If you have ever walked into a po-boy shop, glanced up at the wall, and seen two big-haired, big-hearted characters in an oversized Saints sweatshirt and an even bigger apron, congratulations: you have already met Vic and Nat'ly Broussard. They are the most famous fictional couple in New Orleans. They run a corner bar and po-boy emporium in the Ninth Ward. They speak a language nobody outside Orleans Parish has ever fully decoded. And they exist because a man named Bunny Matthews spent four decades listening to his city and writing down what he heard.
This is the story of Bunny Matthews: the cartoonist, music critic, magazine editor, and accidental linguist who turned New Orleans speech into a permanent art form.
From Monroe to Metairie, By Way of Jim Russell Records
Will Bunn "Bunny" Matthews III was born on February 15, 1951, in Monroe, Louisiana. His family moved south to the Metairie side of the parish line when he was three, which means he spent the formative part of his life listening to the New Orleans accents he would eventually make his career out of recording. He graduated from East Jefferson High School in Metairie, and instead of doing what kids in the early 1970s were supposed to do, he went to work at Jim Russell Records on Magazine Street, the legendary used record store where half of New Orleans music history is filed under a different name than you'd expect.
That job is the secret origin of everything. Working the counter at Jim Russell's gave Bunny three things at once: an encyclopedic ear for New Orleans music, daily access to every weird character who walked in to dig through bins, and an education in how locals actually talked when they thought nobody was writing it down. He briefly enrolled at the University of New Orleans, drew a high lottery number that kept him out of Vietnam, and dropped out to write full time.
F'Sure: The First Time Anyone Took the Yat Dialect Seriously
Bunny's first regular cartoon was called F'Sure: Actual Dialogue Heard on the Streets of New Orleans. It ran in Figaro, a now-defunct New Orleans alt-weekly, from the late 1970s into the early 1980s. The premise was exactly what the title says. Bunny eavesdropped. He wrote down what he heard. He drew the people who said it. Then he printed it next to his music reviews of whatever was playing at Tipitina's that week.
This was a small revolution. Nobody was treating the Yat dialect, the brassy ninth-ward-meets-Brooklyn cadence of working class New Orleans, as worth recording. Linguists who studied it tended to do it from a distance. Bunny did it from a barstool. He treated New Orleans speech the way other people treated jazz: as a living art form invented by people who never thought of themselves as artists.
A collection of F'Sure strips was bound into a book in 1978. If you ever find a copy at a used bookstore on Magazine Street, buy it. Two of his cultural ancestors, A. J. Liebling and Tennessee Williams, would have approved.
The Birth of Vic and Nat'ly Broussard
In 1982, Bunny introduced the world to Vic and Nat'ly Broussard in the pages of Dixie, the Sunday supplement of The Times-Picayune. Vic and Nat'ly are an overweight, big-hearted, deeply opinionated husband and wife who own a corner bar and po-boy shop in the Ninth Ward. Vic wears a Saints jersey. Nat'ly wears a head full of curlers and an apron the size of a flag. They argue about politicians, the Saints' draft picks, food, the weather, their cousin Vermin, and what the kids today are wearing. They argue in a phonetic transcription of New Orleans speech so precise it could be used as a textbook.
Vic and Nat'ly did not feel like cartoon characters. They felt like the people who lived on your aunt's block, taken slightly to the side and made into ink. Bunny's wife Debbie Matthews was a longtime collaborator, sharpening the dialogue and the running gags. The pair became a fixture of New Orleans publications for decades: the Times-Picayune, Gambit, OffBeat, and eventually their own social media feeds, where new strips continued to drop into the 2010s.
The reason Vic and Nat'ly worked is that they were specific. They didn't represent New Orleans the way a tourism brochure represents New Orleans. They represented one couple, in one neighborhood, with one accent, and a thousand small grievances about how the city was changing around them. That specificity is why locals never tired of them. Nobody who lives here wants to see a generic gumbo cartoon. We want to see somebody we recognize.
Music Critic, Magazine Editor, City Witness
Bunny was not just a cartoonist. He was one of the great New Orleans music critics of his generation. He wrote for Figaro, then for OffBeat, the local music monthly he edited from 1999 to 2005. He covered the rebirth of brass band music, the rise of bounce, the persistent weirdness of the city's club scene, and the long quiet careers of musicians the rest of the country forgot about between Fats Domino records.
