The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1555: Army Surplus Komikz feat. Cutey Bunny #5, 1985

The final issue of Cutey Bunny's series participates in the time-honoured tradition of independent/underground comix taking a strip out of mainstream supehero fare. Today's issue basically boils down to anthropomorphic versions of the X-Men versus an amalgam of Justice League, Avengers, and Fantastic Four parodies. Once again, though, the story occurs almost tangentially to the fact that Kelly O'Hare is supposed to be starring in the Army Surplus comic. A between jobs visit to Fatty Tubbins' grandmother turns into a superhero slugfest. The usual cast of Kelly's stories are joined here by her comic co-stars the Space Beavers, and the usual kinds of parodic shenanigans ensue. Though entertaining, I'd have to say this isn't my favourite of the series. To this point, I'd found the stories to be novel in and of themselves, carving out a unique niche in the early indie comics landscape of the 80s. But this issue doesn't do much to distinguish itself from other superhero parodies, and is indeed not quite on par with some of the more nuanced and amusing ones (Dave Sim's Roach character was doing similar things at the time, and doing them to much greater effect).

This is not to say, certainly, that there's nothing to recommend this issue. Quagmire's art is glorious as always, and he most certainly has a level of respect for both his own creations and those that he is aping. But the flair I would associate with the previous issues seems lacking here.

Kelly's adventures continue in the Fantagraphics anthology series Critters, though I've only managed to track down a single issue featuring the buxom bunny. But they're on the list.

"The transmogrification synthesizer...it alterd our molecular structure, so we're just like the characters in the comix...neet, huh?"

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1554: Army Surplus Komikz feat. Cutey Bunny #4, 1985

Ahh, who doesn't love a good origin story? Or sort-of-origin story? Today we meet Ra (yes, that Ra) who comes to critique exactly how Kelly is using the powers he bestowed upon her. With divinely-powered heroes, this kind of thing happens all the time. How many times has Deadman had to deal with this kind of criticism from Rama Kushna? How many times has Dr. Fate had to defy a ridiculous edict from the Lords of Order? I mean, I get it. If you're a deity that's empowered a mere mortal to carry out your divine will, you expect some results - but it's not like the person has agreed to be enslaved to you or your ideas. What's the point of being empowered (in any sense of the term) if you can't use that empowerment for your own fulfillment as well?

Ra is depicted amusingly, however, in that he's a 4000 year old deity who has absolutely no sense of how the modern world works. And this applies not just to social mores but also to much simpler things, like mistaking a small coffee pot for Kelly's home. He's a deity out of time, which is actually kind of a cool story to be telling. How would an ancient Egyptian deity adjust to life in the 1980s?

"Ra is omnipo...ummmm...*cof, cof* eh...what did you say your name was again, kid...?

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1553: Army Surplus Komikz feat. Cutey Bunny #3, 1984

I think one of the things that stands out for me about this comic is that the stories are very organic. In some ways, it feels like the adventures of Cutey Bunny and her friends that we're reading are tales happening between their regular adventures. Often we'll meet up with Kelly when she's visiting the offices of the comic book she stars in and then something crazy will happen, sidetracking us from finding out what her regularly-scheduled adventure would have been. There's something of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern here, in that we're following characters in the interstices of "official" adventures. We have to presume that, in the fictional universe, Kelly's comic book adventures are quite different from the ones that we're witnessing.

Today the team goes international, combatting lake monsters in Scotland. Oh, and the space gophers continue to try to make their way to Dirty Zelda's, a bar that sounds like the best place in the galaxy.

One other note: I didn't skip an issue. #2 got reviewed a couple of years ago.

"By Jove Kelly,...must you be so vivacious..!"

