There’s a darkness beyond even the brightest colors. From the Joker and Harley Quinn to A Cotton Candy Autopsy and so many other instances of sinister imbalance, comic-book-related storytelling has had a long history of looking to clowns for garish, twisted darkness. Image Comics continues its anthology exploration of the darker end of human consciousness with the second issue of Haha. Writer W. Maxwell Prince tells the tale of a girl and her mother and the road trip that would define them in a tale brought to the page by Zoe Thorogood. It’s a slightly haunting moody drama, the likes of which don’t often make it to the comics page.

There’s a little girl. Her mother calls her Rudolph. She’s a clown. (Sort of.) She sneaks out of her father’s place to run away with her mother on a trip to a theme park called Funville. Rudolph’s mother loves her very much. Rudolph’s mother lives in clown make-up. People don’t understand it. Rudolph seems to understand it on some level. She wants to share a very special moment with her mother. Invariably, there are things that Rudolph’s mother does that she’s not going to be able to understand.

Prince tells a very simple mother/daughter story with strikingly muted tones that render a subtlety that’s not often found on the comics page. There’s a wistful restlessness about the story that feels deliciously faded. Around the corner of every panel, there is the suggestion of greater darkness than Prince is allowing into the story. Throughout the one-shot, the possibility of something much darker than the single death hits the page. Prince explores a tragedy in the story, but its intensity is overpowered by the dreamy quest of a mother and daughter looking for something undefinable. 

Little Rudolph is given a wide range of emotions in the story. Thorogood casts that emotion against the page in an endearing range of different moments. The action of the one traumatic moment in the story doesn’t exactly explode across the page, but a sudden jolt of action near the story’s end would compromise the pleasantly saturnine feel of the rest of the issue. There’s a compellingly slow metabolism about the story that Thorogood conjures with impressive grace and heart. The art captures the tenderness and sadness of the story with a sharp sense of balance. 

This may be a six-issue mini-series, but it has great potential to be open-ended. The first two issues of the anthology have opened-up on a promising, new series that just might find be able to find its audience. Clown-related drama has a unique relationship with the comics page that will be interesting to see explored further so long as Image can find enough of a range in different art and story styles to keep it interesting issue after issue after issue. There are so many different directions possible for a series like this. Hopefully, Image can find enough sales to keep the series going long enough to find its potential.

Grade: B+