Happy New New Year Bun Toons! YAY!

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!

Just a Second Bun Toons! YAY!

Normally my #1 Bun Toon of last year comes on the FIRST day of the new year, but yesterday, essentially without warning, I was whisked away in a car with my wife and children to a town far far away from my home for a larger family gathering of my wife’s brother/sister/mother peoples.  Delightful time was had by all, and many of the family are still there as I type this…but as for me, I was delinquent in yesterday’s Bun Toon entry for reasons of merry making, family and good will to all.   So there.

As a result,  I’m dragging the New Year out for one more day in my virtual reality Bunny World.  How can that be a bad thing?  You get to get blind drunk again, as we all get to look at the SECOND most popular Bun Toon  (and the nearly least popular Bun Toon) of 2014 on this, not really New Year’s Day.

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If  I had to list the Marvel Characters I’d Care Least About Getting Their Own Movie, The Guardians of the Galaxy would have made my bottom five…at least in their original Marvel form.  I mean, I actually READ those comics when they first came out in the Seventies…and I might have been the only one…

This Bun Toon was shared, and clicked, and linked to, and posted all over the interweb when I put it up this summer, and I’m going to assume it was the free publicity that it generated for the movie that made Guardians into last year’s runaway hit film.  Marvel has yet to thank me.

I also rescued Constantine from cancellation last fall with the following Bun Toon, done in a similar vein.

It just squeaked out of the top five, so in theory you shouldn’t be seeing it here…I suspect Constantine put some sort of a spell on me…

Ah, the power I have over Hollywood.  He started smoking on the show the very next week….

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Now for another Bun Toons From The Dustbin of History.

Once again, it’s a sentimental, holiday themed Bun Toons that didn’t move the web-clickers.  The big audience just wants to see cars explode and things on fire and people getting their ears cut off…

Caution:  Trigger warning for anyone who’s ever had their ears cut off…

I told you.  No exploding cars – That was the problem.

But I was IN a car with the wife and kids yesterday, which is why you didn’t see this Bun Toon when you were supposed to.

META!!!

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See you guys tomorrow for NEW NEW YEARS DAY!   YAY!

Seriously, I’m keeping up the lie.

Ty the Guy OUT!

Third, But Not Least Bun Toons!

Half way through the Top Five,  and our entry at the middle spot was my least favourite Bun Toon to draw, ever.

This was one of the most read Bun Toons of the year, so it goes in the countdown, but I’d really rather it had never been drawn.

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Another of the year’s most read Bun Toons  (in a virtual tie for third place so I’m putting it here as a balance) is one of my all time favourite Bun Toons.

CONTEXT:  Alan Moore had done a lovely interview towards the beginning of the year in which he had described his opinion of Grant Morrison as one of mild disdain for the sycophantic attention Grant had paid him for decades.

Too much like another famous cartoon relationship in my mind, to pass up this entry…

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Onto my failures.

It seems that holiday themed Bun Toons simply don’t work (as yesterday’s low scoring Santa Story proved).  If I do a nice comic savaging a fellow professional for his opinion, there’s a line-up around the block to read it, but something I draw that pays tribute to a special day in the  year is culled from the honour rolls like bread mould at the back of a rye.

I often do an Easter themed Bun Toon on Easter Bunny Day, and I sometimes do a marijuana themed Bun Toon on 4-20….and when Easter fell on 4-20 this year, I thought this was funny…

Clearly, one has not properly done Stoner Humour if it doesn’t piss off the North Korean Government or the people that imprisoned Tommy Chong, the American Government.  I have to work on angering the fascists more directly and use less bunnies.

More holiday-themed Bun Toons will be showing up on this top and bottom list…coming up tomorrow!

You’ll have to wait to find out if it was a hit or a miss.

Ty the Guy OUT!