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Webcomic Wednesday #8: Dear Toadington

The original intent behind Webcomic Wednesday was, quite frankly, that we'd do them more often than we have. We haven't had one of these since the Homestuck review last June. The thing was, Kuurion got me into reading Homestuck at about that time, and I thought I'd be able to do my own review of it by July. It hasn't worked out that way because I still haven't finished Homestuck; it's incredibly complex and staggeringly long. So I just ended up not writing any more of these. Until now! Today is a Wednesday, and I'm making myself do this.

But I'm going to ease myself back into doing these with a softball review of a comic I love without reservation: Dear Toadington. It's made by two brothers, James and Jefferson Miller. The closest thing it has to a plot is shown in the first strip:

After that, each of the comics is titled "Stories About...", where each comic is a separate story being shared with Toadington. The whole setup is sort of like "Robot Chicken," except that I actually like Dear Toadington. I was made aware of it the one and only time they advertised with Our World as (and I'm paraphrasing from memory) "the webcomic for the discerning gentleman amphibian." At the time, this was the current comic. It's still one of my favorites:

It's smart and it's sick. I haven't liked, or even understood, every single Dear Toadington comic, but when I do, they're usually defined by those two characteristics.

It's rare for the people who pass through the warped lens of a DT strip to show up more than once, but there are exceptions. The Millers themselves appear in a number of comics (especially the early ones) and Daedalus, of mythological fame, appears in "Stories About History's Greatest Inventor," "More Stories About History's Greatest Inventor," and, as of this week, "Even More Stories About History's Greatest Inventor." His inaugural comic is a perfect demonstration of the Millers' sense of humor. Daedalus is tasked with building a labyrinth to contain the minotaur. The word "labyrinth" is normally used as a synonym for "maze," but in truth it isn't. A maze has dead ends in it; a true labyrinth is just a very long path. King Minos has his doubts when shown the blueprints, but Daedalus is sure that nothing could ever walk the whole two miles of the labyrinth and escape. Naturally, he is wrong.

The world of Dear Toadington is invariably childish but often hostile. In one comic, for instance, a man is shown walking down the sidewalk and is then randomly set upon by crows, with "CROWPOCALYPSE" written across the bottom of the page. In another, a different man walking down a different sidewalk arrives at a "sidewalk closed" sign, pops a Mentos in his mouth, and is shown in the last panel wearing a bomb vest in a standoff with police. In the series' most random cartoon to date, "Stories About Awkward Conversations," we see the Millers eating in a diner and discussing a Choose Your Own Adventure book when a sad looking clown comes up and puts a bloody handprint on the outside of the window. They both look at it, and then James asks Jeff again which adventure he chose.

Kuurion doesn't get Dear Toadington, something I have never faulted him for. Dear Toadington is not something that can be gotten 100% of the time. But, fortunately, they have a Twitter feed, which you might find useful for narrowing down why you aren't getting something in particular.

Don't Ask Me About the Plane

Salem, Massachusetts, is known for one thing, and one thing only: witch trials that were held there in 1692. Witch trials that, according to at least one TV documentary I saw, may have been fomented somewhat by the lack of any sort of entertainment in Salem. The natural irony is that all Salem entertainment today is based on witch trial history. Somebody needed to break this cycle. That somebody was the guy who runs this place:

This is a car repair place, although you'd be forgiven for thinking it was a mini golf. The guy who runs it also works at an animal reserve and rescue place in Cost Rica. Or something very close to that; he had a sign up inside that explained it properly, but I didn't have my camera with me then. This is his way of sharing with the world.

"Robin Hood" and the Advent of Furry Fandom

Stuck without Internet for two and a half days, my wife and I ended up rooting through our movie collection for entertainment. We watched three movies from our childhoods - Anastasia, Robin Hood and Mulan. Mixed in with my realizations that Eddie Murphy used to be really funny and Christopher Lloyd makes an awesome Rasputin was the thought that Robin Hood might have consolidated most, if not all, aspects of furriness.

This carries significance to me as the writing half of an anthro webcomic. Neither Kuurion nor I are entirely on board with the idea that what we're doing is "furry," exactly - the term carries connotations that we don't completely associate with - but it's something we resort to as shorthand. Both "anthro comic" and "furry" are in Our World's HTML fields, and I don't think any search engine has used those things since AltaVista.