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1552: Army Surplus Komikz feat. Cutey Bunny #1, 1982

Jumping back into the late underground with Joshua Quagmire and his buxom bunny. Last time I reviewed an issue of this series, I noted how it hearkened back to the older undergrounds, rather than the new vanguard that was quickly morphing into the alternative comics scene. It's also a forerunner in many ways for the diverging yet linked subgenres of anthropomorphic animal comics (Usagi Yojimbo, TMNT, etc, etc.) and furry porn (Genus, Filthy Animals). Kelly O'Hare is meant to be ogled, though she's well aware of the fact and doesn't let those who do (including the audience) get away with it. As comics collectors, fans, scholars, we're prone to dividing things up so that they're easier to talk about. The Golden Age, Silver Age, Bronze Age, Marshmallow Age, etc, or Alternative Comics, Mainstream Comics, Underground Comix. One thing I've started to notice is that there are a multitude that refuse such categorization. Army Surplus is such a one, I think.

Though I won't delve into it too much here, I think there must be a sub-genre of comics in which the actual writers of the comic itself are either disparaged or outright killed by the character in the comic over the course of the story. Quagmire seems to be working through some deep self-loathing in these comics. Or, of course, he's not, and this is an effort in humility.

Or it's just a silly comic with silly stories in it. Let's read some more tomorrow.

"Now all I need is somebody's swash to buckle...!"

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 734: Army Surplus Komikz #2, 1983

The only other Joshua Quagmire comic I've read was the first issue of Critters, which I read some time last year. The Cutey Bunny story in that issue was dark, meditating on the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the Second World War. Today's comic ventures into no such serious waters. Though published in the early 80s, Quagmire's comic retains the sensibilities of the older underground comix, rather than the brand of undergrounds typified by RAW that were appearing at the time. There's lots of bouncing breasts, sex jokes, and parodies of well-known and regarded public figures. The story is also comedically metatextual, in that Quagmire himself appears and is thrown out of a window before finishing the story. Perhaps this is why it makes little sense. My experience of underground comix has always been that, though. One of the wonderful things about this genre is that it is dedicated to pointing out to us that virtually nothing that we experience in life makes any sense - we make sense of it, but it doesn't make sense in and of itself. Maybe this is one of the skills, that of narrativizing, that reading imparts to us.

Maybe some more Cutey Bunny tomorrow. Or maybe not. You never can tell.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 359: Critters #1, June 1986

Initially, before writing this, I couldn't, for the life of me, figure out why it is that we anthropomorphize animals. I mean, I understand that we anthropomorphize just about everything - we're a very self-involved species. But usually that's simply a case of naming a car, or giving a voice to the inner workings of our cats' brains. There is, however, this subset of comics, not quite a genre, that replaces human protagonists with humanized animals. Indeed, this is one of the oldest ways of telling stories in comics, at least in the periodically-distributed pamphlets we've come to know and love. But the question of why we do it is much harder to answer.

Stan Sakai's "Usagi Yojimbo" is always lovely to read. One of the most unsettling parts of any "funny animal" book is when the book stops being funny and gets grim, and Sakai's work straddles that line expertly. This straddling hearkens back to tales that, in some ways, explain the propensity to continue writing funny animal comics - myths. It is difficult to find a popularly available Native American myth that does not feature an anthropomorphized animal of some sort. The same goes for Hindu myths, Japanese myths, in fact, most myth cycles except for the Abrahamic faiths. I think the reason for this popularity of animals in kerygmatic stories is that we can layer our own human foibles and personalities over top of these creatures, but we can also layer the more savage and wild aspects of such creatures over ourselves. In some ways, telling funny animal stories is a way of acknowledging that we, too, are animals.

Once we've come around to that perspective, things start to fall into place a little more. In "Birthright," the final story of this piece, the savagery of politics is portrayed through the fall of an animal-run empire. Cutey Bunny, Joshua Quagmire's piece in this comic, combines the uninhibited sexuality of the animal kingdom (in the form of the buxom Bunny herself) with the animalistic (what does that word even mean?) brutality of the Second World War. Sakai's story is the least savage, in that Usagi laughs and jokes with his comrades, but he also viciously slaughters a group of mercenaries. These animals are not just animals, but people, just as people are not just people, but also animals.

So perhaps that's why this genre...style...continues. Our myths tells us tales about the times when the difference between animal and human was not so vast. Our funny animal books remind us that that gap is still small, regardless of what we might like to think of ourselves as a species.