Today is the 20th anniversary of the creation of the "Shaw Metrix Series".
Before there was Jonah&Jonathan, before Chase&Catch, before Kyaw&Sven, before even Happy&Lowell, there was Shaw&Felix. This was the original "furry-boy-pair" that I created when I was only 17, before I even knew furrydom was a thing. 20 years ago to the day (and close to even the hour) on 2001.03.30, I drew this, my first sketch of the character that would come to be known as "Shaw Metrix".
I actually remember the time of working on this. I came home from school feeling extremely depressed. I decided that I was going to create my very first "gay character" (something I had forbidden myself from ever doing prior). I had the idea of a lonely gay orphan boy with several deformities. In (2) you can see my design process and several failed attempts to create an appealing character model. In the bottom right corner I finally had created a character I was satisfied with.
It is amazing how much of the character was already there from this single first sketch. We have the three ears, the lone "shark ear", an upturned triangular nose, the deformed left pointer finger, the weird "branching tail", slightly widened hips, and the foot paw bands.
The idea was that "Shaw" was born slightly feminine (hence the widened hips) and "gay". I pictured the character living in an orphanage and being ridiculed. There was something appealing about this very odd very depressed character I had created.
What exactly is "Shaw"? I don't know! I would say Shaw is closest to a "cat" of some sort, given the ear and tail type, but in actual fact Shaw doesn't have a "species" in the conventional sense. I had taken the idea of anthropomorphized animal characters to their logical extreme. At a certain point "different species" becomes nothing more than swapping out different ears, tails, and fur patterns, as the characters become increasingly abstract and homogeneous. Eventually you arrive at a "cartoon character" who isn't really anything, it's human, it's animal, but it's not any specific real world animal. It has an animal like face and ears and tail, but nothing you could identify definitively. This is just an odd quirk of the Shaw Metrix Series. All the characters are like this. Some are clearly more like one creature over another, but some are very strange and uncategorizable.
This is justified somewhat by the sci-fi setting. These are anthropomorphic creatures that evolved and even fused with technology over the course of tens of thousands of years.
What is the significance of 50,280 hrs? I am not entirely sure. This was 20 years ago mind you! My best guess is it's Shaw's age in hours. This works out to about 5.7 years. Why in hours? I don't know. Sometimes I'm even cryptic to myself.
I will be slowly uploading the art I have for this series from 20 years ago and trying my best to describe it's strange setting/story/characters/themes etc. It may not all make a lot of sense. It might seem rather hodge podge and inconsistent. Bare in mind I came up with this when I was 17. It is up there with some of the strangest stuff I've ever made.
It is noteworthy for being the first fully furry "series" I ever came up with. All the characters are these weird anthropomorphic animal-like cartoon characters. This was a first. It's also noteworthy as one of my first truly "original" creations. Up to that point things that I made tended to be very heavily influenced/borrowed from pre-existing properties. This was the first time I came up with something that wasn't directly inspired by anything (although maybe very loosely on Oliver Twist which I never read and knew very little about). It was created because I was lonely and depressed and I just wanted a series with a misunderstood character I could sympathize with. I also wanted to give him a best friend (Felix), though this may have come later. (I'll introduce Felix later).
More uploads on this series will probably follow in the near future. I probably won't be making any new art of it for quite some time. I'm not ready to go back to that strange and incoherent world, but I'll be slowly uploading to introduce it. This was the series I had always thought I wanted to introduce to the furry world almost 20 years ago when I discovered it. Now it seems almost too strange. Things like BTBF and Bits&Bobs are, by comparison, a lot more normal furry fare (though a bit odd in their own right). None the less, all the more reason to bring it up. This is a furry work that was made before I had exposure to the furry fandom, and I'd like to try my best and recapture it's uniqueness.
Stay Tuned.
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3 years, 10 months ago
31 Mar 2021 03:10 CEST
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