Sunday, April 4, 2010

Have a Happy Easter- IF YOU DARE!



I think the boys at DC were smoking a little too much Easter grass when they wrote this one.

I saw this cover over at Seduction of the Indifferent and the memories came flooding back. I bought this comic when I was eight. I tried to re-read this at HTML comics, but they don't actually have this particular issue.

The basic premise is simple: Some kids go to an Easter egg hunt which is hosted by a large, friendly-looking Easter Bunny and are, one by one, lured into a series of diabolical traps. At the end, all of the children have ended up in a big vat of chocolate in the basement of a scary old house. The Easter Bunny resurfaces, now looking like the one on the cover.

The bunny reveals to the children that he is bent on getting revenge for the hundreds of chocolate bunnies which are eaten every year. He plans to eat them (the children) and he "Always bite the heads off first!".

Like many stories in Unexpected, the twist ending doesn't make a damn bit of sense. Chocolate bunnies are, after all, just that. They are not rabbits dipped in chocolate. And if there really was an Easter Bunny, why would he suddenly crave revenge? It's analogous to Santa Claus vivisecting someone because they rip the paper on the packages.

Still, I must confess, this story scared the bejeezus out of 8-year-old me. I remember lying in bed, needing to pee, but terrified that the bathroom rug was really a trapdoor which would whisk me away to a vat of chocolate in the basement where that scary bunny (I can't even type "scary bunny" without cracking a smile) would eat me. We didn't even have a basement. Just a crawlspace.

Happy Easter!

7 comments:

  1. That's fantastic. Oh, the things that scare us as children...I'm sure we all have a few "scary bunnys" in our closet. :)

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  2. I guess this is the comic book equivalent of taping a kid's eyelids open "Clockwork Orange"-style and making them watch "Night of the Lepus."

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  3. I've always wanted to know what the cover story for that issue was about and now, at last, thanks you you, I know. Thank you. :)

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  4. Marc: I know! It all seems so irrational now, But maybe that's part of what made it so scary?

    Blog Into Mystery: I LOVE "Night of the Lepus". Any film that combines DeForest Kelly, Giant bunnies and mass electrocution is worthy of an Oscar!

    Steve Does Comics: We here at Silver Age Gold are nothing is not civic-minded.

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