Are you ready for a groovy electric rock happening kaleidoscopic freakout comicbook filled with what middled aged men think teenagers are doing wasting their lives with this ultra-psychedelic late 1960s nonsense? Then maybe you are ready for The Queen Of The In-Crowd, Bunny!


Yes, it's 1969, okay, and all across the USA teeners are taking hard drugs, contracting venereal diseases, dropping out of society to live in communes, telling Mom and Dad to expletive deleted their expletive deleted, and leaving home to shack up with a Hell's Angel named "Thor". But you won't find any of that going on in THESE sooper-yvonet Harvey Comics starring our heroine Bunny Ball, whose last name most certainly is NOT a euphemism for sexual congress.


Relax, turn your mind off and read this book if you enjoy bubbling your boop, as it says on the cover! Just don't do it TOO much. Now what is teen model and actress Bunny up to today? Surely she's not about to film some kind of avant-garde art movie...!


It's 1969 and for most of America, "love scenes in an avant-garde movie" means a newly-devised "X" rating and possibly Dustin Hoffman coughing himself to death on the streets of New York as Jon Voight services the lonely ladies. But what does it mean in a code-approved comic book produced by the team that gave us Little Dot and Baby Huey? I shudder to think.


A whole stag line of creepy leading men queue up to give Bunny some "love". But for the purposes of America's children (and America's parents, for the most part), "avant-garde" merely means "confusing as hell nonsense."


And True Corn Wins as cheesy 1930s style romance - the only kinda romance Harvey Comics writers understand since that was the last time they went on a date, sometime before Hitler invaded Poland - 1930s style romance wins the hearts of dirty hippies and so-called 'filmmakers'. Take that, art!

But Bunny doesn't have to carry the weight of these barely written, 52-page giant comics alone; her younger but still a teenager sister Honey is also along to fill pages.


Looks like Honey is throwing a big party and is inviting everybody, including strangers on the street with leg fetishes.


But Honey isn't worried about inviting too many people, because as everybody knows, half the people you invite never show up anyway!

PRO COMICS TIP: stretch out your thin stories by filling entire panels with your captions! It's 1969, your readers will either think it's a groovy pop-art statement, or be too strung out to notice.


Here we find out that Bunny and Honey still live with Mom and Dad, which makes them the only teenagers in 1969 America that haven't run away to California yet. Get with it kids, Charlie Manson needs new followers!


Uh oh, turns out everybody Honey invited showed up! That means those friends of friends of friends will drink all of Dad's liquor and generally smash up the place. Or, since this is a Harvey comic, they'll eat all the sandwiches. CRISIS


But with some giant caption panels and a generous appraisal of the typical ceiling height of a 1969 suburban home, Honey's friend Walter solves the space problem, only to replace it with the strained muscle problem and the broken skull problem. Oh well.

Being a teenage type comic Bunny frequently featured fashion pages with designs sent in by readers and with descriptions written by furiously transcribing the dialogue from an episode of "Laugh-In".


But it isn't all fashion, boys and sandwiches wasting the pages of Bunny; sometimes Bunny's mean rival Esmeralda schemes to waste lots and lots of pages with her inept plotting.


Here in a story that rocked Washington and challenged the fundamental assumptions underlying all of Western civilization, Esmy and Bunny go horseback riding.


I don't know that these comics were "written" so much as they were free-associated while in a meeting with the print broker who's really excited about some free time on the 4-color litho up at Western, we need this book by 4pm Thursday, make it happen, even if you have to fill entire pages with blown up captions and characters talking to the reader, echoing those blown up captions.


On the other hand, this comic book does do my favorite thing ever, which is to put little eyeballs in the letter "o" when writing "look". I once did that for sixty pages. It was awesome.


Turns out Bunny gets manhandled by the dreamy riding instructor while Esmy is left frustrated on the hill and the words "the end" are written on a horse's butt. which is what I feel like after spending good money on this comic book.

But it isn't all boys and romance! Sometimes it's boys and romance that they can't find! That'll REALLY waste some space!


Here in this exciting story Honey and Bunny are lounging around getting suntans when a passing airplane informs them that their favorite rock band, The Beagles, are going to be at Palisades Park, made famous by that Freddy "Boom Boom" Cannon song and by the fact that if you have the coupon you can ride the Superman ride for 25 cents. Hurry Bunny and Honey!


So of course they break all speed and saftey records getting to the park to see the Beagles. I wonder how many pages they'll waste wandering around the park? Three pages? Four pages?


There is no shortage of weird middle aged men enjoying first-name-basis friendships with Bunny Ball, including Hal here who apparently is America's favorite DJ here in his one appearance ever.


This show is a fashion show as was clearly advertised, and not a Beagles show as we assumed it would be for no good reason! Let's wander around the park some more, we've only killed four pages.


The "Number Nine" cloud is an obvious reference to the Beatles song, and if you look closely in the cross-hatching you can just make out the words "Paul Is... Sick Of This Comic Book."


Up in the air, on the ground, in the water, there is no location we cannot waste a page or two on as we pad out this already thin premise.


My thanks go out to this full-page spread of the "Fun House" for reminding us that somewhere in the world, far away from this tedious, never-ending, so-called comic book, that actual "fun" actually does exist.


Nope, not in the fun house, not on a boat, not at the fashion show, not in the ladies changing room, where could those Beagles be?


Oh there they are, they were hiding underwater to surprise swimming girls. Perfectly acceptable behavior for grown men, and it only took nine pages to tell! And to think there's a paper shortage.

But swimming and possible underwater groping isn't the only thing the Beagles do. They also get involved in Oriental mysticism!


Freddy is smacked out of his mind--- no, wait, he read a book on "yoga" which for the purposes of this comic means "meditation" but I imagine the editors felt "meditation" was too big a word for the subliterate deviants that made up Bunny's audience, so "yoga" it is. Freddy is doing "yoga". Fine.


Freddy is blissed out and one with the universe as the groovy lotus position opens his mind to every love beauty truth vibration! That's right, Harvey Comics, America's teens are stoned out of their minds on Eastern philosophy. Not LSD. Keep telling yourself that.


Even Bunny is appalled at the mindless shell that has become of the formerly sharp and tremendously witty... no, sorry, Freddy was always kind of a mindless shell. At least this way he keeps still.


But Bunny can break him out of his Yogic trance by the Western meditative practice of "shoving her tongue down his throat". Try it gals!

As the 1960s came to a close many of our teen idols vanished into Vegas, Hollywood, rehab, or cemeteries located in picturesque graveyards in Paris and/or Seattle. What happened to Bunny? Did she get married and raise a family? Did she shave her head and join The Family?


Or did she continue to appear in a series of increasingly insulting comic books until cancellation sometime in the Nixon administration? I'd say the latter, and I want to highlight this cover which, fun fact, is the real reason Iron Eyes Cody is crying in that pollution commerical, because I don't wanna get all outraged about cultural appropriation but holy christ this is terrible.

And by the way, whatever happened to Honey?


She took lots and lots of drugs and got really, really high. The end.

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