Haha #4 // Review
Everything floats. Except when it doesn’t. Happy birthday: it’s the fourth issue of W. Maxwell Prince’s Haha. Prince alternates between the earthbound world of a kid with a missing birthday clown and a magical world from which there is apparently no escape. Bringing both worlds to the page is artist Patrick Horvath. Prince and Horvath fuse the every day with the fantastic in an enjoyably idiosyncratic way as the six-issue anthology series enters the second half of its run. A deep emotional exploration takes a dual-track approach to the page in a journey that is as vivid as it is weightless.
Gustav the Magnificent has disappeared. He was entertaining kids in a backyard at a party when he disappeared. He shrunk into a balloon, and it ascended into the air above a quaint, little residential neighborhood. Now Gustav has entered the terrifyingly whimsical World of Floating Objects. He’s in great danger. The kid who saw him vanish is off to spend some time with his grandfather in a very earthbound world where things do NOT float. If people can make some sort of connection, though...maybe there CAN be some levity entering the world of a child’s birthday.
Alternations between two different ends of a narrative can be a lot of fun in a serial. Prince is incredibly regimented about the alternations here. For every two pages of narrative in the world of Gustav, there are exactly two pages of narrative in the world of the kid. No one narrative is allowed to run for longer than two pages. As it is only a single issue, the alternation doesn’t feel annoying or repetitious. It’s a deeply enjoyable sort of abstraction that maintains a steady rhythm from beginning to end. Prince has played with a lot of different moods, motions, and emotions in the very short span of four issues. Issue #4 stands out as being one of the more vividly surreal expeditions into the world of the clown.
Horvath has little difficulty bringing the surreal to the page. The earthbound realism feels firmly established as well. The problem is that there’s more than just the extremes. There’s a little bit of realism that bleeds into the surrealism of Gustav’s world, and there are shadows of whimsy that bleed into the world of the kid on his birthday. Horvath doesn’t render those subtle shades into the panel with a great deal of finesse. The terror of The World of Floating Objects never manages to feel as sinister as it would manage if there was a bit more depth to the floating forms which inhabit it. Likewise, the whimsical nature of everyday life could have tied earthbound reality to Gustav a bit more as well.
The fourth in the series proves that Prince has a very clear idea of how to adjust and articulate the world of the clown in a way that can deliver a universe of diversity. Each story has been distinctly different. The challenge for Prince may lie in closing out the series with some larger sense of composition that would make it feel whole. As it is, the entirety of the six issues are beginning to feel like a weird, darkly comic fugue that flashes across the comics rack.