Robin Hood predates all but the most primordial aspects of furry fandom, and as such I think it had an unrecognized yet simultaneously outsized influence on the shape of things to come. First, though, some context.

PRODUCTION BACKGROUND

After Walt Disney died in 1966, the movies bearing his name went into a qualitative slump that lasted for more than two decades. The Onion's A.V. Club has an excellent review of the first movie made without him, "The Aristocats," which it describes as the beginning of the company's dark age. "Robin Hood" is the movie they made after that, allowing them to reuse footage. Here, watch:

My thanks to whomever made that video, which is honestly still best viewed on a screen not larger than a stamp. Still, the quality is good enough to tell the tale: That dance sequence was cobbled together from three different movies (the other two being Walt's last and first films, "The Jungle Book" and "Snow White.") The knowledgeable among you may have also remembered that Phil Harris, the voice of Little John (who sings "The Phony King of England") is also the voice of Baloo the bear from "The Jungle Book."

"If ever an entertainer was born to be a Disney character, it's Phil Harris," writes Noel Murray in that "Aristocats" review you still haven't read, and he makes a fair point. Harris just sounds so much like a Disney character. So much, in fact, that they reused him in all three of those films. In the "Aristocats" his made-for-AM radio voice works because he plays an alley cat (the refined female lead was Zha Zha Gabor), and it's pretty much the same case with "The Jungle Book."

Here, however, he plays the unwitting lead of an entire faction of people who, in 14th century England, have country accents.

Click on that to see the full-size version. If you haven't seen the movie: Yes, they actually have cards at the beginning explaining who the people are and what they're supposed to be. We're almost to the furry bit, but it's worth going through this because it's just so weird.

Clockwise, from top left: Robin Hood (Brian Bedford, British); Maid Marian (Monica Evans, British); Sir Hiss (Terry Thomas, hissy); Lady Kluck (Carole Shelley, Scottish); Alan-a-Dale (Roger Miller, country); The Sheriff of Nottingham (Pat Buttram, country); Friar Tuck (Andy Devine, country); and Prince John, (Peter Ustinov, British). So, of the nine main characters in that picture (which I got from Fanpop; thanks, Fanpop, for compiling all those pictures into a grid) we have four who actually sound like they're from the United Kingdom, three who sound like they're from the Deep South, and one guy who talks like a snake because he's a snake.

Setting Sir Hiss aside, that's still half the major cast being from a wildly different time and place. Pat Buttram is Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane from "The Dukes of Hazzard," for God's sake, and Roger Miller is the guy who sings "King of the Road." None of this was ever given any contextualization, either. It's just a thing that Disney did, in addition to plundering their other films for footage. So how did this slap-dash collage become the place where the basic tropes of furriness first unified? Truthfully, from what I can tell, this was largely an accident, as the Wikipedia page can explain:

"Initially, the studio considered a movie about Reynard the Fox. However, due to Walt Disney's concern that Reynard was an unsuitable choice for a hero, Ken Anderson used many elements from it in Robin Hood.

"Robin Allan writes in his book Walt Disney and Europe that 'Ken Anderson wept when he saw how his character concepts had been processed into stereotypes for the animation on Robin Hood.'"

So that's where it started. Walt decided that Reynard the Fox wasn't Disney material and the concept art was reprocessed into something else.

CONTEXT

Disney is a cultural-economic monolith. Each of their animated features is conspicuously numbered, indicating the importance that each commands. Even if "Robin Hood" isn't the first Disney animated feature most people would name if pressed for a list, it would probably come up once they're past "The Lion King" and all the princess movies. Probably after "101 Dalmations" but before "Oliver and Company," but I'm only speculating.

As a Disney movie, "Robin Hood" will never go away. It's something each generation of American youth is routinely exposed to, like Playmobil people and chicken pox. People grow up, have kids, and reach for all the same things that they had when they were children. And some of those kids grow up to be furries. But why?

