The Country Bunny, feminist hero

I had not given this particular book a thought in many years, and had forgotten it even existed until I saw the mother bunny in a shawl surrounded by the long line of her many children on the cover. This was one of the many storybooks my late grandmother kept at her house for her four grandchildren, and I was once quite enamored with it, even if I had forgotten the fact.

Re-reading it upon rediscovery a few years ago, I was surprised at the fact that I was remembering the images and story points as I was reading them, and yet also noticing that the artwork wasn’t quite as elaborate or as vivid as that memory.

It’s still a very good book, however, even if my forgotten childhood memory of it was that it was bigger, more expansive and more detailed than it now seemed (I wasn’t as sophisticated a consumer of art and story as a child, and was much more easily pleased than I am now).

The Country Bunny and The Little Gold Shoes (Houghton Mifflin; 1939) is the work of writer DuBose Heyward, who I assume is much better known for his Porgy and Mamba’s Daughters, who gives some credit to his daughter in the story’s conception, as he nailed it down by telling and re-telling it to her (the credits read “As told to Jenifer”).

It’s a very nice little story, and one that presents a surprisingly forward-thinking heroine, although as a child it was the artwork that impressed itself the most upon me.

It’s by Marjorie Flack, who is also no longer alive, and whose work I’m unfamiliar with (The Internet tells me she illustrated a series of books about a dog named Angus, and is best known for The Story of Ping).

Her rabbits are very realistic looking, as if they were the very same rabbits you’d occasionally see hopping around your backyard just before evening, only these ones stood on their hind legs and wore clothes. Thus the mundane and fantastic were combined in the character designs to a point that made the rabbit characters all very exciting to me as a child; they weren’t just drawings of rabbits, they were actually rabbits. They're very Beatrix Potter-y looking rabbits. Like, when I saw one of Richard Scarry's rabbits or cats, I knew it was just an artist drawing a picture of a rabbit or cat for his storybook, but when I'd see a Beatrix Potter-drawn rabbit or cat, I knew it was a picture of a rabbit or cat, but I didn't think of it in terms of the agency (In my child brain, realistic drawings weren't any different than photographs).

I now realize that Flack's drawings were also likely quite appealing because they were so damn cute.

It’s an Easter story, and had the feeling of being a classic or authoritative one, I suppose because of its great age (It was already forty years by the time I was born, and both Heyward and Flack were born in the nineteenth century).

The story opens with an image of five rabbits, dressed in coats with tails, vets, bow ties and short little pants out of which stick their big, long feet and their tails. Two are white with pink eyes, and two are brown and each carries either a basket or an egg.

“We hear of the Easter Bunny who comes each Easter Day before sunrise to bring eggs for boys and girls, so we think there is only one,” the story opens right below the image, and continues to explain that there are five Easter Bunnies, and that they are “the five kindest, and swiftest, and wisest bunnies in the whole world.”

When an Easter Bunny gets too old to do the demanding work any longer, the aged and wise Grandfather Bunny summons rabbits from all over the world to the Palace of Easter Eggs to choose a replacement.

It’s a role that many little bunnies aspire to, including “a little country girl bunny with a brown skin and a little cotton-ball of a tail.”
The rich, “big white bunnies” as well as the “Jack Rabbits” laughed at her and told her “to go back to the country and eat a carrot.” I suppose that’s a pretty bad insult among rabbits.

When she grew up, she eventually had a husband, and soon found herself the mother of twenty-one babies.
You can see how this would be appealing to a little kid. Look at all those bunnies! Baby bunnies!

Curiously, while a husband is mentioned prior to the arrival of the babies, he’s never mentioned again, and certainly doesn’t ever appear in the story. Did he run off? Was he eaten by a fox or made into pie by a farmer? Who knows. Cottontail, as the author sometimes calls the country bunny protagonist, is the sole parent of all these little bunnies.

