Sunday, July 24. 2005
Good Morning Hot Buns: The Canis Claxis Saga
Former CYD regular contributor "The New Meat" takes a look at the legendary Internet hissy-fits of Canis Claxis, quite possibly the most angry, annoying, and demanding furry in history.
Good Morning Hot Buns: The Canis Claxis Saga
by The New Meat
We’ve talked a lot about the old, well-established nutballs of furry fandom here, but there comes a time when the heroes of yesteryear must pass the torch on to a whole new generation of fantard superstars. And it’s in that spirit that I present a man whom I am confident will live in the annals of fan stupidity, a man whose name is destined to be forever associated with giant wolf dong: Canis Claxis. And you can say you heard it here first, that I, The New Meat, was the first to recognize this rising star as the monumental idiot of the future.
You may remember that I’ve mentioned Canis Claxis several times on the forums, as a guy who pesters furry artists with impossible demands and then refuses to pay for his commissions. But Canis Claxis is much, much more. He’s thrown major internet snits when people make fun of him, threatening e-suicide, e-lawsuits and physical harm. He’s created an elaborate fantasy life complete with loving descriptions of the consistency of his own wolf jizz. Most recently, he committed the ultimate sin of art theft in the most laughably ham fisted way ever. He’s a man so given to macho posturing that he makes Wayd Wolf look like Little Bo Peep, a man who obsesses over muscles, leather, and weight lifting, and who travels the universe in a giant metronome.
He may not be famous yet, but I predict that he’ll soon be a household name among fantards. Combining the bloody single-minded persistence of a Quozl, the complete lack of self-awareness of a Keister, and the violent temper of a young Gonterman(1), Canis Claxis is destined to go far. Farther than Bondage Bob. Farther than the “Draw me as a wolf kthanx” guy.
This article serves a dual purpose. First, to warn artists of the ridiculous demands, underhanded scamming, and general pissiness of Canis Claxis (or his alternative name Lhurtwolf). We’ll look at Clax’s modus operandi in dealing with artists in Part I. Second, to make fun of him, because, if you haven’t actually had to talk to him, wow, he’s really funny. We’ll look at Clax’s other hilarious antics in Parts II and III.
To bring you the true story of Canis Claxis, I’ve had to do some substantial legwork that, from a distance, might actually be mistaken for real journalism. As such, I’d like to extend my deepest gratitude to Aura Moser, Braford, Megan Giles, Micah Fennec, and The Mint Mink, as well as various other artists and internet persons, without whose help this article would not have been possible. So read on, and see what this modern-day Woodward and Bernstein uncovered about the real scourge of our times…
By the way, just to state my own interests here, I’ll say that, yes, I learned about Canis Claxis through Micahfennec, whom he commissioned at one point. I know I’ll be accused of using this article to air out personal grudges, but, really, look at this guy. He’s hysterical.
Canis Claxis: The Early Years
Canis Claxis, hereafter just Clax, first burst onto the scene about two years ago, tearing through the furry artistic community and pestering artists into drawing his crazy-muscular manwolf character, never seen without his enormous dog-knotted schlong and vaguely homoerotic leather strappery. To give you an idea of what the character looks like in Clax’s fevered imagination, here’s the picture he commissioned from Micahfennec(2):
Clax’s original modus operendi involved targeting artists who used paypal and then demanding that paypal refund his money once he got the completed commission. Paypal generally folds like a card table when it gets any sort of customer complaint, and this was no exception. Later, he refined the scam: Pleading poverty, he asked artists to enter into a unique payment arrangement – draw the picture for a reduced price and he’d let the artist keep the original pic, which could then be sold on Furbid to make up the difference. Assuming there was a high demand for pictures of crazy-muscular manwolf characters with enormous dog-knotted schlongs and vaguely homoerotic leather strappery.
“[Clax] explained that since he was on disability he could not pay me for a whole commission, but a "paid request" instead for a cheap $20,” said a skeptical Megan Giles, one of many artists burned by Clax. “He explained that a "paid Request" would give me the ability to sell the original to another buyer, thereby increasing my profits. OK...sounded strange but he claimed that he had done this with other artists and even found buyers for the originals. Whatever. So I began sketching his gay-ass character.”
As everyone knows, when you’re apparently severely impoverished and just surviving on disability, there’s no better use of your money than homoerotic furry art.
Later, Clax initiated his dialogue with Micahfennec by rattling off a long list of grievances against other artists that he’d commissioned in the past, but whose “shoddy” work left him so despondent that he was on the verge of suicide(3). He then proceeded to endear himself to his Micahfennec by micromanaging the artistic process, demanding multiple redraftings to correct imagined flaws like a misplaced metal stud or a leather strap that wasn’t shiny enough. No, really. Those are actual Canis Claxis complaints. For example, in the above picture by Micahfennec, Clax threw a hissy fit because she’d inked the picture using pens of an incorrect micron thickness.
