Written By: Will Davies

It’s true what they say about critics. Even the bits about Dagon and the hibiscus plant. We’re all horribly bitter people who failed to succeed in their chosen field and have to resort to shouting at people from the side lines. Fortunately there’s nothing better than failure to prepare you for industry journalism because all that experience that you garner not making films, or writing books or whatever at least qualifies you to waffle incessantly about the work of your would be peers. But no matter how professional you try to be, no matter how high your brow, the bitterness always seeps through one way or the other. It finally got to me this week and as a result I find myself in a very awkward position, because this week’s comic is without fault.

Bunny makes my job incredibly difficult, I can’t think of a single way to be mean to it. It really is just that good. Intelligent humour, five times a week and a clean interface that makes browsing the thousand or so strips a breeze.

Bunny’s secret lies in its simplicity, foregoing complicated plots, characters and even multiple panels. Simple things are hard to break and more often than not outperform their more complex counterparts. That’s how things work with Bunny, it delivers mirth and merriment without all the superfluous packaging. The best indication of this is that the creator, Lem, has not once received hate mail and if you’ve been around on the internet long enough you’ll be well aware of just how strange that is. It more than likely has something to do with the fact that he’s a great guy who is kind enough to repeat an hour and a half long interview when internet columnists make their computers explode by the power of bitterness alone.

Behold:

Will: And then an angel of the lord appeared and said unto the masses “Boo.”
Lem: Oh god
Will: Exactky,
Will:Only with a better grasp of English.
Will: Just got your email. You ready to give this another shot?
Lem: Sure.
Will:Righty ho then.
Will:We’ll start with “the basics”
Will:What is Bunny supposed to be about?
Lem: Ah! Different questions. Slightly. Bunny is… very hard to describe. When I try to tell people what Bunny is about I have to say “Well, it’s a mostly single frame comic about a variety of different things and it features small marshmallow-like creatures but it isn’t really *about* them. If that makes any sense” Usually whoever I am talking to says “Well… actually, no. That doesn’t make any sense at all” And then I hand the URL and say “Well, just go and click around a bit, you’ll get the idea”
Lem: Ultimately, I don’t know what it’s about. It’s part brain dump, part curiosity blog, part soapbox.
Will: What ever the hell you feel like basically.
Lem: Yes.
Lem: Which is a blessing and a curse.
Will: I suppose you get a lot of feed back from people who don’t quite understand what’s going on.
Lem: The odd thing about Bunny in general is how comparatively little feedback it gets. Of that small amount, a tiny fraction of it is the standard “I don’t get it, what’s going on?”.
Lem: But that mostly occurs in the Livejournal feed, and other readers tend to chip in and it (sometimes) becomes clear.
Will: Do you think it could be attributed to cultural differences? There are a lot of Britishy things in there and we’re horribly out numbered by other more westerly peoples.
Lem:Possibly. But compared to, say Scary Go Round, I don’t think there is much in the way of Brit-centric humour in Bunny apart from my obsession with Barry Scott and the Cilit Bang adverts. I have confused my British friends as much as I have my American ones.
Will: Barry Scott is one of the great enigmas of our time.
Lem: He is. He doesn’t even exist! He turns up on the advert, says “Hi! I’m Barry Scott” and it’s as if you’re supposed to know who he is and trust him for that. I thought for the longest time he was a soap star, but it turns out he’s a completely fabricated personality.
Lem: And it’s curious because I think maybe people turned to each other and asked “Who’s Barry Scott? What’s he in? You know, the one in the Cilit Bang advert”. You’ve got the shouted name that’s unusual, the Penny Test gimmick… It’s a piece of advertising genius. Things like that usually show up in Bunny because I’ve had such a response to them. Yet I’ve never been sent a box of Cilit Bang. This disappoints me.
Lem: Anyway. Apologies, I’ve gone off track.
Will: Actually the mandate of the column is to be quite silly.
Lem:Oh good!
Will: Yes.
Will: While we’re on the subject of feed back lets talk about that hate mail thing. That’s an amusing anecdote.
Lem: Oh the competition. Well, to bring the humble reader up to speed, I ran a Hate Mail competition a year or two ago. I wanted people to send the cleverest and interesting hate mail they could think of. And they did. I think I hold the dubious honour of being the only web-comic that has actually had to ask for hate mail. The Internet being as it is.
Will: It is the worlds second largest hate engine.
Lem: I think it’s gotten better in recent years.
Lem: It seemed that around 2000-2001, it was mostly full of drama. And now it’s all moved onto Livejournal.
Will: Indeed.
Will: Thank god for WHO quarantine protocol.
Will: I think I recall entering that hate mail thing.
Will: Or possibly i was writing actual hate mail to someone else.
Lem: It’s hard to tell. Some of the entries were particularly enraged.
Lem:But it was very interesting because I actually made some long term friends out of the exercise.
Lem: so even in that sense, Bunny is a force for slightly benevolent randomness.
Will:Like a police state that bundles people into vans in the dead of night for scones and tea.
Lem:Exactly! The dictatorship of fun.
Will:Ve haf vays of making you zmirk.
Lem: Quite. And while I wait for the inevitable irritated German giving you what for for that remark…
Will: Oh the number of really poor taste jokes that could go here.
Will: But wont.
Will: Because I’m a nice person really who doesn’t need to be beaten up by angry Germans. Really.
Will: I should probably ask a question now.
Lem: Probably best.
Will: Ok. Try this on for size: Numerous web comics now are able to peddle wares and such online some artists even relying wholly on this income. Many fledgling artist’s aspire to such a thing but with more than twenty thousand webcomics floating around the web at any one time do you think that the web comic will remain a viable business venture in the future? Will the market become over saturated or dominated by a select few popular titles?
Will: I think I broke it.
Lem: Well, there’s lots of different thoughts on this I suspect. Personally I don’t think webcomics are a viable business venture to begin with. Lots of people fall into doing it professionally because they get laid off or they don’t mind sacrificing a few things in order to do what they love. But it’s like music. The music industry is dominated by a select number of groups and artists, but it’s possible for someone recording an album on their garage to come out and make a big dent in the industry.
Lem: The market will change, people will look around for new things to read, new things to buy. People can still sell t-shirts even though the market is incredibly competitive these days. I don’t know if luck is more or less to do with success now than it has been in the past.
Lem:But I think the important part about it is that just because the guys from Penny Arcade drive to work in a Mercedes doesn’t mean you will.
Will: I certainly don’t.
Will: I have to rely on this crappy gold plated Segway.
Lem: You have to do it firstly because you want to. If you make money with it, that’s great, but it shouldn’t be your first goal. I think that’s the same with anything creative. People can tell if you’re selling out, properly selling out. It’s brutal if you don’t do it because you love it at some level.
Lem:I personally do this because if I didn’t, I’d go crazy.
Lem:Which … is a form of love I suppose. Probably one you’d see a counsellor about.
Will: o_o
Will: Right.
Will: Well. Does that ever come back and bit you in the face?
Lem: Which part?
Will: Let me rephrase the question. It sounds like you put a lot into the making of the comic, do you ever find that it doesn’t live up to your own expectations?
Lem: Oh, pretty much all the time. There are the odd comics that I feel proud of, but I’m never really satisfied with them.
Will: Tortured artistic soul and all that. Both ears intact I hope?
Lem:*chuckles* Yes, I haven’t done a Van Gogh quite yet. There is this stereotype of the “tortured artist”, and occasionally you do discover how that stereotype came to be.
Lem:But you are caught between the pressure of your own expectations and reality. You want to be better. If you didn’t want to be better you wouldn’t bother doing anything.
Lem: That is not to say I’m particularly agonised about Bunny, but some weeks it feels very hard to come up with any useful material because it needs to be *decent*.
Will: I guess there’s a line between randomness and tripe.
Lem: Yes. and the line frequently moves.
Will: I looked tripe up on Wikipedia and now I feel ill.
Lem:Hahah
Lem: Wikipedia, causing vomitting since 2001
Will: Offal. Named for the noise people make when they find out what it is.
Will: Ok. Two final questions and then I think that would be a good place to stop.
Will:Firstly. What web comics aren’t people reading that you think they should?
Lem: I think everyone should be reading “Octopus Pie” (http://www.octopuspie.com), “LucidTV” (http://www.lucid-tv.com) and, “Cat and Girl” (http://catandgirl.com).
Will: And for the final question:
Will: Jeph Jaques. Whats the worst possible question I could ask him?
Lem: Oh dear. That would require being mean I think.
Will:Ah. I hadn’t thought of that.
Will: Bugger.
Lem: You could always ask him what the soil on mars tastes like. I think that’d be an unanswerable question.
Will: I think I’ve committed myself to it now.
Lem: Excellent.
Will: Some one else also roped me into posing a question about soup.
Will: I’m going to get lynched.
Will: Well I think that just about wraps it up.
Lem: Hahaha. Well, at least you’ll have your answer before you die horribly.
Lem: Excellent. as a precaution I am going to save this.
Will: Hah. Yes.
Will: I’ve been checking to see that the log file is there.
Will: I’m fairly sure I’ll probably most likely be ok.
Lem: We can but hope.
Will: Right. I have to scurry away now to meet deadlines. It’s been fun.
Lem: It has indeed! Thank you for the questions. they were thought provoking
Will:Hah.
Will: Ok. I’m off. This should all go to “print” next Thursday.
Will: See ya.
Lem: Take care
Lem: let me know where it is so I can link to it
Will: It’ll be on the news section of www.septagonstudios.com
Will: I’ll send you a direct link when it gets uploaded proper.
Lem: Thanks
Will:No problem.
Will: Bye.

Bunny can be found at www.bunny-comic.com

Discussion Prod
This week’s question is about drama. Juvenile pedantry or the life blood of the internet? After all, is there really such a thing as bad press?

Five Items or Less
News!

Minus and Rice Boy, two popular fixtures in the Koala Wallop comics collective, both recently announced their completion. Another comic set in Rice Boy’s Overside setting has been announced and will be launching within the next week or so.

The ballot for this years Harvey Awards is open. Nominees for the Online category include: Diary of a Wimpy kid (www.wimpykid.com), EZ Street (www.comicmix.com/title/ez-street), Penny Arcade (www.penny-arcade.com), Perry Bible Fellowship (www.pbfcomics.com ), and The Surreal Adventures of Edgar Allan Poo (www.drunkduck.com/The_surreal_adventures_of_edgar_allan_poo ). Voting closes on the fifteenth of August.

Next week on FPE: Templar, Arizona.

Comments about my punctuation can be directed to fourthpanelestate@googlemail.com

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