By request, this is a re-write of something I posted to CYD. You know how a lot of furry artists worry their art is going to get stolen or ripped off? This fear goes waaaay back in the fandom. Most people don't know it, but it originated from a specific incident and one specific person. The paranoia has spread like a meme in the fandom ever since, though how it started has been largely forgotten.
This is the story of Kevin Duane (aka Assinio). Kevin is a guy with a donkey transformation fetish, a scraggly beard, a resonant self-confident voice, and eyes that don't blink often enough, emitting a sort of crazy-guy-on-the-street vibe. Talking to him can be... an experience, yes, an experience. He's actually fairly intelligent, except that he's not good at long-term financial planning. Short-term, no problem. This is the first thing to understand about Kevin during the 1990s: It was about money. Almost everything he did was part of a money-making scheme.
Kevin Duane moved to Toronto, Canada from somewhere in the U.S. Northeast in the early 1990s. I've heard he fled New York to escape creditors, but I have no idea if that's true. If it was, it foreshadowed things to come. In Toronto, Kevin married a woman named Lucille who supported his application for Canadian citizenship.
He shortly became friends with a guy named Terry Smith, not to be confused with Terrie Smith, the female Californian artist. Terry ran a BBS called Xanth, and in 1992 it hosted over a hundred furry images available for download. Kevin and Terry had access to a scanner, which were expensive and a fairly rare piece of equipment at the time. Personal computers were still using DOS. Image files were small and low-resolution (the JPEG format was fairly new) and most color images were cruddy, heavily pixelated 256-color GIFs.
In 1992, furry art circulated very slowly. You could buy folios and zines from Ed Zolna's mail-order service, you could buy prints at ConFurence in California once a year, or there was the Tezuka FTP site (which wasn't very good). But mostly you had to personally know furry artists and hang out with them, passing around sketchbooks or photocopies. Photocopied artwork was all over the place. The problem with Toronto was that it was an artistic void. Like many in the fandom, long-distance communication was the best you could manage. Kevin had contacts with a number of people, and he made some extra cash by selling Jerry Collins' folios.
Anyway, Kevin and Terry acquired artwork from wherever they could and scanned it. This probably would have gone completely unnoticed if they hadn't altered the images. Bad cropping and coloring, adding comments ("Look at those knockers!"), but most of all was the addition of "XANTH BBS, ###-####" in huge obnoxious lettering to each one, essentially turning them into ads.
The big-name fandom artists caught wind of this in early 1993 and freaked out. For those like Terrie Smith and her husband Glen Wooten, who were already not inclined to digitize any of Terrie's artwork (loss of $$), this was the nail in the coffin. Tygger Graf exploded in her usual hissyfit bipolar way, even though only two of her images had been used. Ken Sample's response can been seen in this May 12, 1993
alt.fan.furry post. And there were others.
Canadian Smith tried to downplay his association with Kevin. What was really bizarre was that when people tried to contact Terry... it was Kevin who answered. Using Terry's account. Which tended to nullify the claims that their association was minimal, and it quickly became apparent that Kevin was mostly behind what had happened.
The long-term effects of this? For the next couple of years, it was very common to see furry artwork marked with the phrase, "Do not redistribute". Of the original artists burned, most of them never comfortably embraced the Internet as a means to circulate their work. Ken Sample's got some of his online, but it represents less than 1% of his output. Terrie Smith only posts the crappiest of thumbnails. Lance Rund's artwork
wasn't on Xanth, and he yanked all of it he could find online; aside from the occasional contribution to
Yarf, his work remained rare until
Associated Student Bodies came along. (Yet he also provided artwork for Kevin's CD projects anyway.) But most of all, the Xanth incident created feelings of anger, betrayal and lost revenue. To this day furry artists freak out over the smallest infractions, slapping copyright notices over everything - even the ones who can't draw. When Sibe came along in 2000, he simply stoked the fire, bringing furry art piracy to a whole new level, perpetuating the fears all over again.
What happened to Kevin? Well... that's an interesting story too. First there was his indirect response to the Xanth incident: a passive-aggressive trolling of the fandom in a Dr. Seuss-style booklet called
Green Tits and Fur.
Here's a PDF file of it (check out the copyright note), as well as artist Taral Wayne's
commentary.
Like many in furry fandom, Kevin saw an opportunity to make money. He's the kind of guy who comes up with get-rich-quick ideas that never quite pan out and work at a loss. "But hey, now I've got this
other great idea and this one's
sure to work with the cash I've got left from the
last scheme..." and repeat. Most of these schemes revolved around selling CDs of furry porn under his business label, Digital Impudendum.
Animal Magnetism was the first of many discs to follow, starting in the mid-1990s.