Also, you’ll notice, she colored outside the lines in a few places, like here and here. No, really. This was a major sticking point for him. Micahfennec soon found that this was standard Canis Claxis operating procedure: After seeing any completed picture, Clax would inevitably fly into a rage, citing many many minute problems in the picture and accusing the artist of trying to rip him off.
For example, one of the first artists to run afoul of Canis Claxis was Braford(4):
"When he received the drawing he sent me an email telling me that he was angry because the drawing was crap. When I asked him why, he started with some senseless complaints like, for example, a rectangular piece of his character’s outfit wasn’t rectangular. He complained about its round edges when, in fact, that was one of the specific things that he told me to do.
“I tried to explain to him that the rectangle was done in the way I did it because it was drawn in the same perspective as the character, something that even a six year old child could understand, but he continued saying I ignored the changes that he wanted."
At this point in the process, Clax generally turns abusive and demands his oh so precious $20 back. He told Braford to “Die with your skull in flames!” and spread the word that Micahfennec was an “unprofessional whore” for her sins of micron choice.
Another artist, Aura Moser, recalled the string of ranting emails she received from Clax: “It was all mostly along the lines of making him want to kill himself, loss of faith in humans, threatening legal action for his $20 and swearing to ruin my reputation,” she said.
And when Megan Giles didn’t draw his character’s feet, he demanded his vitally important $20 back from paypal and sent her the following illuminating email:
The character was supposed to be full lenght. Quite frankly I'm tired of so called "artists" jerking me around. I love furry , but humans with their greed & disinterest killing it makes me sick.
If braford, aura and micah wasn't bad enough, now you want to screw me. Furry is the only thing on this entire planet that was great, but money & laziness got in the way.
Another great idea down the tubes.
I was hopeing you would be different, but you weren't.
I hope the money you make only brings you sorrow, because the desparately needed money for the future that I've spent on furry has certainly done that to me.(5) What a bunch of whores"
This was about the time when Clax’s antics started to come to light. Clax’s habit of telling each succeeding artist about the previous artists who had done him wrong proved his undoing. Giles contacted Micahfennec, Braford, Aura Moser, Calico Paisley, KaputOtter and some of the other big names on Clax’s list, and discovered a pattern of him being a big whiny baby(6). Clax, unmasked as the cur he was, gnashed his teeth pissily before deleting his paypal account, announcing that he was through with furry fandom and vanishing into the night, never to return. As far as is known, he only ended up paying for one piece of art he received, that one by Micahfennec.
Oh, but he did return briefly, to pester Micahfennec to draw a second picture for him, this time a back view, promising to behave better this time. He didn’t, but he did return again even later to demand that Micahfennec send him a duplicate of that picture. See, he said he apparently destroyed the original in a fit of pure glandular rage, although since Canis Claxis seems to live his life on that thin mental edge that most of us occupy only right before we shoot schoolchildren from a belfry, it’s hard to tell what DOESN’T constitute a fit of glandular rage for him(7).
But after THAT, Clax disappeared never to return.
OR DID HE?
The Return of Clax
Even after he’d supposedly left furry, though, Clax was hard at working establishing himself as a reliable source of entertainment on Furcadia, that online Muck sorta thing, where he was known as “Clax the Time Lord,” an “alien canis lupus sapien leathermusclefur, (tailless species), height; 2 meters, weight; 180 kilograms, owns type 90 t.a.r.d.i.s.” Fascinating.
“Everything was going fine till Clax walked in,” said The Mint Mink, who, together with his fiancé, set up the Furcadian equivalent of a private chatroom. “The first I heard of it was when she prodded me in the back and told me that some idiot was causing trouble [in the chatroom]. Steering my avatar to the entrance, I saw this odd fellow entering our place and being booted automatically by our bot. This went on for, oh, twenty minutes before I enquired as to his purpose. He had wandered around our place being, of course, an ass until he got banned, and now he kept trying to get in despite being booted every minute on the dot by the bot. Over… and over… and over. “I have a plan,” he said, “you’ll see what I can do,” he explained. Apparently his plan was to keep trying to get in until by some mystic process the bot ceased to notice him.”
“This guy…. Was an ass. Sorry, wait, I’m British and so he was an arse. I actually started talking to Clax, I hoped to reason with him, and thus the nightmare began. To cut a long tedious story short, every single conversation you will ever have with Clax goes along the lines of him ranting about how you and everyone you know are various expletives, how he will destroy you in some unspecified manner, and here’s the kicker- how he is so much more of a furry then you.”
