As my first venture into the world of graphic novels this book for me did an excellent job of showing the capability comics have to connect to readers on previously unreached levels through the portrayal of human suffering, vulnerability and internal conflict. The anthropomorphic characters were able to drive home emotions and pains that often are rare even in the human characters of other forms of writing. I believe that this feat was reached through two related aspects of the book: the drawn expressions of Hartzell’s main character, the fox, and the overall lack of textual narrative in the typical sense in the novel.

I must admit, initially Hartzell’s choice to not include words in this novel incited in me only skepticism. How can intense emotion and angst be conveyed without words and descriptions to beck them up? But through the reading of this novel I was proven wrong. Also I can finally say I now understand the true meaning of the phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words.” The expressions of Hartzell’s characters are perfectly emotional displaying fear, submission, reluctance, shock, or horror to the optimal degree while also being strikingly ambiguous (the mixture of ecstasy with subtle hints of hesitation and fear on the last page is astounding).

I also enjoyed the commentary on personal denial and eventual acceptance (concepts which are for the most part non-existent in comics as I knew them). This theme can fit well in many different situations and scenarios, but am I alone in thinking that it can especially hit right at home for members of the LGBT community. Sentiments of being an outcast, different, and (perhaps most notably) not being born in the right body seem especially related to transsexuals. I don’t know for sure if that was Hartzell’s direct intent, but I feel it works nicely regarless.

Reflections on Fox Bunny Funny

Because so many other people have now posted their thoughts about the book, I thought that I’d just respond to some opinions that struck me as particularly interesting. First, I want to address the question of whether the graphic novel has a textual narrative separate from the visual sequence that comprises the story. While reading the book, I didn’t necessarily feel that there was a separate verbal narrative that continued throughout the story. To me, it felt more like the visual narrative created a deeper, underlying significance that was separate from the images and that was continuous throughout the whole book. It seemed like the visual narrative didn’t create a verbal tract, but rather inspired a social commentary that exists apart from the images but that is created in the reader’s mind because of the visual narrative. Hartzell employed an interesting technique of representing certain recognizable aspects of our society in his fictional world in order to awaken the reader to his social narrative. I would say that this underlying social commentary resonates more strongly throughout the novel than any verbal narrative that the images inspire in the reader.

In response to Annie’s post, I also felt that scene in which the fox gives in and gives up his identification with the bunnies to act like the other carnivorous foxes was one of the most human scenes in the novel. That change in his character not only seemed typical of other human stories, but it also revealed a complexity in his personality that we would only associate with humans. It did reveal his personal weakness, but in a way, it also allowed the reader to understand and possibly identify with him more. Disappointingly, though, it showed that his struggle was not yet over, and while I was certainly expecting a third part of the novel, I was sad to see that he went all the way over to the “dark side”, so to speak, before turning to the light.

As for the fox’s final transformation, I was utterly shocked that in the joint fox-bunny world they would surgically transform an animal without his consent. Although the reader does realize that the fox had wanted to be a bunny when he was much younger, it’s quite clear that he has adjusted to his fox identity as an adult, and while he seems to be living in denial, I still felt that he should have some say in whether he becomes a bunny. His final acceptance of his new self struck me as unrealistic, though it did create a very climactic ending to the book, and I can understand why Hartzell would want to conclude with this dramatic scene rather than showing several pages’ worth of internal struggle. However, I think what frustrated me about the ending was that the fox did not come to his epiphany about his identity on his own, but was rather forced into it by others who did not even know him personally. I felt that it would have been more satisfying if the fox had taken control of his own life, perhaps after seeing the happy fox-bunny world and realizing that it was now socially acceptable for him to identify with the bunnies.

In its third chapter, Fox Bunny Funny skillfully employs facial expressions to develop the main character’s feelings toward his situation. Although the fox gained the respect of his peers in the fifth panel on page 60 and earned recognition for his hunting, the bags under his eyes in the second panel of page 65 convey the fact that the fox is miserable. His life has turned for the worst, and he is respected for the very thing that he loathes. From pages 63 to 101, the fox also doesn’t smile for a single second. Before he is harassed by the Weird Sinister Rabbit (WSR), the fox’s expressions are much more resigned and completely unemotional, which exemplify the droll of the downfall that his life has taken when he sacrificed his actual values. Suddenly, the fox assumes a face of determination, peppered with annoyance at failing to eliminate the WSR, that seems to contradict the possibility that the fox hates the current state of his life. However, perhaps the fox’s emotional change is something to which every human can relate. He has become so involved with his lie and hidden hypocrisy that he cannot escape that urge to fully live them. Finally, at the very last moment of the story when he fully realizes the change in his identity, the fox smiles and is so emotional that he simultaneously cries.

Fox Bunny Funny goes beyond using facial expressions to develop a reader’s emotional understanding of its story. I love Andy Hartzell’s use of isolated panels, which convey the importance behind the images inside them. The first of which is especially important. It represents the moment when the fox’s life experiences its inciting incident, after which it will never be the same. Another great use of an isolated panel occurs on page 79, where the fox is alone in this empty expanse of white. Suddenly, you turn the page to face huge whoppers of imagery. For a couple of pages, you don’t see panels.. You stare at entire pages. You can understand how the fox is feeling. He must be freaking the eff out.