The problem was that Kevin didn't always pay the artists who contributed to it. Still, he was a savvy shyster. He'd pay
some of the artists - typically the ones who carried more social weight in the fandom. That way if someone said "He doesn't pay artists!" someone else would pipe up, "Yes he does!" and he could string people along. You were also more likely to be paid if you lived closer to Toronto or attended the same conventions as him.
Still, rumors abounded. For the next five years, to keep his business sustainable he sought out new, young artists in the fandom who hadn't heard of him who were easy to persuade with tales of riches and exposure. Some of the more well-established artists continued to do business with him - as long as a contract was signed and the money paid up-front. Money is money.
See, Kevin had this habit of "paying" some artists with free copies of the CDs... which they'd have to sell to make back the money they should have been paid with; competing against other artists who were also trying to sell the same CDs they'd been stuck with. Or they'd be "paid" with bits of computer hardware. (I've been told that Kevin acquired some of these by writing to computer companies, claiming to be a tech reviewer, and offering to write positive magazine reviews in return for free samples. No idea if this is true.)
By the late 1990s, things were looking bad as his schemes and the rumor mill were working against him. He diversified his catalog a little, such as selling shirt buttons with annoying, swirling, blinking LEDs on them. Here's one of his earlier $60 deals: from alt.fan.furry.muck, Feb. 13 1996,
Spooge-A-Day. (Oh, Johnny Blanco, you naive balloon fetishist.)
Now I would like to say Kevin Duane wasn't always looking to make a quick buck. At one convention, playing off his own reputation, he offered himself to be hit in the face with a cream pie for the charity auction. Another incident: When artist Steve Martin crossed the Canadian border to visit Toronto on the way to attending Anthrocon 2002, he was arrested for refusing to pay import duty on the "sellable goods" (boxes of furry porn) in the back of his car, arguing that they were going to be sold in the U.S. and were merely passing
through Canada. Kevin scrounged together a rather hefty amount of cash very quickly to post Steve's bail, although it took much longer for Steve to get his merchandise back.
Other things Kevin did were for public relations. On the one hand there was generosity involved - but on the other hand it was also a hook to try to encourage sales. This usually involved lots of free food - pizza, hot dogs and such. Sometimes he got himself a table in the dealer's room. Failing that, the artist's alley. Failing that, he would sell stuff out of his hotel room - his ice cream parties, where free ice cream was served with liqueur poured over it. (I don't know if he checked IDs for drinking age.) He was also a mobile salesman, his trusty laptop with porn slideshow ever on hand, a shoulderbag full of CDs ready to go.
Things finally caught up with him at Anthrocon in 1999. One of the con rules was that adult artwork in the dealer's room had to be tastefully covered over, with stickers or whatnot. Kevin's laptop display did nothing of the sort (and he may have shown porn to Kagemushi's mother). He was permanently banned - one of the first. I wish I knew the full story of what happened - that would probably be worth its own post. Anyone know all the details?
Anyway, despite the ban, next year Kevin went anyway.
Here's how that
worked out. (Posted to deja.comm.fur.soapbox, July 11, 2000.) This is sometimes jokingly referred to as "Lawncon".
After 2000, Kevin Duane fades quickly from view, what with the cold shoulder treatment and his failed furry business ventures. In artist circles he was already low-radar (notorious yes, but people avoided talking about him), and outside of that he was almost invisible. The only person still paying attention to him was a furry and Something Awful goon-wannabe named Steve Gattuso, who for some reason went on a personal vendetta. This resulted in a briefly notorious NSFW image called
Burn the chair!Meanwhile in Canada, things were catching up with Kevin too. Particularly his disastrous relationship with his wife, who says she was paying his phone bills while he was carrying on with a fantasy writer in northern Ontario. Actually the real problem was that despite living in Canada for over 15 years, Kevin never followed through to change his landed-immigrant status by applying for citizenship. (There's a fee involved.) And the government bureaucracy was starting to notice. At one point returning from the U.S., he was refused entry. After making a series of desperate phone calls, he was told to keep trying - eventually he'd get a less-diligent border guard who'd wave him through. It worked.
You'd think this would be a wake-up call to get the paperwork rolling, but no. After additional warnings, in 2009 there was a domestic dispute in which he allegedly bit his wife and pushed her son over. (Not his own; from a previous marriage of hers.) This became an opportunity to arrest him for assault, and without her support for his citizenship, the government computers flagged his name as someone who'd been there too long. The police gave him a criminal record, and deported him. He's rumored to be living in Philadelphia at the moment. I wonder if he ghosts Anthrocon.
And that's the story of Kevin Duane, furry porn peddler.