That put an end to her dream of being an Easter Bunny: Twenty-one babies took a lot of time and energy, and didn’t leave much time to dream about anything else (The big white rabbits and Jack rabbits laugh at her and say “Only a country rabbit would go and have all those babies;” I’m not sure what to make of that statement. Do country rabbits/folks know less about family-planning? Is that the implication?)

When the babies “stop being babies,” there’s a wonderful four-page sequence in which Cottontail assigns each pair of them a special household task that they become especially adept in. Two are in charge of cooking, two in charge of bed-making and so on; once all the chores are accounted for, pairs are given arts to pursue for the benefit of all, so two learn to sing, two become artists and so on. (The leftover, twenty-first bunny’s task is simply to pull out his mom’s chair when they sit down for dinner, as he’s the politest bunny).
Well, as you may have guessed from the opening, there comes a time when an Easter Bunny retires, and the Grandfather Bunny calls for an assembly at the Palace. Flack renders him bigger and slightly fluffier than all the others, making him seem aged in the shagginess of his fir and the way his ears are tilted slightly back. He is dressed in a suit with tails and a big lacey collar and cuffs, and leans on a cane.

Many rabbits try out, but he doesn’t find quite the rabbit he’s looking for. Not until he asks about Cottontails 21 children, and she explains how she raised them, which demonstrates her wisdom and kindness. To prove her speed, she tells her children to scatter, and then promptly chases all 21 down and reassembles them before Grandfather, earning the job.

On Easter Eve, she returns to the palace and meets the other four Easter Bunnies—
—all of whom, I now notice, are male, and are dressed much more well-to-do than her.

By the end of the night, she has only two more deliveries to make: One to a sick child very far away atop a snow-covered hill, and the other two her own children, who are taking care of the house in her absence.

She’s about to make it to the sick child’s cabin just before the dawn deadline, when she falls and rolls all the way down the hill, hurting herself in the process. Struggling against the pain in her leg, she attempts again, and, for her bravery, is awarded the titular shoes by Grandfather Bunny. These allow her to hop painlessly up the hill and make the delivery.

Returning home, she sees the children have all done their tasks flawlessly, and she bring their basket to their bedroom, giving readers another cute image:
Awwww!

And that’s the story of the country bunny, who ultimately fulfilled her life’s ambition because of, rather than in spite of, what at first seems like an insurmountable handicap and a reason to give up on that ambition and focus her attention elsewhere.

I liked it as a kid because of the great artwork and well-constructed storyline. I like it as an adult because of the great artwork and well-constructed storyline and how positive it is without being the least bit preachy.

********************

I realize Cottontail is the protagonist and all, but I think this little guy is my favorite character:
He's so intense! He's just painting a couple of carrots, but he's painting those carrots as hard as he can.

And the needy, manipulative rabbit lived happily ever after…

Obviously an adult reader is going to experience a storybook intended for a child differently than the child is. But I still find myself occasionally struck by how discordant my reading is with what I assume is the intent of the author, particularly when you consider that the authors are themselves adults, and thus more likely to share the adult’s reading than the child’s. For example, Mélanie Watt’s charming Scaredy Squirrel books revolve around comical exaggerations of mental disorders, and Britta Teckentrup’s Grumpy Cat was one of the saddest things I’d ever read.

One of my strongest reactions to this phenomenon of seeing something I can’t believe is really there in a kids book came a few years ago, shortly after I started this blog (and spending an awful lot of time in the library), when I came across The Rabbit’s Wedding (Harper Collins; 1958).

It’s by the late Garth Williams, a fairly prolific and beloved illustrator who has almost 100 books to his name, including Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, as well as some other books you may be familiar with (Margery Sharp’s Miss Bianca books, 1953 editions of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books, and George Selden’s The Cricket in Times Square). He’s a man who draws very good animals, ones that look quite realistic, but not to the point that they become unexciting or, more importantly, unexpressive.

