Space Moose - History

History

Thrasher said that he began drawing Space Moose while enrolled at Ross Sheppard High School in Edmonton in order to make a friend laugh. The first Space Moose comic premiered in the October 3, 1989 edition of The Gateway. In 1991 Thrasher left the University of Alberta and worked for Northwestern Utilities in Edmonton; during the four months he worked with the company, he did not produce any Space Moose comics, and the school newspaper replaced Space Moose's slot with Colby Christ, a comic about Colby Cosh, a friend of Thrasher. When Thrasher returned to the university, Colby Christ was replaced by Space Moose, which had resumed. Thrasher and Husereau drew "Colby Christ meets Space Moose," a strip that was a segue between the series.

In 1997, Space Moose ran for Students' Union President and finished a close third with 1,400 votes (only 11 votes behind the second place candidate, Hoops Harrison). This led to changes being made in Students' Union rules that would prevent any future "joke" candidate from actually winning an election. Due to the increasing popularity of the cartoon, people took away Space Moose's campaign posters as collector's items.

Around 1997, the comic received 10,000 visits per month. In 1997, due to a controversy involving the strip "Clobberin' Time," the comic was moved from University of Alberta biomedical department servers to private servers. Thrasher said that Darkcore Networks, a web host in Edmonton and a subsidiary of OA Internet, one of the largest internet service providers in Edmonton, invited Thrasher to post his comics there. Thrasher established a new website which housed over 170 Space Moose comic strips, including "Clobberin' Time." The website included an advertising banner from Microsoft. It also had a hit counter which, as of September 10, 1998, stated that the site had been accessed 17,800 times since November 1997. The website included a section called "Clobberin'," about the controversial comic strip. The section invited readers to "fume with the feminists who banned Space Moose from the university network."

A cartoon that was printed in The Gateway, "Antlers of the Damned," depicted Jesus Christ and featured a dog sodomizing Space Moose. As a result, the University of Alberta campus chaplains published a joint letter of recrimination. Another Space Moose cartoon that depicted Snow White facing sodomy at the hands of the Seven Dwarves was published in Slur, a punkzine. As a result, A&B Sound withdrew its advertising from Slur and banned the magazine from its stores.