If you flip through old issues of OffBeat, you can watch Bunny build a kind of running history of New Orleans music in real time. He had the rare critic's gift of being fluent in both the technical side and the social side. He could tell you why a specific drum pattern on a James Booker record was unusual. He could also tell you that the bartender at the Maple Leaf the night Booker played that pattern was the cousin of somebody who used to work for Fats. Music never existed in a vacuum for him. It existed inside the city.
He also drew album covers, illustrated books, designed restaurant menus, and made posters for benefits, second lines, and Jazz Fest after-parties. If you've spent more than a year in New Orleans, you have probably seen his work without knowing it was his.
What Makes a Bunny Matthews Drawing Unmistakable
The visual style is instantly recognizable: chunky black ink lines, expressive faces, exaggerated body language, and dialogue balloons crammed with phonetic spellings that look chaotic until you read them out loud, at which point they sound exactly like your uncle. The drawings have the warmth of a guy who actually likes the people he is drawing. There is no cruelty in a Bunny Matthews cartoon. There is teasing, there is satire, there is local mischief, but the subjects are always loved.
That love is what separates Bunny from a long line of regional cartoonists who slipped into caricature. He never punched down. He drew Vic and Nat'ly the way his grandmother might have drawn them: with affection, with familiarity, and with the patience to get the apron straps exactly right.
Bunny Matthews and Dirty Coast
We have been making shirts in this city since 2005, and from very early on, Bunny's work was one of the visual languages we kept coming back to. His Jazzy Nawlins by Bunny Matthews shirt is a love letter to the city's musical DNA, drawn by the guy who probably reviewed half the records on the soundtrack.
Carrying Bunny's work is not a marketing strategy. It is a small civic obligation. If you are a New Orleans design company and you do not find a way to keep his line work in print, you are failing the assignment.
If you want the broader nostalgia, our K&B Love tee covers the drugstore-on-every-corner era of the city Bunny was drawing, and our Be A New Orleanian Wherever You Are design is, in spirit, the same message Bunny was trying to send: this is a specific place, with specific people, who do specific things, and if you understand it, you belong.
The Archive at the Historic New Orleans Collection
After Bunny died on June 1, 2021, of central nervous system lymphoma, his archive was preserved by the Historic New Orleans Collection. If you want to spend an afternoon looking at original strips, sketches, music writing, correspondence, and the working files of a man who basically wrote a 40-year diary of New Orleans speech, that is where they live. The HNOC archive is open to researchers, students, and anyone who shows up curious.
Reading those files is one of the better ways to understand why New Orleans is different from every other American city. The voices are too specific to fake. The neighborhoods are too small to flatten. The whole city is in there, sentence by sentence, and Bunny was the guy patient enough to write it down.
What Bunny Left Us
Bunny Matthews left New Orleans a few important things. He left us a working transcription of a dialect that had previously been treated as a punchline. He left us two characters, Vic and Nat'ly, who function in this city the way Charlie Brown functions for everyone else: a permanent reference point. He left us a model for how to write about a place you love without flattening it or selling it out. He left us decades of music criticism. And he left us a body of work warm enough that people who never met him talk about him like a friend.
The next time you walk past a po-boy shop and see a familiar drawing taped up next to the menu, take a second to look at it. That is Bunny. He drew the city the way the city actually looks. We are still living in his New Orleans.
FAQ
Who was Bunny Matthews?
Will Bunn "Bunny" Matthews III (1951–2021) was a New Orleans cartoonist, music critic, and magazine editor best known for creating the long-running comic strip Vic and Nat'ly Broussard. He also edited OffBeat magazine from 1999 to 2005.
What is the Vic and Nat'ly cartoon about?
Vic and Nat'ly Broussard are a married couple who run a corner bar and po-boy emporium in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans. The strip, which debuted in 1982, is famous for its phonetic rendering of the Yat dialect and its loving satire of working-class New Orleans life.
Where can I see Bunny Matthews's work?
The Historic New Orleans Collection holds the Bunny Matthews Archive, which is open to researchers and curious visitors. His art also lives on in countless album covers, posters, menus, and merchandise — including Dirty Coast's Jazzy Nawlins by Bunny Matthews tee.
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