To mock Clax’s ridiculous “manly” swaggering, the Mint Mink drew a picture of Clax wearing a pink dress. Clax flipped out, and did what furries always do: threw around some fancy legal buzzwords like “slander” and “defamation.” Then he turned back to Micahfennec, apparently because she still had his commission posted in her VCL gallery and Clax took this as a sign of sympathy, and demanded that she tell The Mint Mink that Claxis was HIS character and, as such, the pink dress pic was “unauthorized and defamatory slander.” Micah wrote back that the picture was parody and that Clax should go suck it(8).
Now sick of dealing with Clax, Micahfennec took the pic out of her gallery. Clax whined about that for a while, telling her to put it back because “I do have fans, you know” and they wanted to bask in his manwolfy glory. When that didn’t pan out, he came up with a back-up idea: Get a VCL gallery of his own and post it himself.
Now, the VCL, in an effort to lift its reputation from “Internet Shitbog” to something resembling a legitimate art site, has recently enacted requirements that applicants have some actual artistic skills before they can get their own gallery(9). Part of the process requires any new applicant to submit three art samples, meant to give the admins an idea of their talents. Clax submitted this:
Notice something familiar about this? Funnier than the obvious art theft, though, is that Clax submitted this picture THREE TIMES. He was a little unclear on the concept, it seems.
VCL assessors thwarted Clax’s brilliant plan by actually demanding three DIFFERENT pictures – such a bother! However, Clax had prepared for this contingency with a brilliant back-up plan. He quickly submitted two supposed “quickies”, including:
At this point, people began to become suspicious. Clax defended himself by saying these later two sketches were done quickly in twenty minutes, while the Micahfennec rip took way, way longer, and – when eyebrows remained raised – brought out this winning argument: "I think they're as good as some of the crap I've seen here. Do I really need to mention the furry kiddie porn!?"
Admins were unimpressed by this line of reasoning and said Clax’s new pieces didn’t display the “artistic maturity” necessary to gain a coveted VCL gallery. So Clax countered with these new pieces:
Sez Clax: "No leather!!! but you might be able to tell I like the darker "fun rods", hehehehe..Sometimes I have a feline feeling to my fursona, I occaisionally purr instead of howl. So, I wondered what would be inbetween canine and feline with a lean toward canine. The answer was obvious!! a FOX!!! a gray fox!"
Thank you, Clax, for that exciting insight into your personality. Honestly, I have no idea what he’s talking about by “fun rods” and – oh, wait. Okay.
No fools they, VCL admins promptly ignored Clax’s increasingly obvious plagiarism to concentrate on the REAL ISSUE: There’s a bit of schmutz in the background there. Use the leveling tool and repost them plz. It was only after KaputOtter herself noted that the pics had actually been drawn by Micahfennec, KaputOtter, and Fel that admins got huffy and threw Clax out on his leather-clad ass. Better luck next time, ANUS CLAXIS LOL!
And that’s where we stand today.
But who, exactly, is Clax?
According to reports, Clax is actually a 40 year old man. His obsession with muscles and weight-lifting indicates that he’s got some issues with sexuality, as does his tendency to fly off the handle when he’s depicted wearing a pink dress.
Clax has invented an elaborate fantasy world, in which his hyper muscular manwolf (described in Clax’s wacky Dr.Who fanfics as a Canis Lupus Sapiens) is a Dr.Who-style intergalactic adventurer who travels the universe in a TARDIS shaped like a giant metronome. Clax “is 79 , very muscular , and two meters tall , due to genetic tailoring .” Clax wears “clothes, which are pyramid studded black leather, he's always been old fashioned about some things.” (!!!) He plays this all out on Furcadia.
In this same epic fantasy, Clax is married to Zarra – another Canis Lupus Sapiens “who's considered (sic) young and very beautiful by their species norm.” An LJ user named Ellychan posted the following in FurN Vacation Guide regarding her Furcadian encounter with Clax: “After a long, drawn out bout of harassment from Clax (which included emails in which he expressed a desire to kill me with a jackhammer), he sat down at a bar with my alt and proceeded to not only hit on her, but round-about try and convince me to RP his mate's character.”
He also apparently offered to show Ellychan his ‘spaceship.’
Clax’s tendency to be a jackass on Furcadia eventually attracted the notice of FurN Vacation Guide, a LJ group that reviews Furcadia “dreams,” which I gather are the little private “residences” that people build for their online characters. Their review of Clax’s giant metronome house can be found here (link may be dead)(10).
Clax angrily responded to this attention with this: "Defamation of copywrited characters is as low as it gets. I didn't mind the dream reviews, but really, an obviously non-legitimate player, such as yourself should stick to that, not the users themselves. Conclusion; you really are as low as Yiffy Cougar, a "wanna be" fur with the morals of a leech. May you face the litigation you deserve."
