Inktober Memory Lane - Care Bears

 Hello again!

I was asked, after making my last post, to share a few more of my pictures and experiences from this past Inktober. As I said earlier, many of these were discoveries and thoughts about the creative process in general and my personal history more than just writing, but I hope you’ll still find it interesting and encouraging of your own personal explorations.

The picture I think I’ll share in this post is one that’s probably not too surprising to some folks that know me well: Bright Heart Raccoon.

The Care Bears have been kind of a quiet franchise since the mid 90s, but they’re starting to gain some public attention again. What you may see of them now, though, pales in comparison to the phenomenon they were back in the 80s and even the early 90s. They had cartoons, toys, dolls, movies, lunch boxes… You name it, and there was a good chance there was a Care Bears version of it back then. Really, this was the case for a lot of the explosive 80s-90s cartoons. G.I. Joe, Transformers, My Little Pony, Rainbow Bright, Ghostbusters (yeah, yeah, they were a movie first), and more were all part of a huge marketing machine designed to get kids to spend as much of their parents’ money as possible, and it worked. Franchises lived or died by their toy sales, so there was a real push from companies to fight for our attention.

However, cynical marketing psychology aside, I adored the Care Bears as a kid. I went to a small school, and one of my first experiences with cliques in Kindergarten was having to choose a side between Care Bears and Rainbow Bright. There was a My Little Pony and Strawberry Shortcake crowd too, but they were the fringe groups. Kinda like that weird kid who always threw out “Atari!” during the SEGA/Nintendo console wars. Anyways, I was all about Care Bears and constantly wanted new toys from the show, but my family was firmly in the lower-middle class, so the best I got was a couple of plushies and a sticker book.

What really made a difference in cementing my fandom, since my folks couldn’t afford to get me tons of junk, was the availability of Care Bear stuff at my local library. I most heavily consumed the Nelvana series VHS tapes, but they also carried a few books that I enjoyed. I have a distinct memory of our family flying to Florida to visit Disney World (One of, I think, two trips we ever took there), and I was terrified. The only thing that could calm me down was reading this big Care Bears picture book of the first movie. I read that thing cover to cover repeatedly and drank up the illustrations.

Look! He's right there on the cover!

The VHS cartoons, though, held a special kind of magic. They were so inventive to me and the characters often did ‘variety show’-style stuff where the same cast would be in different skits. In one show, Champ Bear was a knight, while in another episode, he was a basketball player or they were going camping. My favorite character, though, quickly became Bright Heart Raccoon. Not only was he my favorite color, but he was super smart and also the only raccoon in the cast, kind of like how I was the only mixed race kid in my class. It made him feel really special to me, and I latched on hard. So I asked my parents for stuff with Bright Heart Raccoon on it… but there really wasn’t any. He wasn’t a mainline Care Bear, so he was never in group shots and barely had his own toys or dolls. Additionally, my dad wasn’t too fond of my Care Bear fever since it was distinctly ‘girly stuff’ and, again, at that time, we didn’t have a ton of money to waste searching for special toys.

That was when my mother started doing something especially awesome… She showed me that she could draw. Since I couldn’t really get posters of Care Bears or anything, she would sit down and look at a picture of Bright Heart (and I think Grumpy Bear too, since he was one of her favorites), and she’d draw up a picture of them standing side by side in colored pencil. It wasn’t a big picture, probably a little bigger than a postcard, but it was drawn especially for me, and it was one of a kind. As the years went on, she drew pictures for me of various characters and things that I liked, eventually encouraging me to start drawing for myself after years of watching her, but Bright Heart was the first one, and that was extremely special to me.

The outfit he has in this drawing is the same one he had in the cartoon series, though with some modifications since I always thought the sneakers were silly and I like the heart-shaped pawprints that Care Bears have. If you look at some of my other art, you can see how this design inspired some of my characters and drawing habits, but I’ve definitely come a long way from it. In truth, I don’t think I’ve attempted to draw Bright Heart’s design directly since I was about ten years old, making this one heck of a blast from the past.

As I was drawing this and inking this, I was remembering learning how to draw raccoon masks and tails for the first time, figuring out how to fit a ballcap between a pair of animal ears, and those warm summer days spent watching Mom draw and looking at her art on my bedroom wall. It inspired a lot, and I was sure to send this to my mother after I finished it to tell her as much.

So, yeah, thanks Mom ;) You set me on an awesome creative path.

That’ll do it for this post, but I’ll make at least one more in the future about another of my Inktober memory lane experiences. I hope you all enjoy it, and let me know if there’s a drawing you particularly want to know the backstory on!

Take care, all, and happy reading!

