My favorite furries
Well, okay, maybe the entry title is a bit of an exaggeration. There's other furry fiction I like a great deal, including various stories we've published, not to mention such classic works as Watership Down, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, and Cordwainer Smith's Instrumentality stories and books. And I'm also quite fond of various furry comics, including the quasi-furries in Carla Speed McNeil's Finder universe and Donna Barr's Stinz stories as well as Omaha, Xanadu, Fusion, and so on.
But what I'm here to mention today is that one of the best furry comic books, Albedo Anthropomorphics, has reappeared after a hiatus of too many years, and it's focused once again on Steve Gallaci's excellent Erma Felna: E.D.F. series. To quote the abovelinked Wikipedia article on Albedo, Erma Felna is "a sophisticated science fiction military series set in a sector of space populated by sentient and predominately humanoid versions of several mammal and avian species." It's filled with compelling characters and complex situations, and Gallaci's military background lends an excellent sense of realism to the military aspects of the story. The art is sketchy in places, but overall quite good; he's good at drawing both military hardware and expressive character faces.
I've still got the Albedo roleplaying game sitting on my shelf; never actually played it, but always thought it might be a fun universe to roleplay in. Though I think a lot of the magic of the series comes from the author, so it might not make the transition well.
If you're interested in Gallacci's art, you can find a gallery at VCL. Note: a fair tad bit of adult content mixed in with the G-rated stuff.
The new Albedo is being published by Shanda Fantasy Arts; you can order direct from them, or you can buy it at your local comic store. It looks like issue 1 of this new series came out last year (and I missed it); issue 2 just came out last month (thanks, Kam!). I'm hoping it'll start coming out more frequently.
While I'm here, I should mention that Wikipedia points to the Grand Comic Book Database, an attempt to gather information about every comic book ever published. Nifty! They've got 80,000 cover scans so far.
Oh, and here's a chronology of furry fandom if you're interested.
