RabbitHead [Paperback]

Rebecca Dart (Author, Artist)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 3, 2004

A surreal western adventure told in an experimental narrative style that will have you re-reading it many times over. We follow the singular story of RabbitHead and her faithful steed, Horsey, though many harrowing experiences, only to have the story branch off into different directions and run simultaneously to each other, introducing a plethora of characters, some goofy, some deadly serious. At the end, the storylines collide and the comic comes full circle, to end where it begins

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This comic, which bills itself as a "heavily symbolic tale inspired by spaghetti westerns and Polish literature," puts the "alternative" back into alternative comics. Somewhere in the desert, a RabbitHead With No Name (complete with Clint Eastwood–style poncho) finishes filling in a grave and rides off on her long-necked, worm-headed steed. As she gets underway, she spits, and the two expectorated strands of saliva land and... sprout? At this point, the narrative branches into three separate threads (RabbitHead's story and the respective fates of saliva strands one and two), running parallel to one another on the page. The narrative continues to split until there are seven plot threads, each following a different surreal character. By the time they start collapsing back in on each other, readers have been introduced to potato-shaped cowboys, a hapless skull-headed coyote, a mutant 12-legged mama pig, a belligerent cactus and a domesticated stomach parasite. What these are "heavily symbolic" of is anyone's guess. Dart's artwork is accomplished, with strong layouts, clean inking and a clear storytelling technique. The difficulty is that the plot—though experimentally interesting—doesn't quite justify the device. This title is pretty enough and delivers strange, surprising images, but it lacks weight.
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Product Details

• Paperback: 24 pages
• Publisher: Alternative Comics (August 3, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1891867725
• ISBN-13: 978-1891867729
• Product Dimensions: 10.9 x 8.2 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #625,704 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Review from: http://.poopsheetreviews.blogspot.com/, January 9, 2005

By 

Robin Bougie (Vancouver BC Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: RabbitHead (Paperback)

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.