-Chammy

Currently Reading: Twokinds by Thomas Fischbach

BOOK TALK - The Builders

The Builders by Daniel Polansky

From the summary on Amazon:

A missing eye.

A broken wing.

A stolen country.

The last job didn't end well.

Years go by, and scars fade, but memories only fester. For the animals of the Captain's company, survival has meant keeping a low profile, building a new life, and trying to forget the war they lost. But now the Captain's whiskers are twitching at the idea of evening the score

            ‘Well, that wasn’t what I was expecting’

            This was a phrase that I continuously said to myself while reading through the strange and violent tale of The Builders. When I had picked it up I assumed, both from the cover as well as from the various accolades comparing the book to Brian Jacques and Watership Down, that I was going to be in for a good old fantasy animal adventure. What I found instead was a sea of violence, death, betrayal, and a style that felt closer to Beowulf than it did to any of Brian Jacques works.

            It’s difficult to talk too much about this book without spoiling a number of things, so I will at least give my spoiler-free impressions first here: The Builders is an excellent story that is written in the style of a legend, with plot twists and many violent ends, this is a book for mature readers through and through. It’s fantastic anthropomorphic fiction, playing with many of the stereotypes that the animals involved are known for, and yet treating them as parts of the characters rather than one-note traits or jokes. Although it’s a little short and moves at a breakneck pace, I never felt deprived of characterization. It has a single, brutal story to tell and it does so with great efficiency. I must say, however, that a great many of the characters are very unlikable creatures and there’s not an innocent soul in the book, so it can make it very hard to personally have empathy for any of the cast. I’d definitely recommend it to fans of classic anthropomorphic literature and fans of western legends like Beowulf or North American tall tales.

... What? When I think of tall tales, I think of s'mores around the campfire. Don't you?

            Now, for a bit of a deeper look, I might be diving into spoiler territory as I talk about what I did and did not like about this story here, so consider yourselves warned!

            First and foremost, as I said, I had a bit of a problem connecting with the characters. The first character that we’re introduced to is a battered old soldier of a mouse known simply as ‘the Captain’. He’s immediately abrasive and constantly angry and you know from just looking at him that he’s a surprisingly deadly individual. Those are all cool traits for the gruff old captain stereotype but I never realized how prickly they could make a protagonist. He’s not simply tough with a no-nonsense personality, but he’s also cruel to both ally and enemy. One of the more telling elements of this cruelty is when he visits an old friend who gave up fighting and hires men to kill him, forcing his old friend to fight for his very life and awaken a bloodlust that he’d worked so hard to overcome.

            So, yes, rather than working through reason to get his old compatriot to join him in an eventual battle, or even respecting that ally’s wish to be forgotten, our protagonist throws away the lives of several others in a gambit that, if he’d miscalculated, would have resulted in the death of the very person he wanted to have help him. For the entire book, this incident made me feel just baffled as to why anyone would work with this mouse and why they would approach working with him with such joy and nostalgia. Yes, the Captain is strong and he’ll get the job done, but nobody in their right mind is going to think that they can trust their lives to him.

            This suspension of disbelief is somewhat alleviated as we meet and learn more about the entire cast. As I said above, nobody in this book is innocent, and that’s especially true for our heroes. They’re assassins, thieves, poisoners, liars, and more than a few are betrayers, both of good and bad. In fact, calling them ‘heroes’ feels rather wrong, and even our group of protagonists would most definitely disagree with the title. It took me until near the last half of the book to realize that the titular Builders were working towards positive political ends, as so much of the story feels more like a tale of revenge. It can be very confusing to know how to feel as one reads through this story.

            One thing that is not in question, however, is just how awesome these characters are. I compared this book to Beowulf, and I think the reason for that is because it feels like a classic epic poem in structure more than a novel. In novels, there’s usually an arc of sorts as you see character succeed and fail and grow into an eventual climax. In novels, it’s some accepted for your protagonists to start small and grow into something grand to overcome what were previously thought to be impossible odds. In this book, though, the characters start out being awesome and the entire book feels like we’re watching a legend being built. Strangely, the key villains in the story are actually afraid of the protagonists, and that fear never goes away as each member of the Builders shows exactly why they should be feared. It really put me in a different mood than most stories, and I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed anything quite like it other than possibly Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne series. For an anthropomorphic tale, this came like a wicked curve ball out of left field.

