Today, New Orleans learned of the passing of its son Will Bunn “Bunny” Matthews, whose cartoons captured and defined a generation of the city’s life.
From his earliest strips and music reviews in New Orleans music magazines, Matthews laid down a standard for cultural commentators to follow: Yes, you can laugh, but you’d damn well better love what you laugh at.
His first collection, “F’Sure,” was a rather unapologetic local lift on Stan Mack’s Real Life Funnies strip from the Village Voice, featuring Bunny’s drawings of tourists, Uptown debs and smoky downtown hipsters speaking real New Orleans dialects.
He cemented his reputation as musical, historical, and vibe scholar in the 1980s with his work for Wavelength Magazine. His insistent and frighteningly well-informed advocacy of Louisiana music resulted in countless reviews, interviews, profiles, and drawings, like the map of Cajun dance halls he did for Wavelength with the caveat that the cartographer was not responsible for people getting lost following his approximations.
Matthews’ greatest celebration of and contribution to New Orleans was, without doubt, the characters of Vic and Nat’ly Broussard, whose fictional Ninth Ward bar stood for years as a barometer of our changing culture. Vic and Nat’ly represented to weekly readers of Bunny’s strips the voice of “real” New Orleans, and the absurdity of the idea that there was such a thing, let alone that an old Yat like Vic was it.
In Vic and Nat’ly, and Nat’ly’s miniature Chihuahua in a teacup and nephew Arthuh and the other denizens of Vic’s Nint’ Ward bar, along with the endless lost out of towners who found themselves there, Bunny was able to voice every soul in the city.
Combining the city’s deepest provincialism and reflexive welcome, Vic and Nat’ly became enduring symbols of New Orleans. Vic’s love of po boy sandwiches led to local French bread bakery Leidenheimer’s adopting the couple as their mascots.
Bunny’s acerbic and extreme depictions of locals and visitors, his deep scholarship of Louisiana music, his seeming knowledge of everything wonderfully cool about where we live, reflected a personal awareness of how rich and special our culture is, and the obligations on those of us who love it to explain, expound and expand upon it.
He was, to a generation and more, the eyes, the ears and the funny bone of our town.
There is a vast amount of Bunny’s artwork visible on the internet and I hope you look around at some of it, whether it be his strips, advertising art or band posters. All of it defined a time in our lives, and his passing marks another.
Rest in peace, Bunny.
