Haha #5 // Review
She’s known as Pound Foolish. She’s a geriatric clown who lives in a friendly, little residential neighborhood. She’s bitter. She’s been around long enough to know when things were different. They used to sell cauliflower without cutting it up. (Whoever heard of a floret anyway?) She’s about to get an unexpected, little visitor as she makes casserole in the fifth issue of Haha. Writer W. Maxwell Prince’s anthology min-series reaches its penultimate story with style and class in a pleasantly wistful, little tale of an old woman and a young man, resonantly brought to the page by artist Gabriel Hernández Walta.
Pound Foolish just wants to make cauliflower casserole. She’s going to have to put up with kind of a lot to do so. She’s going to find herself dealing with the high cost of groceries and things not being quite what they are. She also deals with an unexpected guest, a boy who has been saddled with an unenviable task from the group of child mischief-makers. He might not know what to expect out of a creepy, old house of a creepy, old lady who still dresses in the clown make-up of her youth.
The beautiful thing about Prince’s anthology has been its diversity. There’s been sci-fi, horror, drama, and more. There have been instances of heavy, high-gravity darkness, light comedy, and everything in between. So often, an anthology sets a tone, and every story follows in a similar vein. With Prince’s rage having been as big as it’s been, there’s really no telling at all what to expect from a meeting between Pound Foolish and a little troublemaker. Things could get ugly, or they might not. There’s really no telling what’s going to happen. That’s genuinely rare in pop fiction of any kind.
It isn’t easy to make the incredibly mundane world of a geriatric clown seem deeply engaging. Gabriel Hernández Walta does a solid job of making Pound Foolish seem pleasantly bitter without making her seem at all exaggerated or cartoonish. It’s a very earthbound portrayal of a woman who was so used to wearing clown make-up as a performer her whole life that it’s just something she puts on every day, decades after retirement. The world she lives in feels very pleasantly domestic with pleasant, little flashes of life in the circus. It’s a very immersive world in an issue that absolutely demands the right kind of mood.
Haha, has had a genuinely diverse series of moods. The penultimate issue is a perfect match for the strange patchwork of stories that Prince has crafted for the series. There’s no telling what Prince might do in the interest of wrapping up his appealingly quirky, little journey in July. As ephemeral as each story from each issue has been, it’s going to be sad to see the final chapter saunter its way to the rack next month. It’ll be a bittersweet moment for the indie rack to see this series come to an end in July.
