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The Dusty Crates of my Comic Archives
4 years ago
General
Talk about rabbit holes...
While working on the latest installment of What, me Furry? (WMF?), I needed to dig up an older page for a color sample. A much older page. Like 14 years old as of this writing. For this, I chose to go to one of the local backup drives mentioned in the previous journal. What followed was a dive into the deepest recesses of my gallery archives. While I did locate the page in question (I wanted an uncompressed version free of JPG artifacts), I also turned up a bunch of mislabeled folders, missing description files and even some missing full-size versions of the B/W pages.
Oh, the Huge Manatee!
You see, WMF? pre-dates FurAffinity, having made it's debut on a personal website for 40 B/W pages in the late 1990's until I joined VCL in 2003 and continued it from that point without relocating the earlier series. When FA came online in 2005, I chose to repost the entire comic here, from its primitive beginnings at the dawn of my familiarity with this fandom, continuing for awhile with cross-posted entries (as VCL was the most-used art archive until FA surpassed it), then exclusively on FA to the present. What all this means is there is some really old stuff lurking at the very beginnings of my gallery here.
For the sake of backups, not only do I archive the full-sized versions of all the artwork I post, I also save the descriptions, titles and tags in text files along with the artwork. The idea being that I can in a worst-case scenario rebuild my gallery from the ground up, descriptions and tags included, which is kind-of-important given my long-winded descriptions. Every upload has a project number associated with its title, which I can use to find the original full-sized files. Trouble was, I did a few other comics way back then (mostly one-shots) and instead of titles they simply had numbers, a scheme that carried over into the early project name+number system when I started formally archiving my works...and when "What, me Furry?" went into the archives, their actual "issue" numbers weren't used in the folder names. Not a big deal if I never had to look into those folders again. But you can see where this was headed.
Long story short, I spent the last two days combing through the early WMF? pages, fixing their archive folder names to reflect how they're numbered on FA, updating their descriptions here as follows:
--replacing BBCode navigation links with FA's in-house nav links (starting with the second arc)
--updating original pre-2005 post dates to identify them as VCL upload dates (VCL still functions, BTW)
--adding character names to the tag field
After all this, saving the title, updated descriptions and tags in text files for each page's project folder where that info had been missing, not to mention making sure all this new info was duplicated correctly across the two backup drives at home and a thumb drive needed to carry the changes to the two backup drives I keep in my locker at work* . That made for a whole lot of fiddly repetitive work that very few people would voluntarily put up with today, considering that dumping stuff on Twatter with little or no context is widely considered "the way it's done" nowadays.
What does that mean to you watching me today? Well, I guess you can look through the early issues of What, me Furry? and get caught up with the events that led up to the most recent postings in the present year. While the artwork is primitive, the opening premise especially hackneyed and the writing subpar (not that I claim to be any better at it today :D), there are some nuggets of info that affect my roster of OC's even today. If you have questions on those old submissions go ahead and ask them--and if I have an answer, I'll give it.
--What, me Furry? treats my OC's as cartoon characters that are aware of their existence as such, but start off not being aware of furry fandom as an entity until the events of the first few pages of the comic (hence the title). I first developed these characters (Tanya, Tina and Cynthia) while I was attending DeWitt Clinton HS during the middle 1980s, and during my early years in the workforce (Sherryl, Roland, Tatiana and Todd) in the late 1980's.
--There were no comics during the 1990's. I mostly did B/W pinups showing them wearing typical fashions of the day, since I determined even then that they would not be limited to a single mode of dress. These drawings were presented as "model sheets", though I wasn't aware of how such things were supposed to be done to actually qualify as such since in those pre-Internet days I didn't know anyone who could actually draw, much less make use of properly-done sheets. Eventually these drawings will appear here as "Ancient Art Archive" posts.
--I became aware of furry fandom around about 1997 with my first dial-up Internet access, and attended Anthrocon that year (the last year it was held in Albany, NY). Even though I routinely toured various furry WebRings and lurked alt.fan.furry, I only posted my artwork to a personal website whose address I rarely gave out. The first 40 pages of What, me Furry? were created and posted there, as B/W .GIF images as I had to deal with a 5MB limit on free personal website space included with my dial-up account. It wasn't until 2003 that I finally signed up for an account at VCL, then the fandom's biggest artsite. It is within that context that a new arc of WMF? began, with about 12 more pages posted in B/W before I switched to color.
