Railride's Crossing > Table of Content > Department of Anthromedia > Research & Development
I know...many artists in this fandom can conjure up new characters at the drop of a hat. I'm not one of those people. Long ago I read, possibly in an issue of TV Guide, an editorial of sorts that lamented the 1980's trend toward creating cartoons with extended casts. Shows like The Smurfs, The Get-Along Gang and the like often featured a dozen or more prominent characters, and the editorial I read pointed out that such large casts did little to enhance the entertainment value of such shows--most of these characters were cookie-cutter personalities with only one visual or behavioral trait to distinguish them from the others. Also pointed out that classic cartoon stars hardly needed such large ensembles to be entertaining in their own right. I agreed with this POV, and subsequently limited the proliferation of my own set of characters so severely, that by the time I had attended my first Anthrocon in 1998, I had only developed seven cat characters and one bird of indeterminate species, since first starting the group about 1984-85.
Following AC98, I sensed that what I was doing could be percieved as an artistic rut, and not too long after, I had developed a meerkat character, based on photos of the real thing but inspired by the Lion King character "Timon". The usual favored species in furry fandom--foxes, wolves, etc-- remained untouched since I wanted to avoid the appearance of bandwagon-jumping. Years passed, and subsequent exposure to other artist's work via successive Anthrocons made for a growing tendency to re-evaluate my policy. Finally, I faced something I had been denying for a long time: that by designing a pack of cat characters, even though they pre-dated my knowledge of the fandom by a wide margin (more than ten years), nevertheless placed them in the top four fandom favored species. I was already "on the bandwagon". The only way to have avoided this would have been to design characters based on species so exotic, that nobody would be able to recognize their anthropomorphisized forms anyway. Being that my particular drawing style is said by fandom observers to be unique within furry fandom, I guess that also means that even my renditions of way-overused species should come out looking like nothing that has come before.
That brings me to March 2001, where I've re-opened the door to adding additional characters to the group, albeit slowly and with a great deal of deliberation before even embarking on test sketches. "Common" species are open to consideration, for the primary reason that the average person is able to identify what they are. The results of that change of policy can be seen incubating here. As I design new characters, I'll document their development here. Bear in mind that it may be some time before the characters seen here join the regular group (with dedicated galleries and whatnot). If you have suggestions for me, they will be considered, but I'm still working under limitations that may preclude development of characters in the more far-out species.