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A Post About Bunny Suicides…
A Brief Introduction to the Joyfully Demented Cartoons of Andy Riley.
Where it involves humor, I enjoy three things in particular — the absurd, the highbrow, and occasionally the demented. Thankfully, I can get all three at once with the work of Andy Riley.
If you’ve never heard of this gentleman, he’s a British cartoonist who got his start in the early 90s writing for TV and film. Most of his work has been in British television, thus I’ve never actually seen any of it. Well, I’ve never seen any of the shows or films for which he’s written…if I’m honest. I only know about him thanks to a friend who exposed me to his ‘Bunny Suicides’ books almost twenty years ago.
There are three primary books in the series (samples below) which collect a series of cartoons placing depressed bunnies in all kinds of willful death scenarios. Some may cringe at the combination of fluffy woodland creatures and a subject as serious and sobering as suicide, but suicide is a very difficult subject in polite society, so any bit of humor which makes it bearable is a good thing to my mind.
He has another excellent two-book series as well, which starts with ‘Great Lies to Tell Small Kids’ (again, samples below). The charm of these two books is that they play on the presumption that kids will believe…
