First off, if you're looking for the "real" Animal Liberation front: boy, are you in the wrong place, bub. This isn't an animal rights group. I don't know the real ALF's web page, but you can go visit Sea Shepherd, a wonderfully radical marine animal rights organization. Then go ram a whaling ship.
No, what we're about is funny animals, or, as they've come to be known in science fiction and comics fandom, furries. More of a concept than an actual organization, the FALF is dedicated to preserving furry fandom's roots in anthropomorphic animal stories, films and art by promoting knowledge of the fandom's history and publicizing projects we feel are true to this spirit. The likely too-lofty goal is to become the web's central repository for information, news and criticism of both the fan and pro aspects of the field. (I mean "criticism" in the sense of "literary criticism" or "social criticism," not in the sense of "crank shouting at people." More on this below.)
The original Funny Animal Liberation Front was something between a group and an in-joke from "Vootie," the cartoonist's APA run by Ken Fletcher. At the time, anthropomorphic animal characters in comics and animation seemed to be trapped in a ghetto, getting little respect or publication space.
The tides of funny animals in those fields have ebbed and flowed in the passing years. However, Vootie, its successor "Rowrbrazzle," and the independently-formed anime fan group the "Cartoon/Fantasy Organization," laid groundwork for an informal, but increasingly large, group of people who are self-described "furry fans." Why "furry" instead of "funny animal?" You could get lots of answers ranging from the philosophic to the pedantic, but the most honest one is: fans like jargon. Excuse me: fen like jargon. (See?)
As good for funny animals as "furdom" has been, though, the fandom has also found more than its share of acrimony. Few of the comics titles around toward the end of the 1980s survive to the present day; seminal funny animal comic publishers like Fantagraphics and Antarctic Press have dropped all or most of their furry titles. Almost from the start it seemed the more "old school" funny animal artists and fans, of the "Vootie" era and before, thought the furry fans concentrated too much on adult material (which they accused, often rightly, of being less "adult" than "juvenile and prurient"). The rumors that being associated with furry fandom will make it difficult to get a job in the animation industry have been around for so long that they're taken for granted now. And ConFurence, the furry convention held in California each year, is an undeniable success--but it seems that each passing year brings a new round of squabbling from people who think the con increasingly represents a subset of furry fandom with more interest in con-as-sociosexual-gathering than interest in funny animals.
And through all of this there's been very little critical examination of the fandom. There's been a lot of criticism, but little of it's been useful, and far too much of it has been just as juvenile as the alleged problems being criticized.
In the past there've been a few fanzines which have tackled this in their own fashion. Originally there was Ray Rooney's Furtherance. There's also been The Pelt, my own Mange, and Ken Fletcher and Taral Wayne's Plush. All of these had similar, if not identical, approaches--all non-fiction, with news, reviews and editorials.
And, this is where the "New FALF" comes in.
This site went up in 1996 and stayed mostly inactive. Recently, I attempted to bring some of the ideals of the FALF to a commercial project--a web index called "The Mining Company." For various reasons (most of them on my end), this didn't work out. So, the FALF Web Site has been revamped into what you see now, incorporating most of the content I'd done for the Mining Company and building on it. I apologize for having nothing but "coming soon" on the web page for the last half of 1997; in addition to this not being a real easy year for me, shortly after I put that up I re-read the Mining Company's contract and decided that perhaps discretion was the better part of the non-competition clause.
The heart of the site will be the news page. This will be updated as often as I find things that count as "news" (and, of course, as often as people send me things I consider newsworthy). It'll also be updated when other parts of the site are changed, like adding articles, essays, or reviews.
While I'll certainly be writing articles for the FALF, other people are encouraged to do so as well.
If possible, there will be a "letter column" somewhere down the road--either printing email sent to me as comments from people, or a full-fledged discussion forum.
Please, write and let me know what you think of the page. And don't hesitate to send me news clips, articles and suggestions! Last but not least, if you're associated with a comics publishing house or production company, I'd appreciate being kept abreast of what your group is up to--press releases, previews, and the like. If you send it to me, I'll put it up online. (I'll also be looking for things to put up on my own, of course, but if you send it to me, I can't accidentally miss it. Just lose it.)
Write to me at mika@solluna.org. And, for a "history" of why I'm doing this--and to answer the question of "and why do you think you're a good person to do it, anyway?"--there's a longer bio, a mishmash of what I wrote for the Mining Company and one for a fanzine called Mange (which shows up in an altered form here as well). See you in the funny papers.
Technical gobbledygook: This web site is constructed using HomeSite, a "WYSIWYN" (what you see is what you need) HTML editor that serious HTML junkies using (or stuck with) Windows 95/NT will really appreciate. While the site should be usable with any browser (if a bit funny-looking under Lynx at the current time), it'll look best--or at least, closest to its original design--if you have a browser that supports cascading style sheets and you have the font "Georgia" installed (part of Microsoft's "web fonts" set, available in both PC and Mac TrueType format).