The 50 contributors to this inventive volume of comics-style nursery rhymes reads like a who's who of the graphic novel kingdom.
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. Some offer commentary via speech balloons separate from the rhyme, as with James Sturm's hilarious "Jack Be Nimble." The nonplussed fellow announces in a speech balloon, "I don't even know what 'nimble' means" and later, "Why don't you jump over a candlestick! Like I would do such a thing!" Yet when the fellow turns to leave, a bare behind showing through the seared seat of his pants proves otherwise. On the other hand, Sara Varon incorporates speech balloons to deliver the part of "Mary Had a Little Lamb" that calls for conversation. While many of the comics move left to right and down the page via panels, the clever sequences for Marc Rosenthal's overeager hero "Yon Yonson" who "come[s] from Wisconsin" move left to right across the entire spread to visually emphasize a sense of escalating urgency through the thrice-repeated text. Hellboy fans must see what Mike Mignola imagines for the short life of "Solomon Grundy," and the casting of David Macaulay for "London Bridge Is Falling Down" is a stroke of genius. It's impossible to do justice to the originality and creativity contained in this volume; you simply must page through it. The introduction by Leonard S. Marcus is icing on this Pat-a-Cake. Hats off to editor Chris Duffy. --Jennifer M. Brown