Mattt Baaij is another up and coming Dutch cartoonist who had a stand at the Haarlem Stripdagen. He’s been doing comics for some time now, his main character Bunbun (not this one) celebrated his tenth birthday on May 19th. That’s him in the sketch at the bottom of this post having painful things done to his todger. All my fault I’m afraid; I asked for Mattt to draw something sleazy and vulgair and that’s what he came up with.

Bunbun was originally a webcomic, but has also been collected into two books so far, both available from the Syndikaat website. I got the first collection, which looks rather nice, eighty pages in full colour, roughly US floppy sized. The Bunbun strips are pure gag comics, mostly done in a half page six panel format, with occasionally a full page strip. Mattt’s artstyle is functional and sparse, Bunbun especially pared down to the minimum necessary needed to show he’s a rabbit: two long ears and coloured white and that’s it.

What I especially like about the Bunbun strips is the way Mattt has several series of gags that keep coming back. One series for example has the rabbit as a suicide bomber, completed with belt of dynamite attempting to get on a bus to blow it up and getting thwarted every time. Another has him as a knight failing to rescue his girlfriend from a castle guarded by a dragon. On their own these gags barely raise a smile, but the repetition makes them hilarious. If you like this sort of humour of course.

It is a very Dutch sort of humour, high on sex and violence as funny in itself, somewhat corny too at times. None of this is really meant to be shocking, it’s just that there’s a long tradition of this sort of jokes in Dutch comics, something that could seem a bit crass or even naff to foreigners. Fortunately Mattt also has a sense of whimsy to leaven things a bit. It’s not all dick jokes.

(Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)