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RABBITHEAD
by Rebecca Dart
($4.95,
Alternative Comics)
Review by Mark Campos
This comic delivers on every promise anybody's ever made for comics as a potentially great storytelling medium.
Using a deceptively simple conceptual framework, it tells a story that no other medium could convey as effectively or as elegantly. It can't be reduced to mere text, couldn't be remade as a film.
RabbitHead is straight-up comics (or "sequential narrative" if you want to go all McCloud on it), red in tooth and claw.
The narrative kicks off with a woman (whose head is a long-eared rabbit's) mourning at a graveside. She mounts her bizarre horse and rides off, stopping to spit; the spittle splits and becomes two beings, a leaping skeletal demon and a crawling cellular lump .. The central tier of narrative follows the rabbit adventurer, and as new characters are discovered, a new narrative tier splits mitoically from the main story, until there are seven separate stories happening simultaneously. Then the subplots, and characters, all fold back into the main plot by the tragic, mythic ending. You have to read the book seven times through to get all the details, and you will probably wind up rereading it several times more.
It'd be easy for this intricate structure to collapse right on its writer's head, but Rebecca ties each story together gracefully. So much drama and insight is conveyed without a single bit of text, which in itself is a high-wire act that succeeds splendidly. What makes this book wonderful, rather than a starchy academic exercise, is the world she creates: a disturbing, dreamlike ecosystem, where brief lives end in the jaws of strange predators. Rebecca doesn't flinch from depicting the horror of this world, but there are moments of giddy humor: a strange little pig eats a hallucinogenic parasite and trips his brains out in a long, funny sequence.
Rebecca Dart is a brilliant writer, an oncological fabulist. If
RabbitHead doesn't propel her to near the top rank of current cartoonists .. then grits ain't groceries, hens ain't poultry, and Mona Lisa is a man.
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