--Bastien was the first character I developed post-furry-discovery. He was an early example of fandom influence, as I figured I should learn to draw more than just cats. He was followed by Nei'chelle in 2001. No other feline characters were developed afterwards till Kallista in 2008, purely by chance owing to a convention art trade. Other characters, some not yet introduced or posted include a rabbit, a red panda and two otters.
--The main thrust of WMF? I'm working on right now (after an 11-year hiatus O_o) is to formally introduce the newest characters and give viewers an insight on each one's personalities and how they interact with the others. Their residence is a dorm-style two-story building that has private apartments facing an indoor social space where most interaction takes place. Once I have all the characters introduced and have gone a bit into how they play off each other, this location will serve as a jumping-off point for stories involving any combination of my OC's and if appropriate, those of other creators if a suitable idea presents itself. It can also just be a setting for simple pics of various combinations of characters doing typical things, something I used to see a lot of in some art communities back in the day.
*(There's still a sizable chunk of the first arc whose original files are still missing. I'm not even sure if I ever stored the full-size scans in that era--I may have to fire up some very old laptops and hunt through old Zip (and Jaz) disks to find them. At least I still have local copies of the files as posted on FA).
07/18/2021 Edit: I found the original ink drawings of the first arc. I've got some scanning to do. Since the dialogue was added digitally, there is no text on these pages. These won't be posted since the web versions are already on FA, but at least the originals can be digitally preserved/archived at 300DPI. Also I found a stack of 1990's era artwork for the Ancient Art Archive.
While working on the latest installment of What, me Furry? (WMF?), I needed to dig up an older page for a color sample. A much older page. Like 14 years old as of this writing. For this, I chose to go to one of the local backup drives mentioned in the previous journal. What followed was a dive into the deepest recesses of my gallery archives. While I did locate the page in question (I wanted an uncompressed version free of JPG artifacts), I also turned up a bunch of mislabeled folders, missing description files and even some missing full-size versions of the B/W pages.
Oh, the Huge Manatee!
You see, WMF? pre-dates FurAffinity, having made it's debut on a personal website for 40 B/W pages in the late 1990's until I joined VCL in 2003 and continued it from that point without relocating the earlier series. When FA came online in 2005, I chose to repost the entire comic here, from its primitive beginnings at the dawn of my familiarity with this fandom, continuing for awhile with cross-posted entries (as VCL was the most-used art archive until FA surpassed it), then exclusively on FA to the present. What all this means is there is some really old stuff lurking at the very beginnings of my gallery here.
For the sake of backups, not only do I archive the full-sized versions of all the artwork I post, I also save the descriptions, titles and tags in text files along with the artwork. The idea being that I can in a worst-case scenario rebuild my gallery from the ground up, descriptions and tags included, which is kind-of-important given my long-winded descriptions. Every upload has a project number associated with its title, which I can use to find the original full-sized files. Trouble was, I did a few other comics way back then (mostly one-shots) and instead of titles they simply had numbers, a scheme that carried over into the early project name+number system when I started formally archiving my works...and when "What, me Furry?" went into the archives, their actual "issue" numbers weren't used in the folder names. Not a big deal if I never had to look into those folders again. But you can see where this was headed.
Long story short, I spent the last two days combing through the early WMF? pages, fixing their archive folder names to reflect how they're numbered on FA, updating their descriptions here as follows:
--replacing BBCode navigation links with FA's in-house nav links (starting with the second arc)
--updating original pre-2005 post dates to identify them as VCL upload dates (VCL still functions, BTW)
--adding character names to the tag field
After all this, saving the title, updated descriptions and tags in text files for each page's project folder where that info had been missing, not to mention making sure all this new info was duplicated correctly across the two backup drives at home and a thumb drive needed to carry the changes to the two backup drives I keep in my locker at work* . That made for a whole lot of fiddly repetitive work that very few people would voluntarily put up with today, considering that dumping stuff on Twatter with little or no context is widely considered "the way it's done" nowadays.
What does that mean to you watching me today? Well, I guess you can look through the early issues of What, me Furry? and get caught up with the events that led up to the most recent postings in the present year. While the artwork is primitive, the opening premise especially hackneyed and the writing subpar (not that I claim to be any better at it today :D), there are some nuggets of info that affect my roster of OC's even today. If you have questions on those old submissions go ahead and ask them--and if I have an answer, I'll give it.
