Week 87! (Patreon)

Back to panel redraws, this is from 076 - Eating Habits, which was the last intermission-style one-off comic pages in the fifth arc before all the shit with Mask/Fox Kale started going down. Requested by nobody in particular.

Alright, so, I was going through the comics one by one to find another panel to redraw, and then I stumble on this comic page, and memories just start flooding back, because this fucking comic and this fucking panel right here are LEGEND. Or they were 6 or 7 years ago, anyway. And I wanted to talk about it for a minute.

So back in 2009, I wanted to advertise the comic on FurAffinity for one reason or another, and the ads tended to be animated GIFs of stuff, so I decided to make an ad featuring comic panels, and I chose this comic's panels because it was generic and innocent enough. However, this comic's dialogue was too much for a little tiny rectangle ad, so I believe I boiled it down to "Is that a live mouse?" "Don't be such a prude, Kale."

If those last 6 words revived any memories I am both sorry and not sorry for doing that. For those that weren't around for it, that ad and that phrase became a big stupid meme on FA and with furries in general for a little while, to the point that there were parodies of the ad/comic that are still on FA to this day. I got a lot of shit back then for it, and I really didn't handle it that well. I recall trying to play it off but getting into genuine giant arguments with people, people I'm pretty sure still wouldn't talk to me if I tried to contact them for some reason.

That whole incident was basically a giant life lesson for me on how one should react and deal with internet drama and arguments, it taught me that if your comic or your drawing skills or whatever else gets made fun of, if you get made a meme, if people start hating on you for stuff, you shouldn't respond with huge negativity or emotion, if at all. The proper response is to just roll with the punches, acknowledge your legitimate flaws, try and make sure people separate art from artist in their critiques/insults, and to just be friendly and cool with people, even if they're being dicks, cause it's a lot harder to be a dick to someone being friendly than to someone getting upset at you. I've had a lot more success dealing with people like that since that incident, who were surprised that I was actually cool after they ripped into me and stuff like that. If you're younger and you get into shit arguments and drama like that, I'd like to impart on you the same advice.

As for this comic itself, the reason I made it is because the Old Canon briefly delved into the eating habits of carnivore furries, basically saying they ate old dog food, and I hated that and it's dumb to think that all the non-bipedal animals vanished or people would be opposed to eating them, so this comic was meant to retcon the Old Canon and explain that furries, while having preferences based on species sometimes, can just eat whatever in the FH universe.