Original post written by Dogpatch Press Staff
Furry art beyond figure drawing
264 pages, softcover, available for US$35 from the Collegeville store
Review by Jack Newhorse (Tom Geller) of a graphic novel by TUVVIN (Clyde Kopernik, who granted permission to use all graphics provided.)
Source: Page 133
I’ve been looking forward to the first graphic novel of Clyde Kopernik (“TUVVIN”) since a 2021 interview on the Furreal podcast. The “talk show all about furry content creators” featured thumbnails of the host and guest, drawn (I assume) by the guests themselves.
TUVVIN’s thumbnail stood out. The figures were expressive — host Matty eager, TUVVIN blasé. But most furry artists can draw expressive characters.
What grabbed me was its technique: misregistered, full of deliberate printing artifacts, the background a swirling miasma suggesting ghostly souls looming in a drug-induced dream. As in Edvard Munch’s image “The Scream”, the background elevates the foreground. Behind cartoon TUVVIN’s bored gaze, a storm rages.
Welcome to Collegeville
A Town Called Collegeville: A Horror-Tragedy was released four years later, supported by a Patreon and a Kickstarter that quickly reached three times its US$5,000 goal. The 264-page softcover is “a horror comic about a series of murders that takes place in a small town in Indiana in the summer of 1973.”
Loosely speaking, Collegeville follows Mary, drummer for an all-female band named Lackadaisy Junction. They perform at “The Zebulon”, run by the middle-aged Rhett. Also performing are John and the Murderjockeys, a band comprising four of the unruly and violent Cook brothers. The fifth brother is “Chopper” Cook, his face enigmatically frozen in a mad sardonicus. Floating above all is Roy, a genderqueer aficionado of the dark arts and LSD.
Source: Page 72, also on webshop
The world is deeply evocative of its time (1973) and place (a small town in the Midwestern US). TUVVIN lives in Northeastern Ohio and knows the landscape, even if too young to know the period firsthand. But the homework was done: Clothing, cars, and street scenes feel real to me as someone who grew up at this time. (I made a short video about Collegeville‘s environment.) TUVVIN loves this world and the book is a love letter to it.
Transcending furry art
As a visual feast, the book is a success. As a story, less so. Events happen in a sequence along unrelated threads, the “series of murders” being one of them. But there’s also the oil crisis, Mary’s failing family business, the Cook brothers’ violence, the bands, the relationship between Mary and Roy, Roy’s acid trips. It’s a lot, and some threads are abandoned, unresolved.
And yet they create a world rich in angst, poverty, and mood. The taste of bologna with mayo on white bread. High-tension lines buzz on colossal pylons, looming over lost children as they wander through railyards, poisoned streams, and other detritus of a culture in descent. Inescapable.
I’m reminded of the TV show Peaky Blinders, whose plot, characters, and settings I found wanting on first watching. And yet, it’s beautiful. I realized: It’s not about storytelling, but sensuality. The characters are models for beautiful costuming, the locations a proscenium arch for the sets, the whole a showcase for stunning cinematography. And then I was hooked.
Source: Page 98
“Furry Art in the Expanded Field”
So Collegeville is ambitious. But is it furry? The characters are anthropomorphic, but they didn’t have to be. Their species are irrelevant except to show family relationships. (Mary’s a chihuahua-corgi, the Cooks are rabbit-cats, Rhett and his niece are papillons.)
So what makes it furry? Some would say art is furry because it’s from within the furry fandom, as an event producer asserted when I asked what “furry music” is. Collegeville also (arguably) has an element of fursona, which researcher Reuben Mount (“Vanguard Husky”) calls “a key aspect of furry identity” (video): In the Furreal splashscreen, TUVVIN self-depicts as the acid-dropping Roy.
At its base, furry art is figure drawing: Characters imagining characters. Many furry artists stop there. (After all, figure drawing is all you need to do badge commissions.) But it’s only one component. Through other components — backgrounds, composition, Roy Lichtenstein-inspired technique — Collegeville contextualizes and deepens these characters.
So the fursona makes it furry; context makes it art. Such contextualization, I’d argue, moves it into what Auryn (Brett Hanover), termed “the Expanded Field” at the first Furry Studies conference in October 2024. As they said, a growing movement of furries are “bringing furry aesthetics and experiences to bear on the critical discourses of the contemporary avant-garde.” They brought this together with a groundbreaking gallery exhibit ROOM PARTY, which ran for six weeks around Anthrocon 2025. (TUVVIN was a participating artist.)
I believe we’re at the cusp of furry artists seeing themselves as part of a larger art world. Artists like TUVVIN are reaching out, and some on the other side are reaching in. But turning furry art into “fine” art takes more than throwing in a few Photoshop effects, just as a “fine” artist can’t make their work furry by adding ears and a tail. It takes work. As a Patreon member for the years leading up to Collegeville‘s publication, I got to see the color tests, the textural experiments, the way this Indiana town became what it was. Even if TUVVIN sometimes overreached, it’s far-reaching work in “the expanded field”. And I can’t wait to see what comes next.
– Jack Newhorse
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