Hello, I’ve been in the Twin Cities for a couple decades now, but didn’t know about this group until a friend mentioned your upcoming convention.
I’ve been a furry since before the term was commonplace – as a kid, in about ’71 or ’72, I discovered dinosaurs, and started making and illustrating stories about dinosaur/lizard people, and soon branched out into ferret-people and other critters. Sometime in my teens (’86? ’87?), in the Society for Creative Anachronism, I met Master William Blackfox (Mark Wallace, creator of the comics Warthaven and Vixen’s Keep, and one of the artists on Equine the Uncivilized). It was a brief meeting at an event – I didn’t know him well – but it was something of a revelation to me. There were other people who wrote/drew this stuff! And at least one had enough real-world recognition to have his own comic published! This was much-needed encouragement, as by that time I was well aware that most people considered my animal-critters “weird” (although Furry fandom did not have the sexual reputation it does now, or indeed any reputation at all).
I started looking for other “animal-people” comics, and discovered Albedo and Fusion, which introduced me to artists such as Steve Galacci, Donna Barr, Lela Dowling, and Terri Smith. In college I participated for a while in the Barr Wars APA (renamed Bizarre Wars after Donna Barr dropped out) but fell out of it due to (among other things) graduation and needing to find a job. Since then my drawing/writing has fallen off quite a bit, though I did contribute to some early issues of Spontoon, and still write the occasional filk.
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