A clown has a terrible day - but manages to stay upbeat. A clown stripper remembers a doomed road trip with her crazy clown mother. A mime makes a friend - in a robot! Another clown floats, a kid attempts to steal from an old lady clown, and a clown stumbles into the world of the Ice Cream Man...
… which is appropriate given that Haha is basically Ice Cream Man - the clown-themed version! Also like Ice Cream Man, Haha is a pretty bad pseudo-horror anthology of forgettable and uninteresting short stories.
Each issue is drawn by a different artist. The best one is definitely Remi Says, drawn by Roger Langridge, about a mime who makes his act successful after finding a discarded robot and incorporating him into his performance - except the corporation that built the robot wants him back! It’s a decent story, and I liked that it was silent, in keeping with the mime character, and Langridge’s art is very appealing.
The others though are really boring and arbitrarily downbeat. Bad things happen to Bartelby the clown, Rudolph’s mother, and Happy Hank for no other reason than these are “sad clown stories”. Because clowns are meant to be happy so… irony? W. Maxwell Prince can’t make these gloomy things interesting either. A lonely old lady eating casserole, a drunken clown in some kind of fantasy floaty land - they just are what they are and it’s unimpressive.
I liked Martin Morazzo’s art in the final story, and it ties into his and Prince’s Ice Cream Man series for no reason, but I didn’t really like the art of Vanesa Del Rey, Zoe Thorogood, Patrick Horvath, or Gabriel Hernandez Walta.
Haha is only for readers who like Prince’s terrible Ice Cream Man series and want to read more of the same. Like Ice Cream Man, I found reading Haha to be a dreary and underwhelming experience.
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