Apparently, The Rabbit’s Wedding was quite a controversial book at one point, but not for the reason I thought (I didn’t know at the time I first read it that I was familiar with the artist’s work from books I’d read in my own childhood, nor did I realize how old this particular book was).
“Two little rabbits, a white rabbit, and a black rabbit, lived in a large forest,” the first page reads, and we see two rabbits in a rather long-ish shot, standing in a little patch of grass amid some yellow flowers, mist eclipsing much of the forest around them, thought the shapes of trees poke through. “Every morning they hopped out of bed, and into the early morning sunshine. They loved to spend all day playing together.”

They spend a paragraph and a two-page spread playing “Hop Skip and Jump Me,” one of the several rabbit games Williams includes, before the black rabbit suddenly sits down, grows quiet and gets incredibly sad looking.

Look at how sad Williams can make a sad rabbit look:
When the white rabbit asks what’s wrong, the black rabbit says nothing. This happens several times. They’ll play a game for a while, then the black rabbit will grow sad, and the white rabbit will ask what’s wrong.

Did you think that last sad rabbit image was the saddest sad rabbit Williams could draw? Well, it isn’t; he can go sadder:
Slowly the black rabbit reveals more and more about the nature of his sadness, until he says that thinking about his wish makes him sad.

“I just wish that I could be with you forever and always,” he finally tells the white rabbit, much to her shock. She prompts him to wish even harder and he does. “I wish you were all mine!”

So she makes his wish come true. They pick little boquets of dandelions, and then a bunch of rabbits holding hands skip over to them and dance in a circle around them, and Williams pulls back and we see them standing on a hill, surrounded by a circle of rabbits dancing on their hind legs around them, while various other forest animals watch in the foreground.


“And so the two little rabbits were wed and lived together happily in the big forest…and the little black rabbit never looked sad again.”

Now that I know this was written in the late 1950s, the fact that it implies true happiness can only come from a traditional, formal marriage doesn’t seem as odd to me, but on my first reading, I was really quite surprised.

Perhaps part of it was just how sad Williams drew the little black rabbit, or the way that the rabbit’s sadness kept intruding on his day-to-day life with the white rabbit—three or four times in the space of this single day—but it seemed pretty unhealthy to me.

The black rabbit already spent all day every day playing and eating with the white rabbit, but for some reason it just wasn’t good enough for him. He was worried that it might change some day, and thus he was unable to enjoy the time he spent with her because he was thinking about the possibility of not spending time with her. He was making himself miserable—and worrying his friend—by finding a negative where there wasn’t one.

I suppose I also felt some sympathy for the white rabbit, as we all know what it’s like to be around someone who is quite visibly upset by something, but refuses to share the problem, and the white rabbit is left in the frustrating limbo of knowing something is wrong with her friend but not what. The black rabbit wants her to know that he’s upset, but not why he’s upset, or what she can do about it.

Not for a while, anyway.

It all ends happily enough for the two rabbits of course, but if Now wasn’t good enough for the black rabbit, and he needed Forever as well, should the white rabbit be in this relationship? (It seems to me that it was just as likely that the black rabbit was afraid of being alone as much as he wanted to be with the white rabbit). And if she was completely unaware of the black rabbit’s feelings, does she really reciprocate them? (And what if the white rabbit only liked the black one as a friend?!)

And, forgetting the rabbits for a moment, is a loving relationship somehow lesser than if it’s not sanctified by the rite of marriage, which here means dandelions and dancing rabbits? Is marriage really a route to never being sad again, as the ending implies?

After I finished the book, I searched online to find out more about it and see if perhaps others had discussed the unhealthy relationship in it, when I found at that it was a “controversial” story. Not because of any imbalance in the rabbits’ relationship or Williams’ implied messages about marriage, but because one of the rabbits is black and the other is white.

