This gritty crime novel is a parody with anthropomorphic dog and cat detectives. Oh, gee, we haven’t seen THAT before!

San Bernardo is their territory, a seething metropolis where fat-cats prance in the exclusive island enclave of Kathattan while working dogs wallow in the stinking squalor of the Kennels. (back-cover blurb)

NYC, Simon & Schuster/Scribner, July 2009, trade paperback $14.00 (259 pages), Kindle $10.99.

… if you read Chinese.

There has been a recommendation of this one-minute TV commercial from Hong Kong, for the Mannings Plus pharmacy chain. It was first posted on YouTube on January 3; we presume it first appeared on TV this year.

The Recommended Anthropomorphics List tries to give credit to not only the sponsor of recommended TV commercials, but also the advertising agency that produced the commercial and, if possible, the ad agency’s director of the commercial. In this case, all the information is in Cantonese, which we cannot read.

We have asked the recommender and on YouTube, but we do not have a reply yet. Can anyone help? Are there any credits here for who made the commercial?

Nat Geo sees fursuiting as a fit subject for Taboo, according to this three-minute preview:

The program spins furries as "people who enjoy wearing animal costumes in their adult life", calling the behaviour "bizarre", and quoting regular media commentator Dr. Sudeepta Varma:

Furries can be considered greatly taboo because we look at people dressing up in furry costumes as child's play, and it's something that should have been left in the past, and not brought into adulthood.

Update (24 Dec): The episode is to air January 3 at 9PM Eastern, and again at midnight. [cloudchaser_s/furrymedia]

One fursuiter profiled on the show is Nuka (Courtney Plante), a social psychology graduate student at the University of Waterloo in Ontario.

The Huffington Post reports on a 2012 calendar in the United Kingdom which features cats playing musical instruments. The images in the calendar, released by Maverick Arts, were created by digitally altering photographs of real pet cats.

An examination of the publisher's website reveals several other calendars along similar lines, with such titles as Maverick Meerkats, Ferrets Go Fishing, Water Skiing Westies, and Ballroom Bunnies.

Last year, DreamWorks Animation put out three movies: the prestige picture, the fun picture, and the Shrek sequel. On one hand, MegaMind did not have the emotional resonance of How To Train Your Dragon. On the other hand, HTTYD did not feature Will Ferrell emerging from his own head screaming “Presentation!” while Guns’N’Roses “Welcome to the Jungle” blared on the soundtrack.

I’m sensing the beginning of a pattern this year. Kung Fu Panda 2 seemed to be the prestige picture for the year. Puss in Boots is the fun picture, with the Shrek sequel squished into it.

Do not go into this movie expecting any kind of emotional resonance or artistic enlightenment. This is not that kind of movie, and was never intended to be. Do go into this movie expecting to be entertained. As pure entertainment, Puss in Boots is worth watching.

I have been a fan of Bill Willingham as a writer (his art is good but not spectacular) ever since he wrote and drew the Elementals comic book in the 1980s. I still think that Elementals vol. 2 #15, July 1990, is one of the most perfect superhero comics ever written, and I have been reading his Fables for DC Comics/Vertigo since it started in 2002. (The second story arc of Fables, “Animal Farm”, was on the ALAA’s Recommended Anthropomorphic Reading List in 2002.)

But I’ll admit that I totally missed his first novel, Down the Mysterly River (Austin, TX, Clockwork Storybook, April 2001, 230 pages, 100 copies), when it came out ten years ago. Now Willingham has heavily revised it and it is published as a major children’s fantasy under Tor Books’ juvenile Starscape imprint, with twenty-five chapter heading illustrations and an endpaper map by his Fables partner, Mark Buckingham.

Starscape describes it as a “children’s book”. It is, but of the sort that has reviewers comparing it to the Chronicles of Narnia, The Hobbit, the Oz books, The Wind in the Willows, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, and others with lots of talking animals and/or are dramatic fantasy adventures – books that most Furry fans will have read. While I wouldn’t rate it quite as high as a classic, this is an adventure that readers of all ages will enjoy.

Tor/Starscape, Sept. 2011, hardcover $15.99 (333 + 1 pages); Kindle $9.99; audiobook $24.99.

Solatorobo: Red the Hunter is a story-based role-playing game for the Nintendo DS, featuring character design that should more than appeal to furries. If anything, it's as furry as any Star Fox game, and the characters’ animal nature has more effect on the story than just punny names.

The game is some sort of prequel/sequel/something to a game called Tail Concerto. I missed that one, so this was my first introduction to the setting.

Xseed, September 2011 - $34.99 on Amazon

Or “by Franz Kafka & Coleridge Cook”, as the cover and title page say. This is a rewriting by Cook of Kafka’s famous novella to turn Gregor Samsa from a giant insect into an adorably cute kitten.

