Fox Bunny Funny
Written and Illustrated by Andy Hartzell
Top Shelf
$10.00
We all rebel in our own ways.
When I was a teenager, my rebellion wasn’t over anything monumental. My folks were pretty conservative, so we battled over hair length, ear piercing, and curfew. Standard stuff, but it felt important at the time. It felt like there was this person whom I really wanted to be, but wasn’t being allowed to become.
Fox Bunny Funny is about that feeling. In a wordless story, Andy Hartzell depicts a culture of anthropomorphic, “funny animal” foxes that’s largely like any middle-American community. A young boy rides his bike into town to pick up a couple of things for his mom, gets into some mischief with his buddies, plays video games with his little brother, has some dinner, and goes upstairs to his room. But along the way, we learn something disturbing about fox culture: they love dismembering the rabbits.
I’m not talking about a healthy hunter/prey relationship. I’m talking about taking genuine glee in killing the fuzzy little things. As the boy rides into town, he passes a car whose roof is overflowing with tied down rabbit corpses. On the way to the market, he passes a restaurant whose sign depicts a giant ice cream cone with a smiling, dead rabbit head instead of an ice cream scoop. At the store, the butcher matter-of-factly decapitates a rabbit and wraps it up for our young boy. His buddies talk about seeing a movie where a muscular fox hero kills a bunch of rabbits and gets the girl. Giving someone rabbit ears with your fingers is the ultimate insult. The video games depict foxes hunting rabbits and you lose if the rabbits get a chance to strike back. Dinner is of course rabbit parts.
As this horror unfolds, we notice that the boy’s been carrying a bag around with him the whole time. A bag that he hides outside a window when he goes into his house, and retrieves later to take upstairs when no one’s looking. Unfortunately, his mom gets a call from another parent who’s concerned about some of the mischief the boy’s been into. So Mom goes upstairs and into the boy’s room… to find him dressed like a bunny and hopping in front of a mirror. I swear, by the time you get to that scene, Hartzell has done such an excellent job of building this world and creating such a sense of unease that you wouldn’t feel dirtier if he’d actually drawn a kid masturbating.
I don’t know if all the editions are this way, but the book I read is beautifully put together as three individual comic books that are physically collected in a hard wraparound cover that ties with string. It’s a marvelous way of pacing the story because rather than just divide it into chapters in a large book where you can immediately turn the page and keep reading, the design forces you to stop after a cliffhanger, close and put away the book you’re reading, then open the next book and continue. And while you’re doing that, you’re thinking about what you’ve just read. What’s wrong with this poor kid that he empathizes with the bunnies? What’s wrong with his society that they hate the bunnies so? What’s going to happen next now that the kid’s been busted?
I won’t answer all of those questions here except to say that the boy is encouraged to put aside his secret rebellion and conform. Anyone who’s ever felt pressured to kowtow to their parents or their peers or just society in general will identify with this kid. You’ll root for him, hoping that he can find a way to resist the pressure to give in and be just like everybody else. If that urge to resist is as strong in you as it is in me, you’ll find reading Fox Bunny Funny a powerful and moving experience.
This review was originally published at Comic World News.
