Eric Schwartz/Sabrina Online

About
Eric W. Schwartz is an American furry cartoonist best known for his webcomic series Sabrina Online and its pornographic spin-off Fur After Dark. He is also known for his Transformers collecting and his advocacy for the Amiga operating system. Schwartz has been active in the furry fandom since the early 1990's, and the longevity of his characters has resulted in various memes, fan-art and tributes.

Online History

Schwartz first rose to popularity in the furry fandom as a college student in the late 1980's and early 1990's by submitting his work to various Amiga computer magazines. Taking inspiration from Looney Tunes and contemporary series such as Tiny Toons Adventures, Animaniacs, The Ren and Stimpy Show and the various Disney Afternoon series, Schwartz gained a reputation for his homemade animated CGI short films. His original character Amy Squirrel was featured on the cover of the July 1992 issue of CU Amiga Magazine and is considered by some to be the de-facto "mascot" character of the Amiga computer system.

In 1993 Schwartz provided the animation for the opening cut-scene of the Amiga video game Superfrog. Also in 1993 Schwartz launched the comic-strip Sabrina at See-CAD in a student newspaper Above Ground at the Columbus College of Art & Design staring his skunk character Sabrina alongside Amy Squirrel. The series ran a brief twenty two strips before being cancelled in 1994 after Schwartz graduated college.

In September 1996; Schwartz launched a reboot of Sabrina at See-CAD, a web-comic titled Sabrina Online which resumed the story of Sabrina and her roommate Amy. The series rose to fame quickly in the furry fandom. Several years into the series Schwartz introduced the character Zig Zag a skunk-tiger hybrid adult film star created originally by Malcolm Earle (Max Blackrabbit) who hired Sabrina to do graphic design and tech support for her adult film studio. Shortly afterwards Schwartz and Earle launched the website Fur After Dark an NSFW spin-off series sharing several characters from Sabrina Online.

Sabrina Online ran continuously from 1996 to 2016, concluding its 20 year run with the wedding of Sabrina and her longtime boyfriend Richard Conrad. In 2017 the series re-launched in a color format following Sabrina raising her daughter Danielle, with a more infrequent update schedule and the series continues in that format to the present day. Several strips of Sabrina Online were printed with Amiga magazines in the late 1990s. British based furry comics publisher United Publications has printed various collected editions of Sabrina Online along with a book for Fur After Dark.

In addition Schwartz has provided art for the anthology comic American Journal of Anthropomorphics, the Hasbro Transformers Collectors' Club magazine, and the tabletop role playing game Madcap. In 2002 the AROS Research Operating System, an open source Amiga project; adopted the Schwartz designed "AROS Kitty" as their mascot.

Related Memes

Sabrina Online itself references several internet memes and news relevant from the time period each strip is set in, such as leetspeak, commentary on then recently released Transformers films, Trollface or a cameo from Grumpy Cat. One of the 1997 strips was one of the earliest references of the furry slang word yiff online. A 2008 story parodies the US Presidential election. Several strips lampoon the gamers on a couch format popular in other web-comics of the era such as Penny Arcade or Ctrl+Alt+Del. The 2020 and 2021 strips dealt with the impact from the COVID-19 Pandemic, while a 2023 strip features a Shrek-Monopoly game with the phrase Shrek is Life on it.

Sabrina Online has inspired several fan creations over its lifetime such as Chris Yost's "Sabrina-verse" fan fiction and Malcolm Earle's "Sabrina at Algonquin" fan-comic. Video game reviewer and former YouTube Poop creator Stuart K. Reilly is known for his references to the series with Sabrina being a frequent cameo character in his work.

A 2002 episode of The Drew Carey Show involves Drew dating a squirrel fursuiter named Amy has been speculated to be a reference to Amy Squirrel. Another possible mainstream reference to Schwartz's work may have been in a 2022 issue of the Dick Tracy comic, where a character named Eric Graymuzzle ("Graymuzzle" a term used within the furry fandom to refer to older members) is seen working at a furry convention.