To which the admin eloquently replied: "Awww, muffin. Well guess what, bitch tits. It's fursecution time up in this bitch. You wanna speak about ripping off so called "copyrighted" characters, I'm pretty sure your use of Dr.Who is copyrighted, what else? Oh, I know. Your whole FVG is a Wang! stunts and everything else is ripping off characters, just like Skadowee, Dannon, and a whole lot of others. Or did you think we forgot about that? So many people have screens of your little cry baby stunts. Suck it up princess, it's a parody. Ya don't like it? Hop into a fur suit, head to a furmeet and suck my salty nuts along the way. I know, I know; all you want to happen is to be treated like a little wee puppy dog and be punished. It must be hard living that life. Also, I'm not a wanna-be fur, I'm not a furre at all. I'm a human fucking being. Get that through your leather capped head (what the fuck is that thing anyways?) and get the fuck outta my face. FVG, bitch."
And Clax ended the whole affair with his usual inescapable logic: "You don't have a face, you have a fuckhole."
Considering Clax’s schizoid rants, it’s hard to tell what really goes on in his tiny, pea-sized brain. But after repeated Furcadia encounters with Clax, the Mint Mink explained Clax’s mentality thusly:
“Clax isn’t just furry, he is some kind of freakish furry puritan fundamentalist, and anyone who doesn’t dress up like something out of Revenge of the Man Wolf He Whores from Space and jerk off into a bobby sock has no right sharing his oxygen.
“Clax is a believer, a True Believer. He knows, deep in his heart of hearts, that he was born into the wrong body. Clax has been known to boast about his “fur-like” chest hair and explain to people at length that he is really a dog, on the inside. Clax hates everyone who doesn’t share this delusion and probably most of the people who do, and furthermore he thinks you should respect him for this. No matter what insanity he spews at you or humiliating fetish he proudly announces his subscription to, Clax never gets bored of it because he so firmly believes in his righteousness. Clax is the sort of person who goes into such detail describing his character, that he has worked out the makeup and consistency of his horrid wolf jizz.”
“Now, I have tried to be nice to Clax. I have tried to explain that he can’t jut impose these bizarre views on us, tried for entire nights on end in fact. I simply doubt it can be done. Oh well, as Oscar Wilde put it, the only thing worse then being talked about is not talked about at all, at least he still remembers me. Every now and then, Clax will inform me that if I was, as he puts it, a “real furry” then I would make him a commission art piece for no charge, and be thankful for the opportunity to set things straight and balance the scales of justice for my crimes. I like when he does this, it fills me with warmth and admiration for the very human ability to keep on persisting in the face of complete indifference. Clax embodies that fiery spirit that kept primeval man going through those long winters, muttering to his low-browed brethren that one day those sabre toothed bastards will pay. Clax is the firey will to succeed that sent the pilgrims off to find the new world, safe in the knowledge that while they may not have farming tools or indeed expertise a hold full of bibles would see them through. In some weird way Clax would probably be a great leader of men immortalized in deed and song through the ages- except for the fact that, unfortunately, the man is a complete and total tit.”(11)
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Footnotes:
1. To his credit, Gonterman has since moved out of this youthful phase, and now actually demonstrates something of a sense of humor about his former infamy. Props to that.
2. This is, it should be noted, the only known picture to have met the insanely anal Clax’s grudging approval, and that was only after about a dozen drafts.
3. He sent Micahfennec these pictures for reference, and, for the record, every one of them was more than competent. The only thing you could really complain about was the stupid subject matter.
4. Interestingly, Canis Claxis was later banned from a “musclefur” mailing list for posting Braford's art and claiming it was his own. More recently, Clax attempted to sign up for a Furcadia account using Braford’s email address, in an apparent attempt to continue the ruse. However, since the confirmation email was sent to, you know, Braford’s email account, Clax couldn’t actually use it. Not the brightest bulb on the tree, Clax has tried this three times as of this writing, apparently not quite understanding why he hasn’t yet received the confirmation email.)
5. Emphasis mine. Think about this line for a moment. And then say it with me: HAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
6. Warnings about Clax were posted here and here. Incidentally, Clax’s plans to attend Mephit Furmeet were dashed when his potential roommates got wind of the drama and unceremoniously dumped him.
7. “Artists complain about me?? How dare they!! I’ll show them all…BY DESTROYING THIS PIECE OF PAPER! RAR!”
8. Not in so many words.
9. A lot of more, er, amateurish artists are being grandfathered in, though.
10. Incidentally, the admin for FurN Vacation Guide claims to have reams of info on Clax. including some lovely emails and chatlogs in which Clax went insane and threatened bodily harm both to him and to various other people. Unfortunately, he didn’t respond to my email, possibly because he’s now in mortal fear for his life from the mighty and awe-inspiring Clax. But considering that he’s got that picture of Clax in a dress on his site, I’d guess that’s probably not the case.
11. Oh, yeah, as for that hot buns thing...um, p.m. me or something.