writing is just not publishable, and the business plan is unclear and not a very good value ($17 for a digital comic?)
Ships, T&A, and the End of the Universe: SpaceRamblers
A little anime, a little space opera, and a lot of epic.
Space Ramblers
UPDATE! The Space Ramblers webcomic has come back to Indiegogo after a hiatus with a revised business plan and a print version. Check their new Indiegogo campaign. Some of the content of this post may be out of date, check their campaign for the latest information. Campaign ends 6/29/15.
Space Ramblers–soon to appear on a web browser near you–is a massively epic space opera–it’s got swords, it’s got blasters, it has dragons, it potentially has the end of the universe, and may, possibly, have strange and ancient gods. It definitely has a panda.
SR is the project of Roman Polikarpov and team, and the first five pages are up, teaser-style. Given the general structure of “Epic Space Opera” as a genre, it’s kind of like seeing Dumbledore dropping off Harry P at the Dursley’s, or the destruction of Krypton–these are events that set the motion for what’s coming next. We’re not really setting the stage for Act 1, Scene 2, so much as showing the scale and importance of what’s to come, even though the trope of the Hero of Destiny is always “start small, end global.”
I’m only saying, I’ve seen two pandas so far. One controls the universe and sent his family away in an escape pod, the other looks a bit like Lina Inverse‘s younger, slacker sister. It’s not a bad look.
The prologue does show off Polikarov’s art, which–kind of like manga, really–ranges from moody and detailed to–dang, is there a word for it when anime characters are suddenly drawn in a simple, silly way, to show that they’re being simple and silly? By and large, the art is exceptional for a webcomic, and if it can maintain a weekly page of this caliber with a small team, that’s a pretty good level of quality.
You can learn more about the various characters and some of the technology of the SpaceRamblers universe over on Polikarpov’s FA account. If you like sci-fi it’s definitely worth a +watch.
There’s a common problem in funding webcomics online. It’s kind of like the problem of kickstarting a video game: “This is going to be AWESOME when we have a final product, but the progress shots are grainy and low-rez because it’s in development!” That problem–which I’ve seen time and again–is that as you start a webcomic, you just don’t have a fan base. A basic rule of crowdfunding is that it is, at the end of the day, something of a popularity contest. You either have to have a great fan base or a really amazing product to get the dollars. Webcomics get dinged on both sides–a new webcomic doesn’t have the warm bodies and eyeballs to get the big dollars. And because artists change and grow, what it is on page one isn’t what it will become three years down the road. The art will change over time (unless, like Girl Genius, the artist has spent decades honing his style. Look at Page 1 and Page Now of Housepets, though). Or like The Furry Experience, the tone of the comic shifts as it hits its stride.
Funding a new webcomic, both for the creator and her patrons, usually ends up being a leap of faith. Thankfully you’re not dumping tons of money into a bound and printed product, but there is a lot of time that could go down the drain in terms of development. And for the patron, you can’t flip through the material and decide what it’s worth to you, because you really don’t know what it’s going to be worth to you.
That’s the principle challenge of Space Ramblers. It’s a new title by a relatively new artist. Polikarpov’s FA and DA accounts are new creations, devoted mainly to the webcomic. There is a furry scene in Russia, where Polikarpov hails from, so that’s a growth opportunity down the road, but it looks like a small community. Now, Space Ramblers is getting an FA banner ad, and that will hugely help their exposure (those ads, they’re magic, seriously). But with the Indiegogo campaign already launched without a robust fan base, it may be too late for this trip around the merry-go-round. We’ll see.
I almost never say this, but SpaceRamblers should probably have gone flexible funding. I love all-or-nothing funding, it says “hey! I’ve got a business plan!” but webcomics are soft and squishy things. It costs very little to start one up, and while the burden of time is huge, the literal financial cost really isn’t (yes, time and money are the same thing, but only after you can make a part time job out of your passion.) That’s why an ongoing tip jar like Patreon makes a lot of sense for a content provider, it’s revenue that can slowly build as your customer base does.
So far as the Indiegogo page goes, it’s not bad. It has the hard story to tell of “fund my free, publicly-available art,” which is a difficult task in our notoriously cheap fandom. I have some issues with the content–artists are not necessarily marketers, and there’s a lot of “wow this is great!” instead of clear communication of the project’s scope, the characters, and so on, but that’s what FA is for, fleshing out the details. “Tell me that it’s fantastic” is never as compelling as telling me why it’s fantastic.
(It’s one of life’s sad truths that marketers, quite possibly the most useless creatures on board the Golgafrinchan Ark, B-Class, generally have nothing to contribute to the world but hand-waving and exclamation points–but the real creators of the world have their hands full, and really need well-placed exclamation points. After 12 years in marketing, I’ve been able to accept that, to paraphrase Milton, “they also serve who only stand and wave.”)
So here’s my hope for SpaceRamblers. With its low goal, it’s possible that it could make goal after its FA banner ad goes online, but that’s going to be challenging. It has the advantage of being one of the top projects on Indiegogo’s “Comics” page, which usually only fills two or three screens anyway, so it’ll maintain its visibility through the campaign if it gets a few tweets and outside links and the artist posts a lot of updates (Indiegogo tip: posting updates increases your “gogo factor.” I bet FurAffinity links aren’t helpful here since FA hides itself from Google, but I have no way to test that.)
Anyway, my hope would be that the SpaceRamblers campaign is a soft launch for Polikarpov’s comic, and that its funding level without an established fan base is not a reflection of what it could be down the road, after six months of material, an FA banner ad, and maybe a convention table or two. It’s challenging for an unknown artist to raise money, but every artist started out as an unknown.
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