Origins - The Funny Animal Fandom
10/11/2023
It is fairly widely accepted that the underground comix scene in the late 1960s and the early 1970s was a primary influence in the coalescence of what is now known as the Furry Fandom. The latter part of this term, "fandom," is a word that has existed for well over a century, and originated in relation to baseball (Aja Romano, 2016), but the former word was not used in relation to this subculture until the late 20th century. Instead, the term "Funny Animals Fandom" was used. This was because many of the characters in the comics were cartoonish, anthropomorphic animals that resembled characters that would appear in the Sunday newspaper comics, or the Sunday funnies (Fredrik Knudsen, 2018). While the funny animal genre had technically already existed since the very start of the 1900s, it began to morph into exclusively kid-friendly content; the Comics Code of 1954, as Jared Gardner puts it in his article on the topic, "effectively banned many of the most popular genres in comic books" by banning the vast majority of explicit or mature content. This caused a sharp decline in funny animal content that was not created only for children. About a decade later, however, the underground comix movement began to revive the genre (Gardner, 2014).
One of the most well-known of these funny animal comic magazines was Fritz the Cat by Robert Crumb, which ran from 1965 to 1972. It stood out from standard Sunday funnies comics by being explicitly made for adults, and became so popular that it was even made into a movie in 1972, though the film was ultimately what caused Crumb to stop writing the comic (boutje777, 2020). In the same year, Crumb published a funny animal anthology magazine, bearing the deliberately misspelled title of "Funny Aminals". Among the contributors was Art Spiegelman, who submitted the first iteration (which was only three pages long) of his renowned graphic novel Maus. (Information via the Grand Comics Database.)
Inspired partially by such publications, Reed Waller and Ken Fletcher created an amateur press association (APA) known as Vootie. Its publications, known as apazines, were essentially hand-printed anthologies featuring dozens of artists; after submissions were received by the printer, the apazines would be compiled and a copy would be mailed back to each artist who was featured. The publication was selective about its submissions, and the APA method of distribution also did not allow for public accessibility; it was mainly concerned with fostering relationships and conversations between artists that were already established. It was also one of the first apazines to be centered around visual art. It ran from 1976 to 1984. At nearly the moment that it ceased printing, another very similar APA, Rowrbrazzle, rose to take its place (Knudsen, 2018), and was still active as of 2020, possibly even more recently (via the list of issues available at SECOND ED).
Sources:
Aja Romano. "Canon, fanon, shipping and more: a glossary of the tricky terminology that makes up fan culture." Vox, 6/7/2016. Online article.
Fredrik Knudsen. "Furries | Down The Rabbit Hole." YouTube, 8/13/2018. Online video.
Jared Gardner. "Invasion of the Funny Animals." Public Books, 11/15/2014. Online article.
boutje777. "Fritz the Cat." Comics For All, 8/23/2020. Online article.
"Funny Aminals #1." Grand Comics Database. Database entry.