The team behind Big Plans introduces a charming, disarming boy hero in a ten-gallon hat who rides into town on a tortoise to save the day.
Lane Smith (Grandpa Green) sets the stage in a desert-toned palette with flecks of ruby red in the stones that frame a Wild West town and the toads and lizards that live there. "Drywater Gulch had a toad problem," begins Bob Shea's (Dinosaur vs. School) narrative. But not the kind you might think. It's "the never-say-thank-you outlaw kind of toad." A trio of bad guys kissing cattle and hauling loot from a bank jeer at a fleeing Mayor McMuffin. Luckily, "hope rode into town. Slowly. On a tortoise." The bird turns its head in the following scene, to watch a boy in a ten-gallon hat pass by ("Give him a minute"). After a litany of questions from the mayor ("Can you handle a shooting iron?... Stay up past eight?"), and a "nope" to each, McMuffin asks the boy, "Well then, what makes you a sheriff?" Ryan answers, "I know a really lot about dinosaurs." The boy blames the giant crater in the bank wall on T. rex, and a stagecoach robbery on velociraptors.
Children will love being in on the joke and will lap up the dinosaur trivia, as the Toad brothers grow increasingly upset at prehistoric critters getting credit for their crimes. In a brilliant spread, the boy (and tortoise) measures the jail door to figure out how to corral the giant criminals, while the bow-legged brothers' legs frame the scene. Yee-haw! --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness