We All Live In a Floating Red Balloon (With a Depressed Clown) in Haha #4

We all float down here. But sometimes, we float up in the sky, too. Haha #4 is written by W. Maxwell Prince, drawn by Patrick Horvath and lettered by Good Old Neon.

Will Nevin: Ari, what do you think about It? I take it you’re not quite of the generation that was traumatized by Tim Curry and ABC television.

Ari Bard: No, I am not. However, despite not being a huge fan of horror movies, I love Bill Skarsgård’s Pennywise. We’ve got a lot of balloon imagery in this one, and someone seems to have breathed in a little too much helium.

WN: I never caught It Chapter 2 — the soft reviews scared me off. Better/worse/about the same in your view?

AB: It wasn’t as good as the first one, but I felt like it was an entertaining conclusion. I don’t think the book is as good after the timeskip either. Perhaps it’s more relevant to the issue, however, as we see the baggage or loss that our characters hold in Haha #4 only grows with age.

WN: You know, if you can get past the television production values and the strangeness of John-Boy Walton in a dramatic role, fire up that original. I’m just sayin’.

AB: I’ll definitely check it out, but onto the issue at hand, which has a few references we should both be aware of.

I Got Your Reference Right Here

WN: The issue opens with a reference to the aforementioned It and closes with Up — both focused in their own way on the concept of floating — but I can’t think of any of Prince’s work aside from the All-Star Superman riff in Ice Cream Man #17 that so directly spoke to other media properties. Did those mentions work for you? And while it’s pretty easy to track the plot of Up and how it figures here, do you think there’s any substance beyond clowns and “They all float down here” that Prince may be mining?

AB: I can’t think of a ton, but I’m starting to wonder what Prince is doing with all of these references and what his goal seems to be here. I’m definitely OK with nods and easter eggs here and there, and even the more consistent references to One Froggy Evening are a good bit of fun, but this is getting a bit excessive. Between It, Up and The Little Disturbances of Man that you mention below, is Prince just trying to flex on us, or is there something larger at play here, because at this point I feel like it’s become more distracting than entertaining.

WN: If I wasn’t paying a lot of attention — either because I didn’t care or because I didn’t have to tag team this issue for 1,000 words or so — I probably wouldn’t have stopped to look up that quote, but because I’ve chosen this life, I did. Yet aside from the general idea of which character in the original short story text says that line, I don’t think it adds much to our comic here. (Perhaps a reading of the story could add more subtext — I gave it a glance and was not impressed. Sorry/not sorry, Grace Paley fans.) Whether Prince’s ability to work in other material is distracting or entertaining is a matter of taste and preference and, maybe, a question of why you (the Loyal Content Consumer) are reading this series: Are you here for the squirrelly nods, or do you only want fucked up clown stories? I’m not sure what I want, but I don’t think I’m at the point where it’s a turnoff.

What did you think about pointing so directly to Up? I think we’ve got some good wordplay-type stuff here (the house floats up, everything floats down when you go to meet your friendly neighborhood sewer clown), but tying the story of the issue so closely to a Pixar movie made the whole thing feel a little corny.

AB: It was a bit corny, but I’m a sucker for Up, so I bought into it all. I’m into Haha and most of Prince’s work for the fucked up stories, but every so often, I think he does surprise us with something sweet, even if it’s in a twisted way. Perhaps that’s what these references are doing, as a lot of these lines did make me smile even as our characters are dealing with very real issues. The wordplay is quite interesting, and I appreciate the contrast between Up centering on using the balloons to go on an adventure and get away from the mundanity that he was sick of since his wife died. This story is similar to what we see when it comes to Pop, but when it comes to Gustav we come across someone who did float away and found something horrible, all-consuming and devoid of meaning. I guess that is to say the escapism so many of us yearn for can ruin the importance of everything. I’m not sure if this contrast could have been made without the two references.

WN: Ari Bard, a softie. Who knew?

AB: It’s not exactly something I advertise, but Haha and Ice Cream Man often work on multiple emotional layers and, in this case, multiple storylines, isn’t that right?

Crossing the Streams

WN: This is largely two separate stories: one of clown Gustav the Magnificent floating through an absurd nothingness inside a red balloon and Chrissy (at least that’s what his mom calls him — maybe Chris for everyone else?) having a bummer birthday with his cranky pep pep. Generally, this feels like the least clown-ish and maybe the least straightforward story we’ve had so far in the series. Did these two narratives told together work for you?

