Following Fred Patten's stroke, it looked like Rowrbrazzle would go under as there wasn't exactly much of a backup system in place for such problems. At present the membership runs at about 30 artists and writers, and I'm still unsure as to how I wound up part of this group. Oh, yeah, by posting a reply to something on alt.fan.furry. At present the editorship is rotating among four of us - I was editor for the last issue (#90), Mike Susko has the current issue (#91), Mike Curtis the next one, followed by Edd Vick, and then your humble correspondant again. Seems to work so far, though having a single editor would make things easier, especially when dealing with MONEY. Most of my work with #90 involved getting stuff set up, which won't be necessary the next time around.

One good thing about being a member is that I pretty much have the obligation to actually do Art & Stuff, instead of just slouching around with an occasional sketch or whatever; I'm also bringing some old characters back to life. No bunnygrrlz so far but soon.

Oddly enough, each issue seems to involve a disaster of some sort, ranging from the hurricane season last year to the death of all of my printers to my father having a heart attack (he's better now).

I believe our genial host here (JHW) was a member for a time, though the parting was less than pleasant. Ah, well.

BTW for those of you with old copies of Rowrbrazzle from my membership days, you have some unique SnowBuni artwork which was never printed anywhere else.  Even I don't have copies of my older Rowrbrazzle contributions... the original artwork is long gone (most often I gave it away) and I sold my Rowrbrazzle and Huzzah! collections to help pay for college.

I hadn't heard of Rowrbrazzle in a while, so I thought it had been wiped out by the internet like the other APAs I used to belong to. The last time I checked (last century) there was a long waiting list to get in.

d_rains wrote on Oct 16^th, 2006 at 8:49am:


...at one point there were 75 full members and a waiting list of over 50 trying to get into the club.  Actual membership was closer to 80, due to the honorary (lifelong) members. 

A lot of cartoonists bailed when the club went sour, though... I'm surprised that it survived.  Hopefully it's in a rebuilding phase, now.

Can you give us an update on former Rowrbrazzle editor Fred Patten's condition?  And how is the club doing, too?

I ask, because there is now a group of ex-members over in DeviantART community, and we were wondering.

ctc wrote on Apr 26^th, 2007 at 10:14am:


Thanks for the linkage.  Looks like he has a fan page and a Wiki entry, too.

Fred Patten fan page

Fred Patten Wikipedia entry

HA! Back again.

Looks like I'm the OE now. I just stopped by the Wikifur entry (Rowrbrazzle) and noticed that it was updated since my last visit to include this new data point, so it's official now.

Rowrbrazzle #94 is currently coming together; like any other periodical, there's the problem of getting stuff on hand on time, but I expect it to hit the post office by mid-month at latest.

Your idea of having the OE being someone living in a city with multiple members is a good one, especially with the social aspect, but the only place that I can see that fits that description is Tucson. As it is, I have this city (Houston) pretty much to myself; whatever furry community it may possibly have is too fragmentary. In any case, collating would be a problem only if I did it in one fell swoop, instead of incrementally as the material comes in.

I'm interested to hear that the membership was up to 75 members at one time; I know that by the early 90s (from Taral Wayne) that it had been set at 50. Currently it's more or less just under 30 with several possibles, and there seems to be a membership drive going on, which after coming out of a long rather unsettled interval is kind of a nice change.

Donna Barr has the back cover.

jhwood9 wrote on Oct 17^th, 2006 at 6:38am:

A big reason the club went sour was the presence of a kook named Marc S. Tucker. He apparently had severe emotional problems and would throw tantrums-on-paper, hurling insults and invective whenever anyone disagreed with him. He tried to hide it behind a pseudo-intellectual veneer, but he just kept getting worse -- several members left Rowrbrazzle specifically because of Tucker's presence. (I'll never know why we tolerated him for so long.) We took a vote and tossed him out some years back -- and even then he tried to tell us that it was illegal to do so.