This is a straightforward copy of Kafka’s text, with just the descriptions of Samsa-as-an-insect changed to make him a kitten and to do kittenish things. “He lay in bed on his soft, fuzzy back and saw, as he lifted his head a little, his brown arched abdomen divided into striped bowlike sections.”

Upon seeing the picture of a woman in a fur hat and fur boa, “Samsa felt a powerful urge to leap upon the sample clothes and scratch at them thoroughly, but as soon as it had come, it passed.”

Illustrations by Matthew Richardson. Quirk Books, May 2011. Trade paperback, $12.95 (206 pages)

This book collects the second year of Griffin’s award-winning Monday-Wednesday-Friday full-color online comic strip, Housepets!, from June 1, 2009 to May 28, 2010. Wow!

When Book 1 containing the first year’s worth was published in July, I assumed that Griffin would be publishing these annual collections annually. Nope! And I’m glad to be wrong. This means that we won’t have to wait another year to get the third year’s worth.

Charleston, SC, CreateSpace, October 2011
Trade paperback, $12.99 (66 pages)

This coffee-table art book is officially published on November 1, shortly after the movie is released (Oct. 28); but the publisher sent me an advance review copy (Oct. 21).

If they didn’t want to call this The Art of DreamWorks Puss in Boots, they shouldn’t’ve put the DreamWorks logo in the middle of the book’s title.

So I haven’t seen the movie yet. But we have seen its publicity for the last couple of months: the posters, the multiple trailers, the viral videos like “The Cat Haz Swagger” and “’No Pants’ Pants” that emphasize the hunky Puss and his new feline femme fatale, Kitty Softpaws – so we can be sure that this is a very Furry movie.

“The Art of [DreamWorks] Puss in Boots”, by Ramin Zahed, foreword by Guillermo Del Toro.
Insight Editions, November 2011, illustrated hardcover $39.95 (152 pages).

I guess this is part two in what wasn’t ever intended to be an ongoing series; reviews of junk no furry in their right mind would need a review for, because they’re obviously junk.

But Mystery Science Theater 3000 is still my favorite TV show of all time, so this is what I do with my free time.

Last time, I discussed the unintentional horrors of Hyenas; today I will be reviewing the most obvious foreign rip-off of a Dreamworks Animation SKG film since Legend of a Rabbit.

Get ready for The True Story of Puss’N Boots, which, as the DVD box sadly points out, does not feature Antonio Banderas, but does present William Shatner in a role so bad, 'Priceline Negotiator' looks downright Shakespearean.

This is artist Rick Griffin’s collection of the first year of his Monday-Wednesday-Friday Internet comic strip, Housepets!

Griffin (b. 1986; not the underground artist of 1960s-1970s comix and psychedelic posters who died in 1991) says he and his brother have been cartooning since their childhood; he got the rough idea for Housepets! in 2006, posted his first test strips on Fur Affinity during 2007, and the strip went online June 2, 2008.

This collection is unretouched, so the reader can see its evolution from a simple black-&-white, two character strip to a complex full-color strip with over a dozen characters, and the maturing of Griffin’s art style during its first year.

CreateSpace, July 2011; Trade paperback $11.99 (43 pages)

Baen Books, October 2011
Hardcover $18.00 (361 pages)

The first entry in a new teen series and the origin saga for the incredibly popular, multiple New York Times and USA Today bestselling Honor Harrington adult science fiction adventures. Young Stephanie Harrington is none other than the founder of a pioneering family dynasty that is destined to lead the fight for humanity's freedom in a dangerous galaxy. [publisher’s blurb]

Yes, but this story isn’t entirely new. In January 1998, Baen Books published More Than Honor (review; YARF! #58), an anthology of three original novellas by different authors set in Weber’s “Honor Harrington” universe.

The lead novella was Weber’s own “A Beautiful Friendship” (pages 3-132), the beginning of this same story. It appears with minor expansions, retitled as “Unexpected Meetings”, as chapters 1 through 12 (pp. 3-129) of this novel.

The second part, “With Friends Like These…” (chs. 13-29; pp. 133-352), is an original sequel. This rewritten novel version is the first in Baen’s new Star Kingdom series of Young Adult s-f books.

I wasn’t as proactive as I thought I would be, and I’m pretty sure I missed a couple posted during the first of September, so apologies there. Otherwise, here was last month’s Newsbytes.

Do you enjoy Homestuck, but find one therianthropic feline troll and a fan of anthropomorphic fauna insufficient to sate your furry desires? Consider Prequel, an interactive comic using characters, species and settings from the Elder Scrolls video games Morrowind and Oblivion.

Although the popularity of the comic caused it to be moved to its own site after two threads, suggested actions and fan-art for the comic's protagonist are still taken on the MSPA forums (which also feature the topic 'shit. let's be furries', now on its second thread).