CM: The World of Vicki Fox

Last week, we had a comic all about shooting, killing, drinking, and jazzy cats in 1920’s garb. So, in the great tradition of Monty Python’s Flying Circus: “And now for something completely different”

This week’s comic is one of my oldest favorite webcomics, and one that pretty much introduced the genre to me: The World of Vicki Fox.

See? There are many advantages to be little and cute!

The World of Vicki Fox is an anthropomorphic webcomic created by Michael Russell and Laura Howell. It’s best described as a “slice of life” comedy comic strip about the lives of the titular Vicki Fox and her friends and family in the city of Apopka, Georgia. Almost the entire cast is made up of anthropomorphic animals of varying species.

Where many other comics delve into deep stories, crazy action, or fierce drama. The World of Vicki Fox is more like an episode of "Happy Days" or "Mary Tyler Moore". The meat of the comic comes from learning about the characters and seeing the hijinks their various personality traits, jobs, and relationships get them caught up in. In one of the comics, one of the characters even compares Vicki and her roommate Ceri Bobcat to Mary and Rhoda (I now feel really old in enjoying that reference)! It prides itself on being a wholesome, family-friendly experience that can be read and enjoyed by anybody and usually has subtle a lesson to be learned in the midst of all the jokes. What it does best is, without question, creating a full world for the readers to enjoy and immerse themselves in.

Story

The World of Vicki Fox is another comic where it’s difficult to have actual ‘spoilers’ when talking about the story. The reason for this, as I said above, is because the comic isn’t really concerned with telling deep narratives. The deepest the stories have ever gotten in terms of continuity is a storyline that shows how Vicki and Ceri first met and became roommates. While that might seem like a downfall of the comic, it is actually quite the opposite!

Reading and enjoying the stories of The World of Vicki Fox is like enjoying an episode of your favorite sitcom. They’re warm, familiar, and largely self-contained. You can hop in nearly anywhere and still enjoy the characters and the jokes, picking up on the relations between characters as you go along. Speaking of relations, the majority of the stories are focused on romance and family, which makes for great humor, but also plenty of ‘aww’ moments where you’re rooting for the protagonist or feeling sorry for their losses. It’s not all played for laughs, either! A number of comics don’t end in gags, but in thoughtful phrases as the characters come to one realization or another, learning (or, in the case of Zephy Fox, ignoring) lessons along the way.

Another aspect of the comic that might surprise some readers is that The World of Vicki Fox is largely a female-focused comic. Three out of the four primary characters are female and most of the stories are largely from their perspectives or directly involve them in some way. Vicki Fox herself is very concerned with building a life for herself and enjoying every aspect of it that she can. There’s shopping trips, pecan festivals, playful romance, and enjoying family and church functions. In some ways, it might be seen as a little stereotypically girly, but Vicki and her friends are crazy enough that, even if you’re not into ‘girly stuff’, you’ll find something to enjoy. Personally, I had a lot of fun with Aussie, Vicki’s best friend who pretends to be Australian for no good reason aside from thinking that it’s cool.

Presentation

One of the most striking elements of The World of Vicki Fox is its art style. More specifically, the sheer number of art styles on display is pretty incredible.

The comic started out with only Laura Howell doing the art, whose style is quite iconic and fits the cartoony world of Vicki and her friends wonderfully. It has something of a “Looney Tunes” vibe to it, which is really endearing. By the third storyline, the art changed over to Shelly Pleger, another fantastic artist but with a noticeably different style. Her art is more reminiscent of Disney cartoons and 90’s era Warner Bros. cartoons.  It was during her second storyline that things started to change rather dramatically.

Starting with a comic called “Minding the Gap”, all sorts of artists started sending in guest comics and illustrations to fill the space between major storyline updates. It was a remarkable display of talent and style, and really helped to expand The World of Vicki Fox as a comic for the furry comic community at large. It not only showed that Vicki and her friends could appear in different styles and still be absolutely recognizable due to their personalities, but also showed that the comic had an incredible community behind it. As the storyline continued, the art for the main comics changed to Jennifer Morton, another experienced comic artist, with Shelley Pleger coming back every now and again.

Sadly, as the comic went on, this created a bit of a problem where the artistic identity of the comic started to feel inconsistent, both in quality and in pacing. Along with update problems, this might have created the situation that led to the comic’s current hiatus.

The ‘Anthro’ Element

The anthropomorphic element to The World of Vicki Fox is probably one of its strongest traits! Not only are almost all of the characters animals with a wide variety of species and appearances to them, but there are rules set in the world and frequent pokes at common tropes, or habits, of anthropomorphic cartoons.

When I talk about ‘rules’, I mean that it’s clearly outlined how relationships and interactions between species work, and the comic largely sticks to them. Michael Russell himself explains it best in the FAQ on the site, talking about how there are three levels in Vicki’s world: Humans, human-animals, and regular animals. He goes even further to talk about how romantic relationships only exist between members of the same animal family (i.e. canine, feline, etc.), and even how religions work with all the various species in play! There’s clearly a ton of thought put into the world and how the species all interact with it and with each other, and learning about these little wrinkles of the world design isn’t completely necessary, but only makes the stories better.

On the comical side of things, The World of Vicki Fox has its fair share of jokes about cutting holes in clothing for their tails, human-sized cars being horribly cumbersome for most of the smaller animal races, and the girls going crazy about buying shoes, despite usually being barefoot like most typical cartoon animals in the genre. It’s really ‘anthropomorphic’ in the most fun of ways, never taking itself too seriously, but sticking to its rules for the world when they come up. There’s never a problem of Vicki and her friends being merely ‘humans in animal suits’, and that really helps to create its identity.

I won’t lie: I pretty much adore the way The World of Vicki Fox handles anthropomorphism and I dearly wish more comics took the same approach.

My Thoughts

I’ve slipped in a lot of personal thoughts in talking about this comic already, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I really enjoy the whole production. I absolutely recommend this comic to everyone reading here.

However, there are some problems about the comic that I absolutely must talk about and can’t leave out in good conscience. As previously mentioned, the art style for the comic changed dramatically over the years, and the change in quality is very noticeable. Now, this is not to say that the later artists were bad, but more that the difference was just so jarring that it greatly hampered my enjoyment. Personally, my favorite era of the comic’s style is before the ‘Minding the Gap’ comics and I hope we get more of a focused art style when the comic relaunches.

Speaking of which, that brings up the second problem I had with The World of Vicki Fox: the lack of consistent updates. While lulls are not unheard of in webcomics, the massive gaps between comics became so long that the author himself brought attention to it and made a comic out of the gaps! Ironically, even the “Minding the Gap” comics didn’t keep up with much consistency, and that ultimately led to the comic ending prematurely in 2013. The storyline at the time, called “Summer Work”, was left hanging essentially in the middle and looks like it most likely will not have a conclusion. There’s an announcement about the website relaunching and being retitled “Dixie Wildlife” on the Comics page, and we received an update recently about the expected relaunch to be taking place in Spring 2015. Only time will tell if they’ll stick to the launch date, but it is my sincere hope that they do!

Despite these problems, I still love this comic and read back through it frequently. I’m eager to see more of it in the future and consider it a great shame that no print version of The World of Vicki Fox exists! I would love to be able to have something to hold onto if the website ever goes offline, as well as something to show off to my friends and family on my bookshelf.

As it stands, the future of The World of Vicki Fox is nebulous at best, but everything that made the comic and the website great is still available to us online! Be sure to give it a read and experience one of the most wholesome and fun experiences to be had with online anthropomorphic comics!

The World of Vicki Fox

Until next time, happy reading, all!

-Chammy