Tallyho

--

Rating Summary

--

Background
RHJ has been cranking out webcomics since early 2000. On his website you can find about thirteen different webcomics, depending on how you count them. To boot, RHJ is well known for injecting his personal politics into his webcomics with various degrees of success and subtlety.

But this particular webcomic is drastically different from the others I've seen. It's about the adventures of a non-anthropomorphic red fox in Britain who is the target of local fox hunters, though they are so inept the fox has little reason to fear them. In fact the local fox hunters consist of an elderly Basset hound and a psychopathic little boy.

For the record, though traditional hunting of foxes with horses and hounds was outlawed in Britain in 2004, the practice still continues and successful prosecutions are rare.

Downfall
The first half is better than the second half, but the webcomic never actually jumps the shark.

Story and Plot
The scenario is about a nameless red fox being bothered by a local hound, but this hound fails to impress the fox. For that matter, neither does the boy. But as it turns out, the fox learns more about the boy from the dog and finds that the boy is far more impressivethan expected. As for the fox himself, he does not practice the standard wild predator ways. Instead, this is how the fox feeds himself. But how can a wild fox obtain any money? This way.

So, besides dealing with the dog and the boy, what else does the fox do with his time? For one, making trouble at a local golf course. Another is raiding a neighborhood barbeque cookout picnic. His home is a garbage dump (more desirable than the standard hole in the ground). Unfortunately, said home proves only temporary. In trying to get his home reestablished, the fox goes to a local zoo in hopes of getting help from a fellow animal. The fox gets more help than he bargained for, and even then, the fox's plot gets crazy and then even crazier. Of course the fox's plans are met with all sorts of complications, and ultimately the fox's tire-stealing plot has failed. Fortunately, despite this the fox managed to find his tires after all. (The author got one detail wrong. In Britain the emergency call number is "999".}

Not much in the way of story afterward. The walrus finds a mate and has a family, there is more fighting with the boy, and the fox adds furnishings to his den, including a television set. Um, did everybody all of a sudden teleport to the United States Of America?

Unfortunately this rather spoils things. Okay, the webcomic is basically a screwball farce, we saw that in the last story arc. But suddenly everybody being in a new location with no explanation is too much. The scenario already has an established location which was part of the story; you just cannot move everybody elsewhere all of a sudden.

As for the rest of the webcomic? Basically, some more gags and a couple of story arcs, but nowhere near the level of fun as the one with the zoo animals.

Art review
The original artwork consists of rather crude and scribbly monochrome line drawings, though they are expressive and animated:



The artwork does get a bit more refined during the webcomic's run:



The original strips are dated 2002, so presumably when RH Junior created his website, he posted these old strips and then created a new set to follow them:



The newer strips not only look different, but do not continue the numerical sequence of the older ones.

Writing review
This is not a political webcomic as such, though later in the webcomic's run politics does seep in. Well, I guess it wouldn't be an RH Junior webcomic without it. (D. C. Simpson was guilty of the same crime in Ozy and Millie after all.)

But unlike Camp Calomine which is overtly propagandistic, Tallyho has some political jokes but is true to its roots as a comedy about a wild fox and his interactions with everybody around him.

Author biography
An oldschool furry, RHJ is one of the rare right wing libertarian furries - and he is not afraid of reminding you of that, since he does so in nearly every one of his comics. He was part of the original Burned Furs crew, an organization of furries that wanted to purge the furry fandom of degeneracy - the similarities between the Burned Furs MO and how RHJ writes his antagonists, or when he 'parodies' material, are easy to see. He apparently left them again due to a falling out with the leader of the Burned Furs.

Conclusion
Would you believe I showed this webcomic to the creator of a certain fox vixen rock star of some fame in the furry world, and he liked it? Though arguably he would quite disagree with RH Junior's political opinions. The point being that Tallyho is a webcomic the reader can enjoy on its own accord, without the need to be a right-wing libertarian.

RH Junior has shown the he is capable of coming up with genuinely funny webcomics that do not depend on politics or social commentary, which is not the case of other webcomics of his that we have already reviewed on the BWW. If he could only do this sort of thing all the time...

Other webcomics by this person reviewed on this site

 * Quentyn Quinn, Space Ranger and The Probability Bomb
 * Camp Calomine

Links

 * R. H. Junior's DeviantArt page
 * And his FurAffinity page
 * And his "Archive Of Our Own" page of his prose stories.
 * And his Twitter page
 * And his LiveJournal page (Yes, he still uses it nowadays!)
 * And this webcomic managed to get a space on TV Tropes.