Are You Lost, Little Bunny? by Noemi Vola (Mini Kus! #118)

Noemi Vola has created a sumptuous work that examines questioning your identity, which seems to be an elixir for our times. We exist with overstimulated brains in an oversaturated reality, where there’s way too much stimuli to track, even if we’re not neurodivergent. At times, the visuals of Are You Lost, Little Bunny? appear like garish shouty colors scrawled in markers by the hands of a child, which perfectly captures the aesthetic of our overwhelmed senses. The protagonists are lost emotionally, exhausted by their surroundings, missing their loved ones, feeling isolated and alone, needing a vacation, a respite, a retreat of any kind to a place that feels like home. Vola’s densely packed pages are a visual feast, often times focusing on singular figures with enveloping backgrounds that seem to want to swallow them whole. It’s an immersive experience that culminates, for me, in a 2-page spread with “nobody saves anyone” emblazoned in a sickly ring of pink hearts that pulses and radiates energy outward across the pages. It’s a frightening and bleak message, if we allow ourselves to believe this faulty myth. The follow up warning seems to be the thought that “life is fantastic when you have no feelings,” a reminder of the inherent danger of numbing yourself, because if you’re not feeling, then what’s the point of living in the first place? Noemi Vola delivers a tremendous performance here, proof once again that kus! is consistently my favorite publisher in the world.