Andy hartzell also uses skewed panels to assist the reader’s understanding of the fox’s emotions. Pages 84-85’s panels give the appearance of the fox tumbling into the ultimate climax of his freak-out. To represent dream sequences or sequences that convey the fox’s imagination, Hartzell employs panels with squiggly borders.

To heighten the reader’s emotions, Hartzell blackens the pages outside the panels. During the parts of the story when the fox becomes deepened and soon locked in a certain situation (whether it’s a tragic one where the fox reluctantly hunts for rabbits on pages 36-51 or a terrifying one where the fox undergoes sadistic surgery on pages 90-99), the pages are blackened to emphasize how the fox is feeling and, as a result, how the reader should feel. Hartzell combines isolated panels, squiggly borders, and blackened pages when the audience of the fox’s surgery engages in a weird orgy of biting and fusing and begins to spiral around the surgeon’s head. That combination assisted with my understanding that the orgy was imagined but also frightening for the fox, who is a victim of the bunny’s scalpel.

Last note... I do not understand the circular structure that is brought by the black dot on the very last page of the story. (I assume that the story is circular because the black dot also appears in the very beginning of the story, on the bag that holds the fox’s bunny costume.) I guess that the dot represents the fox’s fulfilled desire.

Fantasy in Fox Bunny Funny

When I think of a story containing bunnies and foxes, I think of a children’s bedtime story. When I think of a children’s bedtime story, I do not think of realistic and terrifying facial expressions. The third panel of the story contains the illustration of a human-like face of fear and doubt. The expressiveness of the animals is human-like because it conveys sadness, fear, panic, shamefulness and other emotions that people might rather hide. A graphic novel about bunnies and foxes is also “a real human topic” exactly because it contains unsavory motifs such as exclusion.

Pages 58 through 60 contained the most human patterns of behavior, to me, as the fox quickly transformed from realizing his true identity of harmony with the bunnies to being shamed into becoming the most vicious type of fox. I suppose it is interesting that this scene seemed the most human to me when it was also, in my opinion, the most disgusting type of human behavior- hypocrisy and hate incited by fear. The evolution of the fox’s behavior during these particular panels exemplified the maturity of the story. In a “normal” comic book, average people often turn into superhuman beings with an emotional trigger like anger or hypersensitivity to danger. Instead of becoming a superhuman being (or superfox being), the fox transformed from a loving fox sympathetic to the plight of the bunnies to a violent, bunny-eating machine. The transformation exposed more weakness than strength in the character of the fox, who was shamed by his peers into behavior he actually found detestable. Fox Bunny Funny is fantasy because it’s about anthropomorphic creatures, but the evolution of human emotions through facial expressions and emotional transformation are very real. By the end of the graphic novel, when my brain had settled into treating the foxes and bunnies like humans, the fantastical last scene was startling. The black instead of white background of the pages seemed to indicate a dream sequence or simply a dark experience. Bunny DNA and fox DNA mixed together during the pages with the black background, yet the fox woke up as a bunny in pages with a white background. Had the fox’s dreams and reality fused so that so that he is living a dream world by the end of the novel? Did he become so singularly obsessed with his fox identity that it drove him to madness and thus, starting from when he chased the bunny on page 67, was he merely living in a world of fantasy that could guide him to his true identity as a bunny? Some of the most fantastical elements of Fox Bunny Funny are separate from the fact that it contains fox and bunny characters. Instead, the story communicates the very real human topic of identity issues and the fantasy lies in distinguishing real events from events imagined in the head of the main character.

To me, there's an obvious thematic structure going on in Fox Bunny Funny. The texts opposes sets of binaries in order to construct an overall message about identity/identity politics. I hesitate to write about any text's "overall message," but I will here precisely because the opposing binaries at work in this text present a very clear message about our protagonist's struggle with his identity. I won't go so far as to say that these sets of binaries (e.g. fox/bunny, black/white, superterranean/subterranean, etc.) work always in opposition, to the eschewal of any form of symbiosis or overlap. After all, the end of the text presents an image of foxes and bunnies combined in a double helix--literally fusing them together in what is a symbol of basic identity, the genetic code.

I am very interested, however, in the way that the "textual narrative" or perhaps "verbal narrative" is refracted in the "visual narrative" that is constructed by the actual illustrations. I know that the text doesn't have any words, so strictly speaking, it would seem that the text doesn't have a "textual narrative" at all. I think that therein lies my questions about the work. Does the genre lend itself to the creation of two narrative tracts--the visual and the textual--in ways that allow messages from the textual to converse with messages in the visual? Would a work be more dynamic with both? Can artist-writers construct dual narratives of this type to present contrasting, and thus more conflict-laden and interesting messages?

It's hard to say with this text because there aren't any words with which to conceive of a textual or verbal narrative. I would like to note that this text, like the history of the "dirty" or "degenerate" comic in the United States, forces its character into the underground to accomplish the fulfillment of its character's degenerate desires.

There are some other really interesting issues that I hope others will comment on. Like, whether the fox's transformation is one to which he consents, or whether the last visual image, which (aside from the huge black dot on the opposing page) shows the fox as bunny, belies something bad about the concept of transformation itself, since the fox-now-bunny's face registers an expression which I think looks almost grotesque.

I know this was sort of rambly, but I hope it generates some discourse. Thoughts?

Alternaive Press Expo San Francisco

Hi Everyone, great meeting you today. Here's the info for the APE Comicon this weekend!