Free Comic Friday: Fuzzy Baseball Greatest Hits

Papercutz Free Comic Book Day #19: Fuzzy Baseball Greatest Hits
Created, written, art, color and lettering by John Steven Gurney
Editor-in-Chief: Jim Salicrup
Released: May 7, 2022

Baseball season is up on us, and while I've written about football and basketball here, I haven't ventured too much into America's alleged pastime – except for that issue of NFL SuperPro. I have nothing against baseball and enjoy it in some cases, particularly movies.

Allegiance-wise, I'm a Florida Marlins fan and yes, I know they're now the Miami Marlins. Somehow after that change I lost interest in the team, which I would like to attribute to their difficult-to-look-at color scheme rather than them not being very good. I am a Washington Redfootmanders fan, after all.

Another medium in which I enjoy baseball is video games, specifically “Base Wars” on the NES and “Ken Griffey Jr.'s Slugfest” on the N64. I'm not even sure how I acquired the latter, but I played it a lot in college on the system my brother gave me after he switched to a PlayStation 2 or 3 or something.

And by played, I mean created players, drafted rosters and sometimes made it to actual games, though I never completed a full season. Tom Goodwin was usually my leadoff man, and Paul O'Neill, thanks largely to his guest spot on “Seinfeld” was often a top selection.

Building teams and creating players was my favorite aspect of sports games. I remember when the Madden and NBA Live franchises added the ability to trade players. I tried to keep my “NBA Live 96” Sega Genesis game updated to reflect actual rosters, to the point where I think it overwhelmed the yellow memory chip thingie* and the game would sometimes just stop.

I conducted a whole lot of drafts on the Griffey game, and I loved thematically customizing rosters on EA's NCAA football and basketball games (a bunch of Marvel bad guys taking the court for Villanova; leading an Avengers-based Iowa Hawkeyes team to a bowl game; etc.).

All that preamble helps explain why Papercutz's 2022 “Fuzzy Baseball” Free Comic Book Day sampler appealed to me. I mean, besides it being a free comic book.

The only work of Gurney's with which I was familiar was “Dinosaur Train,” which apparently was a book before it was a PBS series I sometimes watched with my kids. What got my attention besides the juxtaposition of rich, wholesome children's book art with baseball was the opening page roster of the Fernwood Valley Fuzzies.

Some of the names seem pretty standard if there is such a thing as conventional names for anthropomorphic baseball players. Blossom Honey-Possum is our point-of-view character as a fan who gets signed by the team. Pam the Lamb and Walter Wombat are OK, but then we get into the word play, like Hammy Sosa, Pony Perez and Jackie Rabbitson. As someone who has spent far too much time making up names and numbers for digital athletes, this was a home run for me.

The stories are excerpts from Fuzzy Baseball graphic novels, the first showing how Blossom joined the team and found their effort to be a little lacking in her first game against the rival Red Claws. The difference in the ninth inning is three solo home runs by Reggie Rhino hit off Fuzzies pitcher Sandy Kofox. But it's Blossom who figures out that Red Claw pitcher Gator Gibson's tail is tipping what pitches he's about to throw.

The next section finds the Fuzzies traveling to take on the Sashimi City Ninjas, featuring players like Pug Rodriguez and Melvin Otter. The Ninjas are polite but supremely confident, and a dynamic pitching performance by Tomiko Tamarin has the visitors intimidated. Pitcher Kit Ocelot seeks help from Blossom's book on Manga League Baseball.

The third and final installment showcases a game between the Fuzzies and the Geartown Clankies. The name and their look don't do a good job of hiding the fact that they're robots, even if an ad earlier in the issue hadn't shown a robitic player on the cover of a collection of three Fuzzy Baseball stories available for sale. But adding robots in disguise** is still another curveball, pun not initially intended but fully owned.

I found some of the graphic novels on Hoopla and read at least one. It was fun and seemed to be especially appealing to baseball fan dads (or moms) sharing the sport with their kids. If my daughters and I were more into baseball, I would suggest reading this together, but I'll have to content myself with football and Lilo & Stitch comics.

If baseball, Dad jokes and all-ages fun pique your interest, give Fuzzy Baseball a try.

* - Apologies for all the technical jargon.

** - No, not those robots in disguise.