The March Hare — #aComicaDay (19) – Wis(s)e Words

Ambush Bug was tame. The March Hare is not even toilet trained yet.

Straight from the twisted minds of Ambush bugs The creative duo Robert Loren Fleming (scripter) and Keith Giffen (creator, writer, artist) try to give him a helping hand, dragging with them the poor, unfortunate souls of Rick Bryant (ink) and Pat Brosseau (letters) . Drawn almost entirely in 12 panel pages by Giffen, in the same art style he used Legion of superheroes, The March Hare is the story of a mafia hitman who killed his own brother – and is now stuck with the mystical rabbit that drove his brother crazy. Harvey, this isn’t it.

If you’ve read Ambush bug then you know approximately how The March Hare work. You get an extremely silly story that is done completely straight, the only difference being that the Hare is a much more muted personality compared to the Bug. Instead, we see things primarily through the eyes of Milo, the hitman now saddled with this pooka as he wakes up to find his bedroom in a nuclear winter wonderland, complains to his local bartender about the Hare, and shoots a neighbor for drank his drink. whiskey (turns out it’s actually his dog doing this) before going on a game show where the Hare consistently gives him wrong answers, after which he kills the winner and the Hare in turn drowns his sorrows. On the last page, a Catholic priest gives us absolution for purchasing and reading this comic.

This was supposed to be an ongoing series, but only the first issue was ever published. Almost by the time it came out in 1986, the publisher, Lodestone Publications/Deluxe Comics, had gone bankrupt after losing a lawsuit over the book’s ownership. THUNDER agents. A rival publisher had purchased the rights to this title and its characters from the original publisher, but Deluxe Comics argued that these were in the public domain because copyrights had never been properly registered, back when it was still required in the US. Due to the lawsuit, several major distributors stopped distributing Deluxe/Lodestone books and by the time they lost the lawsuit, they had no choice but to close.

What remains is this one problem The March Hare as a bit of a curiosity in the career of Keith Giffen, a bit of a successor to Ambush bug and a precursor to his 90s creation The Heckler. I was lucky enough to find it during one of my endless searches for back issues in the 1990s, and I knew about it because of its own advertisement in another Lodestone title, Dave Cockrum’s Futuristsfrom which the opening slogan is taken.