Nursery Rhyme Comics: 50 Timeless Rhymes by 50 Celebrated Cartoonists

Thanks to these inventive comics-style retellings, events that might not have made sense to many of us in those nursery classics finally do.

Stephanie Yue reveals that it's not that the mouse was afraid of the clock in "Hickory, Dickory, Dock." Instead, the furry creature is nearly late for work in the bell tower. So the mouse, awakening from a nap, runs "up the clock" to strike it once with a mallet ("bong"), then runs down to resume its siesta. Why do the "Three Blind Mice" chase after the farmer's wife? Richard Sala suggests it's because they smell the freshly made cake she carries. Once she sets the cake down, she metes out their punishment ("with a carving knife"), and the now short-tailed trio heads for the exit. Perhaps one of the enduring puzzles in the nursery rhyme world is the narrative for "Rock-a-Bye Baby" with its suggestion of a hard fall "when the bough breaks." Tao Nyeu's interpretation gives us a self-sufficient "baby"--a lamb that takes a tumble but lands on its hooves. When a wolf villain "breaks" the bough with a chain saw, the cradle crashes onto the wolf's back and the lamb takes possession of the saw.

The volume presents a cornucopia of approaches to visual storytelling, and the 50 contributors to this compendium reads like a who's who of the graphic novel kingdom. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

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