FUZZ & PLUCK IN SPLITSVILLE, PART 2 (of 4)

Stearn continues the anthropomorphic tale of ill fortune in a brutal world

By Mike Whybark     September 12, 2002

Fuzz, the good-natured teddy bear, and Pluck, the ill-tempered, unfeathered banty rooster, continue their misadventures in what I assume to be the town of Splitsville. When we last left our protagonists, Fuzz had suffered a dog attack while attempting to deliver an order of fast food to a mansion, and Pluck had been invited to join a troupe of animal gladiators.

In the current issue, the story nudges forward by one scene each. Fuzz is brought home by the little girl of the mansion to join her collection of stuffed toys and dolls; they decide that Fuzz should have wings so that he can fly home. In order to do this they cruelly saw the wings off one of their number, a duck. Fuzz is then chucked out the window, where he is again mauled by the dog.

Pluck, on the other hand, fares somewhat better; in a free-for-all battle royale, he is the last, er, man standing. In the process he makes some enemies within his own team. He also learns that in addition to the animals, a giant, half-insect mutant grapefruit coaches the opposing team, and the mutant's creator, a genetic engineer named Doctor Bungle, helped create the floating arena where the battle takes place.

While the deepening of detail provided to the setting helps increase the strangeness and harshness of Stearn's world, and the presentation of slapstick violence increased, I did not note a corresponding increase in laughs-per-page over the first issue of SPLITSVILLE. Indeed, it seems to me that Stearn is engaged in re-defining slapstick in such a way as to emphasize the violence at the expense of the humor. The scene in which the naive dolls of the mansion turn on the duck to saw his wings off was particularly chilling, and not the sort of scene you'd want to share with your five-year-old nephew who grew up on the TOY STORY movies.

It's possible, I suppose, that the realmodels or antecedents for SPLITSVILLE are European fairy tales, or, more accurately, folk tales. The stories we know as children's fare, such as Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Hansel and Gretel, all contained scenes of great violence and horror prior to being cleaned up for English and American children's consumption in the mid 19th century. The world depicted in these stories was one in which great and unknowable forces of vast malice lurked just outside the illuminated circle of the hearth fire. Stearn here has relocated those forces firmly within the flickering glow of the lights of civilization.

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