AB: It did and it didn’t. I understand some of the narrative intersections they were going for here, but tonally I felt a lot of dissonance, and the most important connecting thread between the two, the grandfather, doesn’t get introduced until halfway through the issue. I think that it’s bringing back some of the attitudes in issue #1 about rejecting reality in a different way by saying everything floats all the same, but this time we see both Gustav and Pop use that attitude to confront their troubles instead of outright ignoring them. What did you think about how these two characters face their struggles?

WN: They’re interesting companion characters; Gustav (without getting into the intricacies of addiction and alcoholism) has made much of his trouble for himself, while Pop has chosen to deal with the grief of losing his wife by becoming an insufferable ass. Both are flawed, but by the end, both choose to be better. Pretty damn uplifting. (ba dum dum)

AB: It’s definitely an issue that promotes balance. One chooses to add a little reality back into his life, while the other chooses to add a bit of whimsy. I think it would have been nice to see a bit more of Gustav beyond just his resolve, but I appreciate the messaging here.

WN: I could have gone with a page showing him drunk at Chris’ party, but that would have blunted the strangeness of Chris swearing he shrunk down and entered the balloon. Also, Mom, how about you sell the fact your kid told you something totally fucked right there?

AB: I suppose it really speaks to the quality of the work when even with a larger 30 pages per issue, we’re still asking for more, and speaking of more, it appears we have an upcoming blockbuster event in the W. Maxwell Prince non-cinematic universe on our hands.

More Crossing of Streams with the Prince Comic Universe

WN: Haha #4 may not be as clown-y as its predecessors, but it feels the most like an ICM chapter in how it ruminates on grief and loss. Outside of the general substance, I read the line about “getting sucked into the television” as a direct nod to ICM #11, and the animal-ish bartender (plus the acknowledgement of alcoholism) at least reminded me of King of Nowhere. Did you also feel the push toward other Prince books, or am I reading too much into this?

AB: I definitely did as well. You touched upon a lot of the connections that I saw in this issue, and I’m just left wondering what it is all for. I have a lot of mixed feelings when it comes to the importance of authorial intent, but with each additional issue in this series, I can’t help but feel a desire to know more about what Prince wants to do here with all of these references. He mentions that he gets bored easily, so this could easily be just a way for him to amuse himself while he writes and to change things up a bit, but I would really like to know if it goes deeper than that.

WN: That’s something I really admire about him and his work — he says it’s about getting bored, but we could also look at it as a way of not being complacent with your own work and imagining how it could be better and different. I always think about coming up with new bits and new ways of doing things, but I rarely carry those thoughts out. Prince tears up his instruction manual every time out, it seems.

AB: Definitely. Prince and his craft are pushing the medium more than the vast majority of monthly comics because it’s something he needs to do to stay interested, and that’s the kind of drive and execution I really admire, especially when he’s able to keep things so personal while doing so.

WN: We’re getting a little ahead of ourselves with this, but issue #6 will be a direct, no-doubt-about-it tie-in with ICM. How do you feel about that?

AB: Well, I’m a huge fan of Ice Cream Man, and despite my increasing confusion with what is going on in this series, I’m still along for the ride in Haha, so I’m looking forward to it. An extradimensional Ice Cream Man entity and a clown with an alternate perception of reality is a lot of horror and whimsy to handle all at the same time, so I’m sure we’re in for a roller coaster.

WN: And since we’re talking about ICM, Prince had talked in the past about #24 maybe being the end of the series or at least the start of a hiatus. And while I can’t find #25 in Previews or anywhere else on the internet, there’s at least one artist who’s done work on a variant cover, so it looks like Prince will be bringing weirdness into our lives for at least the rest of this year.

AB: Cheers to that lickity split!

Here’s the Punchline

The quote tossed out from “a book” by Chrissy’s mom comes from The Little Disturbances of Man, a short story collection by author Grace Paley. In the story “A Woman, Young and Old,” the line is spoken — fittingly and not-at-all-coincidentally — by a grandmother.
Good Old Neon’s work with the lettering was sharp here, especially in moments in which characters said something under their breath.