Shanda Fantasy Arts is coming out with a new comic this summer called Coco Gunbun about a futuristic superheroine in an armored bunnygirl outfit. Here's the Diamond preview:

COCO GUNBUN #1 - B&W. (Chelsea Mitchell/Ron Murphy) In the not so distant future, Neo-Metro is a city in turmoil. The super conglomerate P.I.M.P has extended its corrupt grasp to the highest levels of city Government. Enter... CoCo Gun Bunn. The butt-kicking daughter of a female mercenary, CoCo is out to avenge her mother's untimely demise. 40 pp.

purrsiapress wrote on May 10^th, 2006 at 3:07pm:


Thanks for the heads-up; looks like it will be a fun comic.  Coco falls into the category of "false bunnygirls," in that she doesn't really have bunny ears, but some kind of device or feature that resembles bunny ears.  ...sort of like the battle antenna on the anime character Nuku Nuku All-Purpose Cultural CatGirl.

I've done a few projects for SFA over the years (I still have a few Shanda pinups in my gallery), but I've lost touch with publishers Mike and Carole Curtis over the years.  Good to see that they're still in business.

Coco GunBun has her own website now.

http://www.cocogunbun.com/

Her artist, Ron Murphey, also has a DeviantART gallery with some pinups of Coco:

http://shonuff44.deviantart.com/

Well, I purchased two copies of GunBun #1 from Rabbit Valley comics.  Total order cost about $20, so it wasn't cheap.


It contains about 36 interior pages of Gunbun, including one complete story with finished artwork (Shear Mayhem!), one complete story with unfinished artwork (untitled), one unfinished story fragment, and four Coco pinups by various.  An unfinished, incomplete and unrelated story (FoxQuest) is also included, apparently as filler (5 pages).

In the lead story, an out-of-costume superhero catgirl tries to convince the crowd at the styling salon that she has bested a villainess, but the matron of the establishment knows better... and tells the story (in blow-by-blow fashion) of how Katrina was defeated when she tried to displace Coco GunBun as the local superheroine.

The front cover is nice, although I wish we could see more of her ears...



Cover (presumably) by Ron Murphy.

The story is illustrated in an adapted anime style, and includes the convention of highlighting certain scenes with the characters appearing in super-deformed (chibi) style.  

Oddly enough, these are the strongest panels in the story.  I'm almost wishing that the whole book was penciled in this style.  This is not entirely unprecedented, as I've seen manga artist Motoo Koyama include whole chapters of his "Ozanari Dungeon" series in super-deformed style, complete with chibi monsters, zombies, skeletons, warriors, etc.



Artwork by Ron Murphy and Joseph Silver.

Back cover.



Artwork by Ron Murphy.