What is North American Fur?

North American Fur, more commonly known as NAF, is an APA-zine. The "APA" part stands for Amateur Press Association; these are groups of people who contribute to their organization's publication and make comments on each other's contributions. "Zine" is short for "fanzine", a non-professional publication (as opposed to comics printed by a company that pays the creators). There used to be a lot of fanzines around the furry world — prior to the rise of the Web, that was the only way to let people see your art, unless you could get into a professionally-published comic. There used to be several APA-zines around as well, such as Gallery and Huzzah, but they're pretty much gone.

The difference between an APA-zine and a regular APA is that an APA-zine sells copies to the public to defray costs, meaning that members don't have to pay for their copies.

What does NAF the publication look like?

As printing technology has advanced, NAF has gone through a number of incarnations, but current issues are printed as 8.5" by 11" perfect-bound books with wraparound color covers. Here are some pics of recent issues.

The issues shown here are member copies, which have private pages for comments and such that do not appear in the sale copies. They used to be on blue paper and hence are sometimes still called "blue pages". Due to the way we're printing now, we can't insert paper of different colors, so the private pages now have black stripes on the outside edges, which you can see the edges of in the picture above.

Sounds like NAF has a history?

As of January 2010, 23 issues spanning nearly 13 years. It was started in 1997 by Paul Groulx (Growl), who published the first three issues. Jarlidium Press picked it up with issue four when Growl was unable to continue it himself. The picture below was taken in early 2008, so it doesn't have the issues published since then, but you can see those on the main NAF page.

I have to be a member to be in NAF?

Yes, that's the way APAs work. It's easy to apply: just email us at info@jarlidium.com with some samples of your work. These days, a pointer to your FA gallery/DA gallery/personal webpage is fine — anything that provides a typical sampling of your work so we can evaluate it fairly.

You guys said I'm in, what now?

Please check out the FAQ for new members and the official policies.

NAF #27

336 pages of art and stories by 33 creators, plus 12-page color supplement! Cover by Portzebie. $18

Scavengers #3

The crew of the Recovery has been ordered to chase down a ghost — one that's remarkably solid! 24 pages in FULL COLOR, $5
           

Squeak! #2

Comics by Zephery Hughes, Sailor Anna, and Flinters. 24 pages, $4
           

Xfrmations Unlimited #3

Comics, pinups, and text stories by seven creators. 32 pages, $4
           

Death on the Omnibus

All 1200+ strips of Flinthoof's ROOMIES webcomic, plus a special story just for this collection. 340 pages, $18