Happy New Year everybody (he said, knowing it isn’t)! Wasn’t last night a blast (probably not)?
It’s OFFICIALLY the first of the new year, here at Bun Toon Central, and time for the Most and Least Popular Bun Toons of 2014 to be revealed.
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Our champion of the year was read by far, far more folks than possibly any Bun Toon of all time. There’s almost no way to tell. Normally, I use the local webcounter here, and tally up all the links back to determine how many eyeballs landed on my humble bunny funnies, but this little viral monster ended up everywhere online, on everyone’s ELSE’S tumbler, on their website and eventually onto the printed page as a poster (available exclusively at Reno’s Wizard World Comic Convention last year!). I can’t count up other people’s tumbler numbers, and couldn’t even guess at how many people lifted this Bun Toon whole cloth, so we’re just going to say “lots and lots” and leave it at that.
And it’s all for the love of Mr. Finger…
That version above is actually the “cleaned up” version of the strip, which originally ran in a much cruder form, but it was hard to read, and I wasn’t proud of the pastiche style…
The original looked like this:
But who can read that lettering?
Best parts of crusading for Bill The Boy Wonder last year: Creating awareness of his story, and getting to talk to his granddaughter Athena Finger. The tide is starting to turn towards justice for Bill’s place in history: If you go to Batman’s wiki page, it says co-created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger nowadays. It’s only DC Comics that can’t admit it, but the part of fandom that isn’t controlled by an iron-clad legal document that keeps Finger from getting his due credit, is happy to embrace Batman’s other papa.
Finally. Batman fans have been given the Finger.
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Time for hilarious failure.
When they decided to kill off Wolverine, right after bringing Peter Parker back from the dead, slightly after the return of Jean Gray, but after the murder of Professor X, which was followed by the return of Nightcrawler…I started to think there was no choice…at least if I wanted my Bun Toons to catch on.
That’s Ortiz, the Hispanic Pool Boy in the last panel, a beloved ethnic slur that showed up in the strip a few times over the summer. He wasn’t popular either.
That strip up there was only the SECOND least read Bun Toon of the year…the honour of being dead LAST was earned the very next week when I decided to keep up with this silly Dead Bunny Saga…and NO ONE showed up to play along.
The Pepsi drinking version of the Bunny (with the backwards signature on his shirt) hosted Bun Toons for the rest of the summer, but I quickly stopped making reference to his being an evil twin as no one seemed to notice or care.
Sigh.
Eventually, I simply put the signature on the shirt the right way ’round again in September, and the readership boycott drew to a close.
I thought it was a funny “take” on the industry’s fondness for slaughtering its heroes, but I’ve never been so wrong in my instincts before.
Which means, the epic, twenty-eight part “Return of the Bunny” will never see the light of day. It’s a pity, because I would have brought back the Watcher, Gwen, Jor-El and Lara, and Jack Kirby in successive chapters.
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See you NEXT week for the start of Bun Tooning 2015! (No entry tomorrow, I don’t want to overstay my welcome with six Bun Toons in a row!) What’s coming up will surprise you, because it will surprise me. I never know what these little stories will be about until Saturday morning.
Ty the Guy OUT for 2014!
Ty Templeton's ART LAND!! 