If I wanted to be disingenuous and grossly understate something, I’d say the last few posts on this website have been only a “little” heavy with their subject matter. Navigating faith, young love, complicated relationships… coming out. A lot of the memories I want to recollect and catalog here deal with experiences that some people spend their entire lives grappling with, but not everything I went through in the furry fandom is overwhelmingly negative; some of it is amusing and, for better or worse, I look back upon it fondly. Maybe I should pull back on the yoke a bit and share some stories to introduce a little levity.
So, here is a brief ditty about the time in 2014 I met a professional comic book artist and stumbled into an awkward exchange with him despite several attempts to keep our conversation kosher.
Hopefully I am not telegraphing too much by saying this, because this is something that will pay off later, but I am very passionate about furry comics. Regular publications, physical at least, kind of stopped being a “thing” in the late 2000’s once the internet became properly widespread and adopted by the masses; there was no longer a suitable justification for all of the independent publishers to maintain the expenses of printing and shipping comic books all over the country. “Just go online.” And from there, physical publication mostly came to an end. But, some major publishers did occasionally dabble in anthro-adjacent series and things that would generally appeal to Joe Furry. Godzilla is one of those things that I feel is adjacent enough that it would maintain at least some crossover appeal. At least, it did for me.
At the time IDW was running a miniseries called Godzilla: King of the Monsters and one of the artists for the series was the unfortunately surnamed Matt Herms. I wasn’t super into the series but I did skim it and I heard through the grapevine that Matt would be making an appearance at a comic book shop local to me to do a meet and greet. For the life of me I cannot remember the name of this store; I recall that it was in the same shopping center as Nine Lives Books in San Antonio, Texas, however just looking them up for reference isn’t easy as Nine Lives did not survive the COVID pandemic and closed down, and there’s limited information available as to what else is in the area where it used to be. All of that seems to have shut down too, but it was whatever comic shop was catty-corner to that bookstore.
By “heard through the grapevine” I really mean “I showed up to shop at Nine Lives Books and I saw across the parking lot there was a big sign for a special thing going on at this other store that involved a Godzilla comic book artist”. Since I had no advance notice, and did not want to drive all the way across the city to get back to my apartment and grab a comic only to drive all the way back, I figured I’d at least pop in and see what was going on.
Like a lot of comic artists Matt would do a quick sketch for you for a small fee, so rather than buy a non-#1 issue of the Godzilla comic and have him sign that I opted for the sketch because it was basically the same price. The shop wasn’t super busy so we were able to chat a bit; Matt said he could draw “any Godzilla” so I decided to throw him a curveball and specifically ask him to do the much maligned “Zilla” from the 1997 American film (the one with Ferris Bueller in it), both to be a dick and also because while the movie sucks I do happen to like the monster design. Matt had a good laugh and remarked that genuinely no one has ever asked him for that one, and then he proceeded to knock out a hell of a sketch of her in profile. Since there weren’t a lot of people in the store (and I guess since I was apparently the first to dare ask for “the bad Godzilla”) he added some light shading and other extra detail to it, all while he and I exchanged pleasantries.
One of the things we talked about was the computer game Colossal Kaiju Combat which at the time had run its course on Kickstarter and, as Kickstarters tend to do, fall apart at the seams leaving everyone feeling pissed off and ripped off. Matt did some of the conceptual art for the game so he was familiar with the project and since he had insider knowledge I asked him how he felt about Duncan Roo and Macroceli being added to the game because their owners both donated an insane amount of money to the Kickstarter to have their characters added as playable monsters. (For the uninitiated, Duncan Roo and Macroceli are two people from the furry fandom’s early years who became very prominent and popular in macrophilia circles. They’re cut from the “suspiciously wealthy furries” cloth, like that guy who commissions all of the Fox & Falco smut… which come to think of it is also macro art. Weird.) I didn’t mean it as a loaded question or anything, but I was among the people in the peanut gallery who were a little miffed that multiple people had dropped fat stacks to have what amounted to fetish characters put into a game that wasn’t aimed at their demographic.
Matt laughed about it and kind of gave a non-answer, not because he was beholden to an NDA or anything but more like he just didn’t care all that much. I got the impression it was “a job” to him, one of many he’d been hired to do over the years, and nothing more. Not to say there was a lack of passion in his work, just that he didn’t seem to have any investment in furry nonsense. By now he was wrapping up the sketch that had turned into a full-on drawing and I remarked that it looked great and that “my friends on this website I run for fans of dinosaurs, dragons, and kaiju will love seeing it”. If you’re familiar with the content of this blog and the persona I used to embody in the fandom you will know exactly what website I am talking about. Additionally, you’ll also know why I refrained from naming it and instead kept my comment vague.
“Oh, what website is that?” Matt asked, inquisitively.
Out of a desire to keep things as pseudo-professional as they had been up to this point I decided to give him another out by remarking that not all the content on the website was “age-appropriate” and I gestured to some kids standing within earshot of us and said I didn’t want to get specific since we were in mixed company.
Matt ambivalently shrugged it off and noted that the kids were distracted by something else and probably were not paying attention to us. Again, he asked what the website was.
I sighed to myself, realizing that I guess I’d shot myself in the foot by even mentioning that I “had” a website in the first place. Matt was clearly very interested to know, so I figured I’d let him have it.
“Herpy,” I finally said, bluntly.
Matt paused, the ink pen in his hand coming to a halt on the paper in front of him. He very slowly looked up from his seat at me, head cocked ever so slightly to the side like a dog who’d just heard a distant whistle.
“That’s your website?” He asked with very deliberate emphasis on the second word.
The way he said that I knew in an instant that he didn’t just recognize the name but was familiar with the site itself. I just sort of nervously nodded my head in response, letting Matt know that his day had been graced by the presence of none other than Dracokon himself, a reminder that we are literally everywhere and you never know when you’ll cross paths with a Niche Furry Superstar… or whatever. There’s an entire United States where I could’ve been shopping and he could’ve been signing autographs, and for a split second the planets aligned for us to meet in a nondescript comic book shop just off Loop 410 in the second largest city in Texas. In that moment, Matt realized he was 20 seconds away from finishing a sketch destined to be in the hands of someone who managed an online community full of people who were very interested in the unmentionable bits of the character on the page in front of him.
Matt returned his attention to the paper and finished the drawing, signed it and everything. He didn’t seem offended or disturbed by the information he now had, and even as we parted ways he was still just as professional and friendly as he was before I flashed my powerlevel at his request. The encounter has been an amusing one to regale others with, though as the years have marched on the one thing that has always stuck out to me that I never received closure on was how Matt even knew about Herpy in the first place. Seemed a very specific thing to be familiar with, all things considered. It’s not the kind of place you just “know about” the same way people used to joke about Bad Dragon, the difference of course being Bad Dragon was something of a minor pop culture phenomenon.
…he wasn’t a user there, was he?
Genuinely. Perhaps as vague as I was trying to be with the description I gave of the website he still knew what it was, especially when I mentioned it wasn’t PG, and that’s why he was as persistent as he was in knowing what community I was talking about. I can’t prove that (something I want to very strongly stress), but if that was the case he has a much better poker face than I. For one reason or another when Herpy was name-dropped it did not take beyond a fraction of a second for the information to click. That’s the one thing I’ve never been able to shake. I think about it every time the sketch catches my gaze from its placement on the wall in my living room. Maybe we really are literally everywhere.
Until next time.
