Kiera Won’s Toto Bunny Zine – the first two of which we will be looking at today at Broken Frontier – take us into genuinely minicomic territory, given that each can sit comfortably in the palm of an average-sized hand. They also represent work that is wonderfully tactile in conception. You just couldn’t replicate the experience the reader gets from their fold-out format in a digital format. It’s a completely different interaction with the “page”, and Won exploits it to its fullest potential in these two tiny comics.
For example, given the concertina structure of the comics you can either read them with a “page turn” – revealing images in a much more gradual manner and creating a sense of the unknown to events as they progress – or alternatively, you can unfold the entire narrative in one go giving a sense of the immediately sequential.
The strips themselves are delightful vignettes that give us relatable short comics about Toto Bunny – the reasons for running late when getting ready to go out, clumsy food mishaps, choosing a flavour of doughnut, losing those extra pounds you put on while on holiday and so on. One side of each mini zine portrays Toto Bunny having misadventures with a horizontal format (8 panels including covers) while the flip side gives us two four-panel strips to be read vertically.
Appealing cartooning with a sense of quirky energy, and shorts that have a definite feelgood factor, make these first two issues of Toto Bunny an endearing and even, dare I say it, an adorable reading experience.
Kiera Won (W/A) • Self-published, £6.00 each or £10.00 for both
Review by Andy Oliver
Kiera Won will be a guest artist at the Gosh! Comics and Broken Frontier Drink and Draw on Friday, August 29th. Details here.
