Review: Fox Bunny Funny

Andy Hartzell, Top Shelf

Fox Bunny Funny is the sort of book that demands to be read as allegory, although its unclear to me what the allegory might be for.

Its unnamed protagonist is a young anthropomorphic fox who wishes he were an anthropomorphic bunny. Since foxes, naturally, kill and eat bunnies this wish is problematic, and the young protagonist is bullied into being not only a bunny-killer but eventually a champion bunny killer. But the specter of his suppressed and forbidden desires still haunts him…

This set up could be criticized for being incoherent in and of itself: the identity-questioning implicit in a fox wearing a bunny suit and hopping about (his mother catches him in his room mid hop at one point), as well as the machismo implicit in the foxes’ murderous excursions into Bunnyburg, seems to indicate that we’re reading a metaphor for homosexuality or gender identity (cross fox and bunny and you’re “funny”—get it?); the pogroms on bunnies isolated in their own ghetto calls to mind a different class of oppression. I suppose this could be glossed over or explained away, but a more substantial problem obtains for any attempt at an allegorical reading: The young fox bears no responsibility, in the end, for his years of lepicide; he is offered redemption devoid of responsibility. This gives the comics’ ending, which would ordinarily have been satisfying, a hollow ring. The fox’s personal struggle becomes the only thing that matters, a topos that might have flown in the ’seventies but seems unforgivably selfish today.

But leaving the allegory aside, the comic has much to recommend it. It is completely wordless (which is why no one has a name) and wordless comics are hard to pull off, especially if it involves a strange world with its own rules, and rather arcane motivations. The amount of information Hartzell conveys wordlessly is impressive, and the story takes some pretty complicated twists without ever becoming confusing.

The art is pleasant and simple, and while it never takes on the iconic austerity of Norwegian cartoonist Jason’s work (clearly an influence here, and inevitably a comparison point), it does a better job of distinguishing characters, no small feat when you consider how similar all foxes tend to look. There are some nice formalistic touches as well. On the deadly joyride to Bunnyburg, the foxes’ bus enters a tunnel, and the panel goes black. On the following page, when they exit the tunnel, the page’s gutters turn black, and remains black throughout the pogrom, until, in the depths of a nightmare, the panels themselves begin to turn black.

Best of all are the small details scattered throughout the book. Foxes are ludicrously obsessed with being foxes, such that their cars and houses all have fox ears; and they’re also obsessed with killing bunnies, reflected in their movies and video games. Bunnies, in contrast, are obsessed with carrots. The multitude of tossed off fox/dead bunny/carrot gags are a delight, reaching a kind of frenzy in a double-page spread in the book’s closing chapter. Giving a friend the “bunny ears,” as school kids will, takes on a deeper meaning in this world, and it’s that kind of attention to detail that is the best part of Fox Bunny Funny.

Overall, Fox Bunny Funny is a well drawn and well done book, and certainly worth trying out. But it’s frustrating that it so thoroughly thwarts any attempts to read more into it.