One of the fun things I did when I was researching the DeviantArt Krystal fanarts was find out what was the oldest Krystal fanart in existence. Now, it may not be possible to know for certain, because the earliest fanart may never have been posted, or it was posted on some personal site that is now long gone. Then there's the wrinkle about how Krystal from Dinosaur Planet was known from demos playable at E3 2000, two years before Star Fox Adventures released. If I remember correctly, the now-defunct Krystal Lovers Association was actually an update to an older fan forum based around the Dinosaur Planet Krystal and predated Star Fox Adventures itself as well. Additionally, DeviantArt launched in 2000, just a couple years before Star Fox Adventures, and it had just started getting popular around 2003. FurAffinity didn't even exist until 2005. So we can only go so far with what we have.

Keeping that in mind, what's the oldest Krystal fanart on DeviantArt? Well, it's still a hard question to answer.

The oldest Krystal-related image I could find was Krystal Banner by KDragon. This was posted to DeviantArt on October 27, 2002, one month and 5 days after Star Fox Adventures was released.

This is a banner image. For those of you too young to remember what those were... back when the internet was just starting to become popular, but before Facebook and YouTube, most people hung out in forums. They're like Discord, but anyone could make a channel called a "thread", and you usually typed out whole paragraphs instead of quick chats. I'm being a bit facetious here. Forums still exist, but they aren't anywhere close to as popular as they once were. Anyway, people would post banners and text about their favorite things in their signature, which would appear after each post they made, like an email signature. And there was a thriving group of people who would make banners for different things. The Krystal Archive had its own banner image a while back. I don't have access to it right now, though, or I'd show you.

However, this banner (and most others), doesn't contain original art. This one is just screenshots with some text. What's the oldest actual fanart that was made originally about Krystal?

The oldest Krystal fanart I could find was SD Fox and Krystal by nokitty. This was posted to DeviantArt on November 7, 2002, one month and 11 days after Star Fox Adventures was released.

It's a quick sketch, and pretty small, but it's definitely Krystal (and Fox, OTP 4-eva!). Very cool little artwork.

As a bonus, the first Krystal-exclusive fanart I was able to find was Krystal from STFADP by pika-bunny. This one was released on November 8, 2002, a day later.

Do you know older Krystal artwork?