If one were so inclined, one could interpret it as an interracial love story, which was illegal in 19 states at the time. A Wikipedia page on Williams quotes The Encyclopedia of Censorship:

The Rabbit's Wedding, by Garth Williams, was transferred from the open shelves to the reserved shelves at the Montgomery (Alabama) Public Library in 1959 because an illustration shows a black buck rabbit with a white doe rabbit. Such miscegenation, stated an editor in Orlando, was "brainwashing . . . as soon as you pick up the book and open its pages you realize these rabbits are integrated." The Montgomery Home News added that the book was integrationist propaganda obviously aimed at children in their formative years.

People are fucking insane.

The book is mostly black and white, with only touches of yellow in it, so the colors of the rabbits seem like they were merely the best choices for distinguishing them from one another. I suppose Williams could have called them “the white rabbit” and “the yellow rabbit,” but then, rabbits aren’t yellow. When the wedding rabbits all show up at the end, they’re the same shade of gray, and are indistinguishable from one another; there’s a white rabbit, a black rabbit, and every other rabbit.

It’s strange how much times have changed though. Some thought Williams was attacking and devaluing marriage back in the day by encouraging different “races” to marry, whereas my reaction reading it in 2009 was that he was attacking other types of relationships and overvaluing marriage.

Today is Easter.

When I was a little kid, that meant it would have been the third most exciting morning of the year, following Christmas morning and that of my birthday.

My siblings and I would look for the Easter baskets the Easter Bunny had hidden around our house the night before, and then hunt for the little chocolate, foil-wrapped eggs he had hidden around the house before our dog Jacoby sniffed them out and ate them all (You know, neither chocolate nor tinfoil are supposed to be very good for dogs; Jacoby must have had a stomach like a robotic goat).

Then I'd be dressed in a powder blue, polyester-y little suit with a clip-on bow tie, and go to Sunday morning mass, followed by dinner with my extended family, consisting of ham, lasagna, cracker meal or wedding soup, and a variety of bizarre (to me) seasonal pies: rice pie, meat pie and Farina pie.

Now I'm a grown-up, as well as a non-practicing Catholic and a vegetarian, which strips away pretty much everything that was once special and significant about the day. And I live far away from my family, so I'm not even spending the day with my littlest relatives and relations, watching them look for baskets or turn up their noses at rice and meat pies.

This is how I celebrate Easter now. By listening to an album about a radical ancient hippie who changed the course of world history for both good and ill when he martyred himself for a cause, completely boning his friend and fellow poverty activist Judas in the process...

...while blogging about children's picture books involving rabbits.

Rabbit related content to follow shortly; in the meantime, please enjoy the hymn above, and ponder the theological implications of a disco-themed heaven.

Hoppy Easter from Hoppy The Marvel Bunny

Let's talk about Hoppy The Marvel Bunny, who is billed on his comic book as the "World's Mightiest Bunny."

It's true enough, of course, and it makes for a good boast, at least until you stop and think about it. He's still a bunny, after all.

Like, I might be the "World's Mightiest Guy Named J. Caleb Mozzocco," but that doesn't mean most 13-year-old girls couldn't defeat me in a round of arm-wrestling, a bench-pressing contest or hand-to-hand combat.

Of course, if you're a super-powered rabbit, there are worse ways to describe your physical prowess than "World's Mightiest Bunny!"



You could always go with "World's Mightiest Cottontail!"

I love all these old Hoppy covers, and would love to read the contents, although I doubt there's much chance of a Hoppy The Marvel Bunny Archive Edition in the near future. It's not just that I think animal versions of human superheroes are inherently interesting (although I did by that recent abominable JMS-written Spider-Ham special), but the artwork looks fantastic, and well, Hoppy just looks like such a total maniac, with his huge glassy-eyes and fixed, open-mouthed grin, that I'd really like to see just how insane his adventures are.

