From the days before all furries had migrated to Deviantart and you still had to buy this sort of comic in your local comic shop.
I have no idea why my local comic shop got this particular issue of this particular series back then. As far as I know there wasn’t a cluster of furry comics fans frequenting it, nor do I remember seeing any other furry comic there ever. My guess is that because they had only been selling US comics recently, the owner tried out some things to see if they sold. And since I picked this out of the bargain bin a few years later, it clearly didn’t.
I know why I bought it and so should you if you look at the people listed on the cover. A sketches gallery featuring art by Norm Breyfogle, Guy Davis, Paris Cullins. Matt Feazell, John K. Snyder III and Tim Vigil among others? That’s worth picking up, if perhaps not at full price. That it’s all art of a sexy black cat lady helps of course.
Ms Chevious, the star of this issue was created by Randy Zimmerman and Sue van Camp, who also did the cover here. According to the short history provided in the introduction, she was intended to be the foil to the star of Zimmerman and van Camp’s attempted space trucker series starting J. B. Space that he had thought off in the mid-eighties. Her creation led to them retooling their ideas and instead they settled on a broader series, Tales from the Aniverse, with J. B. Space no longer being the sole protagonist.
Tales from the Aniverse was originally published in 1985-1987 by Arrow Comics. Arrow was one of those mid-eighties publishers which died in the great Black and White Bust of 1987, when the success of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had “inspired” a host of wannabes into setting up their own publishers, flooding the market and killing off a great many comic shops and publishers in the aftermath. Or so I thought, but a quick look at the Grand Comics Database showed that something calling itself Arrow Comics had a book out as recently as 2023.
In any case, Tales from the Aniverse lasted six issues there, then moved to WeeBee Comics for another two as The Aniverse before that publisher died. The third and so far last series, of which this was the second issue of two was published by Massive Comics Group, which despite its name only has one other issue to its name. it looks like this was something Zimmerman himself had set up to publish Tales from the Aniverse. He had plans for more: there was an ad for a terribly generic looking superhero title called The Superials in the back this.
The stories in this issue all feature Ms. Chevious as you’d expect and are decent if you like furry science fiction I guess. This is no Dalgoda but they are perfectly cromulent stories. The main attraction for me were the sketches and there’s a nice mix of proper furry artists (van Camp and Zimmerman, Steve Martin John Spiedel) with more well known ones like Breyfogle.
Furry comics were once a fairly big, if specialised bit of the direct market: even Fantagraphics published them. These days most of it seems to have moved online I think, with a few exceptions like Usagi Yojimbo. Zimmerman, according to the Wikipedia entry was still doing Ms Chevious stories as late as 2009; sue van Camp seem to have moved into being a role playing/computer games artist in the nineties.
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