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.