Jackrabbit
Year: 2014
Author: Ian Thomas Healy
Length: 256 pages
I’ve watched a lot of superhero movies and read at least a few superhero comics, but I haven’t read any superhero books before. This changed when I picked up Jackrabbit, a book in the Just Cause universe of superheroes. The idea of a 6-foot-tall superhero rabbit was amusing enough for me to give it a try. What I came away with was a smartly written superhero story that was as much fun as it was funny. Sure, it might have been a little too horny for the standard superhero fare, but you can get away with more in a book than in more visual mediums.
While somewhat formulaic, Jackrabbit is an origin story for the titular superhero—although you can’t really call them that as these characters are technically “heralds” of obscure gods like the god of rabbits. This transformation results in a super-powered rabbit man who feels like the antics of Bugs Bunny combined with the fourth-wall breaking snark of Deadpool. The sidekick/foil of Bluebird only made this better, who chatters away in run-on sentences without taking a breath. With the two of them together trying to save the world from an invasion of cockroaches, we might just stand a chance.
I appreciated the diversity of a BIPOC main character, as well as some LGBTQ+ representation—even if both felt a little stereotypical at times. But hey, some representation is better than no representation at all. There was also enough inclusion of references from the main Just Cause series of books that made me curious what the more serious superhero fare from this author is like. I’ll have to check them out at some point.
An uncommon origin story for a comedic superhero, I give Jackrabbit 4.0 stars out of 5.
