Created by Keith Giffen and Benjamin Roman
Image Comics, November 2018
GIVE ME FIVE MINUTES and I can drive you crazy. Sophisticated talk is entertaining for a minute, until it’s clear there is only one track, just the one track, adored and adored and adored till your bored beyond endurance and must escape. This is what it is like when rabbits talk.
“You ever catch some of the conversations going on around here?”
Fortunately, like relations with most of our fellow beings in the same species, we only encounter the rabbits one panel at a time. And I think you know who they are. If these were human beings, I would be the first to guffaw and stomp off, like who wants to spend time with these fools, but because they are rabbits, and talking rabbits being no surprise whatsoever these days, the tics and tacs of characeristicks become abstract, something you can reach out and poke at, and look at and say, I recognize you, you squiggly creature making no sense or only sense you yourself see to praise and adore and adore, and adore, I saw you in the mirror just a moment before.
No deaths in this six-issue mini-series created by long-loved strip writer Keith Giffen and artist Benjamin Roman, but there are some existentially stark moments down close to the rabbit hutches; making reflections startling enough to electrify. Hello. That’s all I know.
The scene shown here is one of the few panoramic views of Aunt Agatha’s spread, populated by wayward rabbits the way the title says, plus adolescent niece Julie who feeds them and helps around the house, since Aunt Agatha is in a wheelchair with a kind of audio computer contraption to help her talk like I think shows up in a spooky space adventure somewhere with a kooky drooling grandma a bit the same, less benign (so far she does no damage to anyone), plus a dog with gender identity issues, or species identity, or something. For all these creatures, better to forget psychoanalysis. It’s all social issues. If all you crazies could just behave, we would be fine.
Oh, you do?
Imagine arguing with your pets about their concerns and current projects. Well, of course you do, don’t you. You would. So this comic hits the right note on page one when number-one talk-backer Sawyer rabbit complains about the same old food. He helps. He is a friendly abstraction, a welcome contradiction with fluffy rabbit curls. I have been trying to come back to myself, though I am aware that might be only layers and layers and nothing really else but illusions of meaning, and rabbits jabbering in the background.
A physics definition of the “multiverse” finally convinced me it is real: a condition where light rays from one source never reach light rays from another source, they are so distant from one another. It will always be tomorrow they meet. What if rabbit to rabbit as person to person or possibly self to self, even past to future, the habit rabbit parts and incalculable parts all mix together and yet never meet, making the multiverse not somewhere distant beyond but always here, up close between the hutches, and all we can do is adore it until tomorrow and thank providence we often enough do meet up? What about that?
And this is why seeing wayward rabbits succeed is healthy for all of us.
