Ambush Bug was tame. The March Hare hasn’t even been housebroken.
Straight from the warped minds of Ambush Bugs creative duo, Robert Loren Fleming (scripter) and Keith Giffen (creator, writer, penciler), comes this attempt to one-up him, dragging the poor unfortunate souls of Rick Bryant (inker) and Pat Brosseau (lettering) with them. Drawn almost entirely in 12 panel pages by Giffen, in the same art style he was also using in Legion of Superheroes, The March Hare is the story of a mafia hitman who murdered his own brother — and now is stuck with the mystical rabbit that drove his brother mad. Harvey this ain’t.
If you’ve read Ambush Bug than you roughly know how The March Hare works. You get an extremely silly story done perfectly straight, the one difference being that the Hare is a much more muted personality compared to the Bug. Instead we’re mostly seeing things through the eyes of Milo, the hitman who’s now saddled with this pooka as he’s woken up to find his bedroom in a nuclear winter wonderland, complains to his local barkeep about the Hare and shoots a neighbour for drinking his whisky (turns out it’s actually his dog who does so) before going on a games show with the Hare feeding him consistently wrong answers after which he murders the winner and the Hare in turn drowns his sorrows. In the last page a Catholic priest gives us absolution for having bought and read 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 its publisher, Lodestone Publications/Deluxe Comics, had gone out of business, due to losing a lawsuit on who owned the T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents. A rival publisher had bought the rights to this title and its characters from the original publisher, but Deluxe Comics argued they were in the public domain because the copyrights had never been properly registrered, back when that was still mandatory in the US. Because of the lawsuit several big distributors stopped distributing Deluxe/Lodestone books and by the time they lost the suit, they had no choice but to close down.
Which leaves this one issue of The March Hare as a bit of a curiosity in Keith Giffen’s career, somewhat of a successor to Ambush Bug and a predecessor of his 90s creation The Heckler. I was lucky enough to find it during one of my endless back issue bin crawls in the nineties, knowing of it because of a house ad in another Lodestone title, Dave Cockrum’s Futurians, from which the opening tag line was taken.
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