Andy Hartzell, Fox Bunny Funny (Top Shelf, 2007). $10.00, paperback; Tom Neely, The Blot (I Will Destroy You, 2007). $14.95, paperback.

by Jared Gardner

Much to the annoyance of some of my more sophisticated colleagues in the high-stakes world of comics reviewing, I am not a big fan of silent or pantomime comics. In the fraught minefield of comics orthodoxies, this makes me something of a half-way saint, hanging on to the text as a vital component of what it is that makes graphic narrative work its particular magic. But despite the suspicious glances of the blackhats and the other purists, I remain largely unconvinced. Much of what passes as the best work in the pantomime subgenre of graphic narrative strikes me as feigning profundity through simplicity while performing only banality. So it was a real surprise this month to find two recent pantomime graphic narratives that did not make me long for the missing text – two books which truly do say more without words than they ever could have with them. Indeed, the second of these, Fox Bunny Funny, might even be something of a masterpiece.

The first, The Blot, by Tom Neelyis a visual treat, reminiscent in every way of the magic of the earliest comics, especially McCay and Feininger, and the early plastic-fantastic animation of the 1920s. The story is a highly abstract meditation on the darkness within, represented by an inky blob that erupts at moments of loneliness, love, heartache – in other words, anytime and anywhere. The inky blot threatens always to consume the clean lines of the everyday and to erase the ties that bind us to each other. The book considers, graphically and beautifully, the ways this darkness hovers always around us and within us, ready to engulf us – but equally capable of bringing us together and forging new ties and new identities.

There is nothing simple or pat in Neely’s meditations, and no nice, tidy lessons to take from the volume. The conclusion itself is remarkably and appropriately ambivalent. Finally liberated from a particularly bad bout of the Blot, our nameless protagonist ventures outside and visits a tree which he had earlier defoliated with his inky plague. He touches the bare branches again, and now it returns to life (and with a burst of startling color in the predominantly black and white book). But this scene of rebirth comes at a seemingly tragic cost to our hero. How easy it would have been for Neely to end with a simple image of redemption and rebirth. It is a credit to him as an artist and a storyteller that he does not make life so easy on himself or his readers. (The Blot can be purchased online at http://www.iwilldestroyyou.com)

After celebrating The Blot to a colleague, I was given a copy of Fox Bunny Funny with the always-terrifying suggestion that “if-you-liked-X-you’ll-love-Y.” I accept the book with a silent chuckle, already planning on using it to provide the whipping-boy to my glowing review of The Blot. My usually dead-on close reading of the cover had already convinced me this book would be more of the same: empty (silent) gestures disguised as Big Ideas. But what I read left me (and forgive me for what sounds like a bad pun) literally speechless. I have now read the book several times, and my sense of admiration for what Andy Hartzell has accomplished here deepens each time.

The premise of the book is disarmingly simple: a young fox grows up secretly alienated from the world in which he lives – a world where foxes eat bunnies and bunnies live in terror of foxes. Like many young people who harbor fantasies and identifications that pull them away from the dull norms of their society, our young fox is a sad case: devoting his days to hiding his dark secrets from the quotidian gestapo of the status quo and his nights to allowing his true self to come out in the imagined privacy of his bedroom. But of course, such privacies are there to be violated, and our protagonist finds himself exposed and disciplined into a proper sense of his identity as Fox. The course of his reeducation is brutal and heartbreaking, and all the more moving for its enforced silences. And in the final chapter, when our hero is led to a very different world where foxes and bunnies relate in ways hitherto unimaginable, the vision is truly divine.

I shared this book with a young man who (like all of us) has a deep sense of himself as “not normal,” and his identification with the book’s story was visceral and intense. It is easy to see why. The wordlessness allows the allegory of the story to be adapted in infinite directions and to describe the pain and possibilities of infinite crises of identification. And the final vision of release and rebirth, in this dark age of fundamentalist Awakenings, offers the rest of us a new religion. I for one am ready to worship at the church of Funny forever more. Amen.