I was busy at work on Saturday. I did not spend as much time as usual on the internet. Still I hit my usual sites, the New York and LA Time, the Maddow Blog, Daily Dish, the Daily Beast and the Daily What. I probably followed links away from those sites too.
On a blog site of some sort I found a haunting (non-animated) cartoon. I remembered thinking I would have to download it when I got home. Now I cannot find it. In trying to find it, I tried to retrace my steps, now my memory and my internet history is is all screwed up.
The cartoon was in black and white. It showed a little girl, her face frozen in a scowl in all frames. Mother buys her a bunny rabbit, she does not smile, when mother leaves the bunny promised to be her best friend and to play pirates. The girl is in bed with the talking rabbit. The door opens (and so the rabbit becomes a stuffed doll again), the shadow of a man (her dad?) falls across the bed.
The next frame shows her alone, her pajamas in disarray. The rabbit wakes back up, “Wow that was gross, more than I signed up for.” He heads to the bedroom window. The last frame shows a pile of disanimated toys in a pile outside the window.
A haunting example of the cartoonist’s art, and yet I have lost it.
I know exactly what you mean Paul in Qatar: and, yeek, you remember it exactly correct. The series is called Clarissa, and its by Jason Yungbluth from the comic page Deep Fried. Which has other dark comics, a favorite of mine is Weapon Brown.
To fill it in for you better, and to warn anyone else interested – yes, Daddy has/does rape Clarissa (never explicitly shown, the image you describes is the worst one,) she is very sour in all comics as a result, authority figures at school don’t know whats wrong even with the obvious signs, she has told her mother and brothers, and to keep the family together, they are trusting Dad’s promise to try to control himself, and he doesn’t always succeed. Its a smart, but haunting series of comic strips, and not everyone “gets” it. And no, I’m not posting a link, not even broken link double spoiler, SDMB sanitized, whatever armored.
Well, I kinda spoiled all of the series that I’d seen already for you. But with more context, the cartoon gains a lot of depth. For example, when you see the family dynamic, and you look at the first few frames of the cartoon in this thread, you can understand the mother’s sour face as she drinks hard liquor from a mug, then puts on her best Mary Kay/Tammy Fae rictus grin to give her the bunny doll. She actually must believe this will make it all better. And … well, it makes me shudder too, come to mention it.
Wow… I’d seen, out of context, the “Thanksgiving Dinner” sequence of that comic, where the family is trying to pretend that life is all normal and happy…and the little girl, who is the victim of the rape, refuses to go along with it.