Heck, even the thugs he fights look like lunatics. Check out that giraffe firing on him in the cover above. The giraffe doesn't show any of the anger, fear or general consternation that you can read on the faces of the thugs that fire bullets at Superman or Captain Marvel. In fact, the giraffe seems to be just as overjoyed to find a bullet-proof bunny and be firing at it as Hoppy is to be bullet-proof and getting fired upon. Plus, there's this...



Thrill-chuckling! You don't see many comic books that promise honest-to-God thrill-chuckling inside.

Now, what the heck is "thrill-chuckling," and is it a good thing to have in a comic book?

Well, I'm sure it must be, since it's contained in a comic book about a barrel-chested rabbit who dresses like Captain Marvel and who battle joyous giraffes. As regular EDILW readers have probably noticed by now, I love Captain Marvel and his family of suporting characters and antagonists. It's always bugged me when people dismiss Captain Marvel as a Superman knock-off (which also describes ever single superhero from Batman on) or as too silly and childish for today's more sophisticated comics medium (with "sophisticated" usually meaning darker and more violent rather than, um, actually sophisticated).

I suppose that elements like an evil worm in coke-bottle glasses and a rabbit version of himself are among the things that Marvel haters have in mind when they say Cap's just too darn childish and retro, but, personally, I don't see them as any more ridiculous than, say, an evil imp in a bowler hat or a dog version of Superman. And that caped strongman has three ongoing titles, a JLA membership card and a team-up title with Batman.

Besides, it's not like Hoppy the Marvel Bunny existed in the same fictional universe as Captain Marvel—He lived in Funny Animal Land, which is either another planet or another dimension/Earth from the one Captain Marvel lived on, depending on what point of history we're talking about (At some points, Hoppy could read Captain Marvel comics). Hoppy was created in 1942 in Funny Animal #1 before earning his own eponymous title, where he was mild-mannered rabbit named Hoppy, who could transform into Captain Marvel Bunny by saying "Shazam!" and gaining the powers of Salamander, Hogules, Antlers, Zebreus, Abalone and Monkury (Oh come on, that's not any sillier than Winick's millions-of-Zeuses thing, is it?).





Jerry Ordway has written the only real post-Crisis, in-continuity story featuring Hoppy, in the above Power of Shazam! #29. At a birthday party, Billy Batson falls into a magician's hat, transforming into Captain Marvel as he goes down. His magic lightining is shared with one of the denizens of the funny animal land he finds himself in, however, which transforms a talking rabbit there into the Marvel bunny. After their adventure, Billy wakes up, and we're not sure if it was all a dream or not, which isn't a bad way to handle such things as diminutive interdimensional beings dressed like modern DCU superheroes.

I imagine this will probably remain the last Hoppy story for quite a while too, despite the existence of a Hoppy DC Direct action figure. While Jeff Smith would no doubt do the concept justice, I doubt he'll have time to get to Hoppy in his Monster Society of Evil miniseries (It's half over already, and he hasn't even gotten to Captain Marvel Jr yet). And given Judd Winick's mishandling of the Marvel Family on a conceptual level, I shudder to think what he might do with a funny animals superhero.

But who knows, DC has given Detective Chimp a one-shot and recently announced a new Captain Carrot series, so anything's possible, right?

In the mean time, we'll just have to settle for this tale of Superman, Captain Marvel and Hoppy the Marvel Bunny battling the evil alliance of King Kull, Mr. Mxyptlk and Mr. Mind (in an adorable little spaceship), over at Scans_Daily. I hope that makes it into a future volume of Showcase Presents: Shazam!.





Bonus rabbit strip from Scans_Daily: Green Lantern Alan Scott vs. a bunch of rabbits.







The Reason for the Season: Sorry about all the rabbits this Easter weekend. I know that, despite their ubiquity in modern American society this time of the year, they're not the real reason a lot of people celebrate the holiday. This guy is. So, in the interest of equal representation of Easter protagonists in comic books here on EDILW, here are some comic book versions of Jesus. Click to embiggen:

Comic Book Bunnies