            Speaking of, as far as anthropomorphic fiction goes, The Builders is very solid. There’s an extremely diverse cast, including a salamander and an owl, and their individual animal traits are highlighted as a means to bring out their character, but not in a stereotypical fashion. Yes, the weasel is a cheat and a liar, but he’s also firmly a good guy and has one of the more heroic moments in the story. The badger is big and deadly, but he’s also soft-spoken and even a little romantic. The mouse is small and tenacious, but he’s also the most dangerous creature to ever walk the countryside, and everybody knows it.

            See, one of the most common pitfalls that can befall anthropomorphic literature, especially ones written in recent years, is when the characters lose their species identity. It can be easy, when reading certain books with diverse animal casts, to forget exactly what animal someone is, especially when you’re deep into the drama. Modern anthropomorphic stories can certainly have good and complex characters, but sometimes they can definitely feel interchangeable with humans or, at the very least, interchangeable with one another. The fox acts like the wolf who acts like the panther. This isn’t to say that all animal characters need to have dialogue tags that indicate their tails wagging or that they need to include barks and meows with their sentences (Goodness please no on that!), but a character’s species should be intricately tied to their identity, and not something added as an afterthought.

            It’s a little difficult to properly lay out how I mean this, but the best and most literal example that I can give is one of my favorite books: The Wind in the Willows. In a way, you could say that this book cheats by having all of the characters named after the animals that they are. Mole, Ratty, and Mr. Toad are all names that hide nothing… but somehow, upon saying those names, I just get a vivid mental picture of the character in the novel. I can’t say the name ‘Mr. Toad’ and not think of the wide-eyed, adventure-seeking expression of that crazed amphibian as he rides along in his newest vehicle. His species is a part of his character, and The Builders manages to convey that exact same feeling with its characters without resorting to calling them by their species names. It’s quite amazing.

It's funny... For as much as I love Disney, this is still the definitive version of Mr. Toad's appearance in my mind.
Maybe it's the pink human-y look of the Disney version that throws me off of it? Ah well!

            So, while The Builders might be a slightly mixed bag for my personal tastes because of the cruel characters and the intense violence and situations, I will not deny that it is an excellent book, and a perfect example of good anthropomorphic literature. I doubt this will reach the level of popularity as others in the field, and the book leaves absolutely no room for any kind of sequel, but I still feel like it should be getting more attention than it has. If you feel intrigued enough by my review here to give it a look, then please do so and let me know what you thought!

            Until next time, happy reading, all!

-Chammy

Currently Reading:

Mister Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

Happy Furry Book Month!

Hello one and all!

I wanted to make you readers aware that October is a very special month indeed. Not just because of Halloween, Leif Erikson Day, or even National Nut Day (October 22 for the curious)!

Celebrating October in style!

No, October is extra special because it is officially known as Furry Book Month! At least, it’s official insofar as the month was declared as such by the Furry Writer’s Guild.

From what I can tell by reading their post about it and doing a little bit of Google Searching research, this is the first month that this has ever been made official, and I would like to join in to promote it to the few folks who read here!

Here are some details from the month borrowed and summarized from Skye Lansing (Check out his author blog here!), who seems to be one of the key promoters:

What is Furry Book Month?

It is a month-long campaign to help promote anthropomorphic literature and the producers of such content. While the focus of the campaign is on newer anthro literature, there is nothing at all wrong with taking this month to share classic from your collection! To help with the promotion, some publishers and book sellers are offering fantastic discounts for some of their books that fall under the ‘furry’ subgenre. You can read all about the current deals being offered at the Furry Writer’s Guild!

What is a Furry Book?

In the broadest sense, a furry book is any book that features anthropomorphic animal characters. We’ve talked about anthropomorphic literature plenty of times here, so you readers should be pros at identifying these! However, just because the book has anthropomorphic animals in it does NOT guarantee a discount from publishers. The discounts for this month seem largely to be focusing on books targeting or produced by the furry sub-culture. This doesn’t mean that you can’t promote and enjoy your copy of Redwall, though! It just means you might not be able to get it for half price.

How long does Furry Book Month last?

It lasts from October 1^st – 31^st, though some deals from publishers may have smaller windows.

Now, despite the naming, Furry Book Month does not have to be about the Furry sub-culture! Even if you have no interest at all in that, this month serves as a great way to promote the kinds of books that we enjoy! Who knows? If we can expand awareness of this month even further, more publishers and websites might get in on the fun, and it’ll go a long ways toward encouraging more writers in our favorite genre.

Besides that, this is a great excuse for me to talk to even more people about anthropomorphic literature at the library.

These guys have the right idea!

Until next time, happy reading!

-Chammy

Currently reading:

Gene Wilder: Funny and Sad by Brian Scott Mednick (Uhh… he played a fox in a movie once! It totally counts) 
Lackadaisy Vol. 2 by Tracy J. Butler