I picked this book up at half price books out of pure curiosity. It ended up being a cute and somewhat bizarre middle grade graphic novel and I enjoyed it.

Chickenhare (yes, he is half chicken and half hare) and Abe (a turtle with a strange beard) are sold to an evil taxidermist named Klaus. Klaus is obsessed with strange animals and Chickenhare and Abe must escape before they are stuffed. They end up escaping with two other strange animals, Meg and Banjo, into a deep dark cave where they find that there are other dangers outside of Klaus that are just as deadly. Oh, and I should mention that Chickenhare is being haunted by the ghost of a goat...yes it all ties together eventually.

This is a well done but very bizarre graphic novel. The theme throughout is pretty morbid. Basically Klaus is a very emotionally damaged man who likes to snuggle with the dead animals he kills and stuffs...this man has serious mental issues.

It gets even weirder when Chickenhare finds the dead rotting body of the goat who has been haunting him. The goat, Buttons, decides to reinhabit his dead body and then for the vast portion of the story Chickenhare is dragging around a dead goat body.

All the above being said, despite the morbid oddness of this story I ended up liking it. I can honestly say I have never read anything like this book. It was well written and engaging...and just downright strange.

The illustration throughout is brightly colored, easy to follow, and very well done. However, I do have a bit of trouble figuring out what demographic this was written for. It’s targeted at a middle grade audience but I think it might be a bit too out there for most kids in that age group to really get it. That, and as I said, it’s pretty darn morbid.

Overall this was an entertaining and bizarre graphic novel. I ended up enjoying it and it’s very different from other middle grade fantasy graphic novels out there. I would recommend to fans of the Bones graphic novels by Jeff Smith or the Amulet graphic novels by Kazu Kibuishi. However, this graphic novel isn’t as good as either of those… That being said I will probably go ahead and read the next one in the series because it was well done and was strange enough to intrigue me. ( )

Meh. Not much story to the story. Or humor... ( )

ChickenHare is a graphic novel series picked up by Scholastic's Graphix imprint. They've been touting it as a successor to Bone, but my gn friends said it really wasn't that good. Well, being the book skeptic that I am, I just had to see for myself. Warning: Ahead there be spoilers.

So, it's not so much that it's not good (although it's pretty humdrum art and overall text - looks like every other full color, clean-lined graphic novel Graphix puts out really) it's more that it's COMPLETELY FREAKING WEIRD INSANITY.

The story opens with a guy walking through the snow with what appears to be a rabbit and a turtle in his backpack and he informs them he's going to sell them to this crazy taxidermist. His name is Mr. Klaus. He looks like Santa Claus, except for the...uh...badly taxidermied animals he keeps fondling. They make a bid for freedom by insulting the picture of the taxidermist's long-lost...friend (I really, really hope they were just friends) goat Mr. Buttons. Mr. Buttons appears to have gotten tired of being beaten and run away forty years previously. The rabbit is really the rare ChickenHare and the turtle is a whiskered chelonai. They are imprisoned in bird cages with two other weird animals, a monkey-like creature named Banjo and a somewhat psychotic elf-like girl named Meg who has spunky female heroine written all over her. We discover the turtle's name is Abe, but ChickenHare is just...ChickenHare. They manage to escape, breaking the legs of the jailer in the process and damaging the butler. Mr. Klaus forces them to get into his sleigh and go after his fleeing taxidermy subjects anyways. ChickenHare gets separated from the other animals, who meet some strange little creatures who keep saying that Banjo is a "krampus" which is apparently something bad. ChickenHare meanwhile follows the ghost of a goat and discovers the body of Mr. Buttons - he fell into a crevice, broke his legs, and starved to death. His ghost has just been waiting for someone to come along and thaw his frozen body a little so he can get back in. They all meet up again (including the broken-legged corpse of Mr. Buttons) and have a battle. Mr. Buttons lures Mr. Klaus over the ice and they plunge into a freezing lake and die (well, sort of, the goat was already dead...). The weird little creatures have a feast, Mr. Buttons' ghost shows up and says all is well, and after discovering that the feast was Mr. Klaus' butler and his other servants (YES THEY WERE EATING PEOPLE OMG) they set out on their journey home.

Verdict: I...have no words to describe this. I mean, I don't mind serious subjects in a kids' comic but this makes no sense. "Oh, yeah, in this world Santa is a psychotic, brutal taxidermist" and "sure, let's just eat the bad guys" coupled with the typical kidsy art of Graphix kind of blows my mind. Especially the subtext of Mr. Buttons - stay with an abusive person so they don't hurt anyone else. I can see kids reading this, but I can't see myself spending any of the library's budget on it. I think I'll buy new copies of Bone instead.

ISBN: 9780545485081; This edition published 2013 by Scholastic/Graphix; Borrowed from another library in my consortium

Wow, surprisingly dark for a GN with a talking half chicken, half rabbit. ( )

This was pretty weird. There were a lot of talking animals. And a crazy taxidermist with his own butler. And then people die in a really gross way. ( )