WikiFur (the furry wiki encyclopedia, as you probably guessed) says that furry fandom was born when the old "funny animal" genre expanded out of comedy and into drama. (Taking an additional step back, the original funny animal cartoons probably owe something in their popularity to the fact that furries are easier to draw than humans.)

"Robin Hood" is, in my mind, the first time anthropomorphic animals had been used visually in a dramatic situation, and every one of those points is necessary to the genesis of the fandom. The WikiFur "History" page linked above (and here) lists a number of works considered groundbreaking on the road to furdom, and "Robin Hood" is the first to meet all of them. While many other works contain multiple dimensions of furriness ("Kimba the White Lion" actually made it stateside several years earlier, and I only discount it because the characters aren't truly anthropomorphic), "Robin Hood" was the first to put them all together. The closet thing previous is this:

It's almost drama ("Well, what did you expect in an opera? A happy ending?"), it's visual, and it's anthro. But it's not really furry. Not even with the it's-awkward-but-we're-laughing sexuality that evokes virtually everything non-furries seem to think of furries. It also isn't actually a story, it's a parody of a story, existing exclusively as a mocking shadow of its subject.

"Robin Hood" was more ambitious than that, although truth be told, "What's Opera, Doc?" might well be the better cartoon. After seven decades of sight gags, the funny animals finally got a chance to be something other than funny in "Robin Hood." The spectre of death is very real here, going against the keystone tenet that cartoons can't die, and the characters are shown with (generally) realistic emotions.

King John, the "Phony King of England" from the song, is, for instance, shown as a thumbsucking mama's boy trying desperately to overcome his own inadequacies through wanton brutality. That's not a three-dimensional character, but it's at least two-dimensional - earlier cartoon characters, like Daffy Duck, could only show frustration and fear. To move from frustration to overcompensation, and fear to self-conscious inadequacy, is akin (to switch analogies) to the step up from the three primary colors to the whole spectrum of secondary colors.

IMPACT

Ultimately my argument of significance is built entirely on circumstantial evidence, but I feel like it's pretty good circumstantial evidence. And the significance also extends to the way furries look. I'm too tired to upload any more pictures, but actually click on any of the ones I have. Compare Robin against Bugs Bunny up there. Bugs is lanky, with smooth fur. Robin looks more like an actual version of the animal he is - his fur fluffs out in places, something that has gone on to be virtually universal in furry art.

But he looks more human than Bugs, too, and that's the last and biggest part of what it means to be furry. Furry fandom - and its detractors - are so distracted by the animal half of things that both sides forget that it's the humanity that people need to be able to relate to. The exception to this rule being the assignment of breasts. That's another, probably somehow longer, essay. For now, it's enough to say that the human element, while less visible, is not diminished.

The last visual component is also the first thing you see, even if you don't notice it anymore: Anthro characters wear clothes. Donald Duck, a true funny animal, doesn't wear pants. And while this has been a font of cultural ridicule for Donald, we also know he doesn't have anything to hide. He's just feathers down there, which is a great source of relief for me and God knows how many other people. But Maid Marian has slight secondary sexual characteristics, and her lady-in-waiting, Lady Kluck, has cleavage. These aren't animals anymore; they're naked under their clothes.

"Robin Hood" was the place where funny animals stopped having to be funny, but it's also the place where they stopped having to be all animal, too. TV Tropes, which has covered all this ground before, calls this evolution "Anthropomorphic Shift" but in this case the shift all took place prior to the start of the movie.

"Robin Hood" made a story about humans and told it with animals - but, crucially, the animals are still largely human. And that, simply, is where everything finally came together.

Libraries I Have Blogged From

Here in Lebanon, New Hampshire, you get two basic choices for "library," and they are both ridiculous. The first is the Lebanon Public Library, which is built primarily out of marble and, even with a new wing, is so tiny that the books have to really be packed in there. This is the children's room:

See, that's what I imagine a children's room in a library looking like - a congenial mess. My wife and I spent a fair amount of time there because 1) usually there aren't actually that many children, and 2) the adult section had the one obligatory creepy guy who never left. Later on we found out that there was some extra space on the second floor, which you can get to with this elevator:

Which contains this phone:

The piece of paper taped to the handset says "Call 911."

and then be left alone to browse the Internet in peace.

