By Zack Quaintance — This week sees the launch of a new Image Comics anthology series, Haha #1. This comic is written by W. Maxwell Prince, whose other Image Comics anthology series — Ice Cream Man — is a few years old now and nigh-universally beloved among comics criticism web sites, including this one. As such, there is perhaps a natural inclination to compare the two books, and what one finds are a handful of small yet significant differences.

The most obvious of which is the art. On Ice Cream Man, Prince has teamed with the same art team for every issue, that being colorist Chris O’Halloran and artist Martin Morazzo, who is perhaps the best in the industry at creating visuals that at once appear wholesome and innocous, while clearly hiding a sinister underbelly. In Haha, artists will rotate, with a new team coming aboard for each issue (in Haha #1 we get an absolute treat from artist Vanesa Del Rey, who is colored by O’Halloran, and in Haha #2 we’ll get work from rising industry star Zoe Thorogood).

The other primary difference is the scope with which these stories appear to be interested. With an anthology comic series it is perhaps more difficult to get a sense of the narrative interests at work, especially after only one issue, but my sense after finishing Haha #1 was that this is a book interested in raising questions about shared societal troubles, challenges, and concerns. In this first story, our main character is a clown (my impression is that all of these stories will revolve around similar entertainers). The clown, whose name is Bartleby, is a guy who just wants the sort of stable life that has long been promised to Americans — work, house, family, and maybe if he’s lucky a little respect.

But the outside world has made that impossible. In the course of this issue, Bartleby is fired, mugged, robbed, shot, and mocked. His job on the surface is a clown, but there is a deeper metaphor at work there, one that casts the complacent at large in the same role. Do you want to get by? Do you want to be comfortable? Do you want the life that you’d long assumed was coming your way? Haha. Hahahaha.

This is a bit of a contrast from Ice Cream Man, which wields a similar narrative interest, instead focusing it on concerns of the micro, on questions about what happens when a loved one dies, or when a child moves from outside one’s protection, or when there is a darkside to children’s literature, and so on. In this way, Haha and Ice Cream Man seem like two sides to the same modern existentialist coin, one asking what do you fear most in your daily life while the other is pointing out the futile humor of its overall trajectory.

In the end, I enjoyed this first issue immensely, as much as some of the brightest highlights from its older sibling, Ice Cream Man. Haha #1 has a dark humor to it, just as Del Rey’s excellent cover suggests it will. It has an earnest main character who makes for the perfect everyman, and a set of plot paces that can only be described as heartbreaking. It cites Thomas Hobbes in a way that doesn’t feel at all pretentious, and it features an excellent extended sequence that I suspect is an homage to one of my all-time favorite pieces of short fiction, Bullet in the Brain by Tobias Wolff. It’s a fantastic example of what a smart and provocative monthly indie comic can and should be. I loved it.

I’m excited to see where Haha as a series goes, too. With an anthology it is also harder to get a read on that, to guess what a book’s interest is long-term. My sense is that as Ice Cream Man has continued, the fanbase has continued to grow, which is a bit unusual for a monthly comic. That speaks to the focus of the series, and if Haha takes a similar approach, I expect we’ll see a similar new readership snowball effect here as well.

Overall: Haha #1 features the smart existential storytelling we’ve come to expect from writer W. Maxwell Prince, paired with phenomenal artwork by Vanesa Del Rey and Chris O’Halloran. It’s an exciting start to a new anthology series, one that fans of the format should consider a must-read. 9.8/10

REVIEW: Haha #1

Haha #1
Writer: W. Maxwell Prince
Artist: Vanesa Del Rey
Colorist: Chris O’Halloran
Letterer: Good Old Neon
Publisher: Image Comics
ICE CREAM MAN writer W. MAXWELL PRINCE brings his signature style of one-shot storytelling to the world of clowns—and he’s invited SOME OF THE COMIC INDUSTRY’S BEST ARTISTS to join him for the ride.
HAHA is a genre-jumping, throat-lumping look at the sad, scary, hilarious life of those who get paid to play the fool—but these ain’t your typical jokers.
Price: $3.99
Read It Digitally: Haha #1

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Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.