"Empires" Inspired Covers for the old "YARF!" Fanzine! (Patreon)

Some covers that were done for the Yarf! fanzine back in the day. I am leased to look back and know that the very first ever Yarf! fanzine featured my characters/story.  If you've been following the "Empires: the Ace of Spades/Morrigan's War" story at the Sergeant tier, you'll recognize a lot of these characters and note that a new cover was done to note new phases of the story being introduced.

Above: when the Imperial storyline under Captain Morrigan began to be featured prominently, I did this propaganda style cover featuring her.  Dan Flahive did the inking.

Above: the story progressed to the point where I had all the allied characters together and all the Imperial characters as well, and it was time to begin the clash between them.  Again, I did a sort of "Movie Poster Style" for them, at least I hoped it would come across that way, even though I didn't have all the sophisticated composition elements found in most modern movie posters.

Above: This one I really liked; not only did I feel like my inking was finally up to snuff but it was also done for San Diego Comic-Con 1995, which I attended (got to meet J. Michael Straczynski, who made "Babylon 5"). Instead of a movie poster style I made the cover look like one of the panels from the story inside, at least symbolically. There was no actual scene like this in the comic, but there were scenes somewhat related to it. I was particularly pleased with how I incorporated the cover elements of the fanzine (title, episode number, etc) into the background as story panel images. 

Compared to the very first cover I did with #1, this showed a lot of improvement, I think. This was the last cover I personally did for Yarf! 

This was the next cover for the 'zine, as the story was wrapping up and finalizing. It was the last "Empires" cover made, and it was made by a friend and co-conspirator in the story named Dave Bryant. I bounced some ideas off him and he helped with character development as well, so he got the honor of doing the last cover.  I always considered him to be a most excellent artist, but it always took him a long, long time to complete art. He did a lot of text story writing that was as good or better, so he concentrated on that. 

Not exactly an "Empires themed" cover but a cover in which the story was kind of represented by me, in a furry format, wearing one of the Centrality uniforms featured in the story. This cover was done by an artist and writer called Jimmy Chin, who represented himself as the vexed-looking rabbit next to my character , seated and holding a pen to a piece of paper. 

This cover represented a sort of cross between regular "Yarf!" contributors and a comic-con, so a lot of the people in the fanzine are portrayed here. Obviously, since it was a furry fanzine, everyone was given a furry persona to represent them.  For example, Fred Patten (RIP) is represented as the bespectacled bird in the top right, and Lance Rund (bottom left) is the fox at the computer trying to print out "Yarf!" but having a system failure. Others included are Zjonni Perchalski, Bryce Nakagawa, Monica Livingstone, Jim Groat, Avi Melman, and others. These were people that were kind of the big, regular names in the 'zine. 

They were good times and I enjoyed the camaraderie and the accomplishment of the story, even though I wasn't as deeply invested in the whole "furry" thing and as soon as the story was done, it was easy for me to move on to other things. 

I don't know if I'll ever do "furry" stuff again; it has been over 20 years since I was involved there, but I still consider a lot of these people to be my friends and respected colleagues. 

Until later!