WMF? first arc (1-40) --- WMF? second arc (41-today) --- My gallery on VCL (for that retro Y2K-era vibe)Some context surrounding those early pages:--What, me Furry? treats my OC's as cartoon characters that are aware of their existence as such, but start off not being aware of furry fandom as an entity until the events of the first few pages of the comic (hence the title). I first developed these characters (Tanya, Tina and Cynthia) while I was attending DeWitt Clinton HS during the middle 1980s, and during my early years in the workforce (Sherryl, Roland, Tatiana and Todd) in the late 1980's.
--There were no comics during the 1990's. I mostly did B/W pinups showing them wearing typical fashions of the day, since I determined even then that they would not be limited to a single mode of dress. These drawings were presented as "model sheets", though I wasn't aware of how such things were supposed to be done to actually qualify as such since in those pre-Internet days I didn't know anyone who could actually draw, much less make use of properly-done sheets. Eventually these drawings will appear here as "Ancient Art Archive" posts.
--I became aware of furry fandom around about 1997 with my first dial-up Internet access, and attended Anthrocon that year (the last year it was held in Albany, NY). Even though I routinely toured various furry WebRings and lurked alt.fan.furry, I only posted my artwork to a personal website whose address I rarely gave out. The first 40 pages of What, me Furry? were created and posted there, as B/W .GIF images as I had to deal with a 5MB limit on free personal website space included with my dial-up account. It wasn't until 2003 that I finally signed up for an account at VCL, then the fandom's biggest artsite. It is within that context that a new arc of WMF? began, with about 12 more pages posted in B/W before I switched to color.
--Bastien was the first character I developed post-furry-discovery. He was an early example of fandom influence, as I figured I should learn to draw more than just cats. He was followed by Nei'chelle in 2001. No other feline characters were developed afterwards till Kallista in 2008, purely by chance owing to a convention art trade. Other characters, some not yet introduced or posted include a rabbit, a red panda and two otters.
--The main thrust of WMF? I'm working on right now (after an 11-year hiatus O_o) is to formally introduce the newest characters and give viewers an insight on each one's personalities and how they interact with the others. Their residence is a dorm-style two-story building that has private apartments facing an indoor social space where most interaction takes place. Once I have all the characters introduced and have gone a bit into how they play off each other, this location will serve as a jumping-off point for stories involving any combination of my OC's and if appropriate, those of other creators if a suitable idea presents itself. It can also just be a setting for simple pics of various combinations of characters doing typical things, something I used to see a lot of in some art communities back in the day.
*(There's still a sizable chunk of the first arc whose original files are still missing. I'm not even sure if I ever stored the full-size scans in that era--I may have to fire up some very old laptops and hunt through old Zip (and Jaz) disks to find them. At least I still have local copies of the files as posted on FA).
07/18/2021 Edit: I found the original ink drawings of the first arc. I've got some scanning to do. Since the dialogue was added digitally, there is no text on these pages. These won't be posted since the web versions are already on FA, but at least the originals can be digitally preserved/archived at 300DPI. Also I found a stack of 1990's era artwork for the Ancient Art Archive.
In a way, I'm glad I don't depend on commission funds to make ends meet. I see artists going to social media for visibility in hopes of that translating into commissions, but the end result (IF they're successful) is they're banging out pics with little or no context around them, and they're quickly forgotten as soon as the next pic is posted. In fact, I know an artist on here who has been performing a "catch-up" series of posts for more than a year, of artwork he "forgot to post here", that is up to 600+ pictures with no end in sight, no description on any of them save for a copy-pasted blurb, no tags, doesn't even identify his own OC's. Essentially using FA as a file dump. Entirely his right of course, but his watchers no longer comment on his pics anymore since it's plainly obvious he'll never look at 'em.
I honestly hope to high heaven that FA doesn't get MySpace-d by Twitter. It seems 95% of everything awful about the Internet spawns from there, and I hope I'm never forced to use it just to keep from vanishing as an artist in this fandom. For all the missteps 'Neer and company have made, nobody to my knowledge ever got fired+blacklisted from being dogpiled by an outrage mob on this platform.