Your second choice is the Kilton Public Library, which was finished in 2011 and feels remarkably like an airport concourse. This is what the inside of Kilton looks like:

That's... not actually that many books. "Spacious" isn't a word you normally associate with libraries, either. How many people did it take to bankroll such a majestic public structure?

This many:

Holy living fuck. That board is four feet wide and contains 526 plaques. BUT - does Kilton have this poster?

My wife says this is the "2000s-est thing ever." She's not wrong.

Nope, that's the proud property of Lebanon Public. This is too close to call. Let's go to the grid.

Criterion	Kilton PL	Lebanon PL
Books?	Some	Lots
Wi-Fi?	Y	Y
Sells coffee?	Y	N
Bathrooms?	M + F	Unisex (2)
Bathroom smelled like weed smoke at least once?	N	Y
Will sell you photocopy of NYT crossword?	Y	Y
Spells "public" as "pvblic"?	N	Y
My Little Pony-themed Obama-style poster?	N	Y
Donations board the size of a flatscreen TV?	Y	N
Confernce room with moving walls?	Y	N
Microfilm machine?	?	Y
Share a website?	Oh	yeah.

Clearly, this is still too close to call. Such are the bountiful options if you are in Lebanon, N.H., and need a place to read/blog/get high.

Water Is the Enemy

Water is the enemy.

Water permeates. Water corrodes. Water consumes.

To be fair, the fine folks at Isuzu and Concord, makers of my car and camper, respectively, did their best. Nineteen is old for a car. Forty-three is really old for a camper. And where things are starting to give out, water is starting to get in.

I don't know the full providence of Milo, the Isuzu, but I bought it in Vermont and it looks like it were used there its whole life. Vermonters use road salt, and it's hard to explain the ramifications of that to people who've never woken up to a thermometer reading -10 and whined "Not again!" to themselves. By lowering the freezing point of water, the ultimate need and ultimate enemy, road salt makes roads passable under circumstances they wouldn't otherwise be. But it comes at a terrible price.

Milo is rust-eaten to a degree that astounded the man who sold it to be and then ended up doing frame repair work. I backed into some steps with the trailer hitch and about ten pounds of rust fell off. Just handfuls of gravel-sized pieces of iron oxide.

Water is the enemy

The camper, a 1969 Woodsman Traveler, leaks. I'm not entirely sure from where - a path of delaminating wood indicates the back window - and it's making the board the mattress sits on wet. Laying down a tarp seems to help some, but only to a point.

Yesterday, I spent an hour and a half - I checked the clock - trying to get a taillight to come on because water had seeped into the casing. This was on the truck, and the taillight, after being cracked by a previous owner, was patched with some sort of rubbery epoxy. But water got in anyway and the taillight stopped working. After pulling out some (naturally) rust-eaten screws, I managed to liberate the old bulb and then had a certified hell of a time trying to get the new one to come on because one of the contact points in the socket was rusted over and in a hard-to-get place.

As this latitude, at this time of year, an hour and a half is most of your afternoon, and I spent mine trying to make a bulb come on so the cops wouldn't pull me over again. Because water is the enemy.

Draw, Draw, Stop

My wife's grandmother invented a game called Draw, Draw, Stop. It involves two people and drawing materials. One person starts a drawing, and the other person tells them to "stop," then finish it themselves. Yesterday, while we carpooled with my mother to a family get-together, my wife and I played Draw, Draw, Stop in MS Paint. The results are as follows.

This one was going to be a truck. It became a classy whale with a tophat:

In this one, the fuzzy edge that was going to be the fur on a Santa hat became a cloud, which led to this:

The mouth of this eel was going to be the back of a guitar. Remember that all of these were drawn by two cramped people using a touchpad to draw in a moving vehicle:

This one was actually going to be a ballerina, so the dashboard hula girl it came out as is actually pretty close to the mark.

This one was going to be just a pair of giant eyes. Now it is, according to my wife, two jolly fruits singing to baby banana Jesus. I agree with her assessment that this is better than the pair of eyes.

And, finally: This sea turtle was going to be a helicopter, and the Mad Hatter was going to be a blender. See if you can guess how