Jack and the Beanstalk and the
French Fries. By Mark Teague. Orchard Books/Scholastic. $17.99.
Tales from the Deep: That Are
Completely Fabricated—The Twentieth “Sherman’s Lagoon” Collection. By Jim
Toomey. Andrews McMeel. $14.99.
Happy as a Clam: The Twenty-First
“Sherman’s Lagoon” Collection. By Jim Toomey. Andrews McMeel. $14.99.
There is a certain
virtuosity involved in coming up with recognizable situations that are
stretched so far out of shape as to be amusing but not so far as to be
unrecognizable. Pushing things almost to the limit for kids – and maybe to the limit for adults – is a pretty
fair recipe for humor. But this works only if the limit-pushing is handled with
sufficient skill. Mark Teague has shown such skill again and again in his
wonderful pictures for the How Do
Dinosaurs… series, written by Jane Yolen. And he shows equal ability on his
own in the writing and illustrations of Jack
and the Beanstalk and the French Fries. The premise is simple enough and,
when you think about it, quite logical. That huge beanstalk that grew from the
magic beans that Jack got for the family’s cow took him into the clouds, true.
But before it took him there,
wouldn’t it be logical for a beanstalk to produce some, you know, beans? And
since the whole story starts with Jack and his mother being desperately poor
and desperately hungry – which is why they have to sell the cow in the first
place, being disinclined to butcher it and not having refrigeration to preserve
the meat in any case – wouldn’t it make sense for Jack and mom to eat the beans
from the beanstalk and not have Jack go gallivanting about with giants and
fee-fi-fo-fum and all that? Teague starts Jack
and the Beanstalk and the French Fries with the actual beginning of the
fairy tale, right through the point at which Jack’s angry mom tosses the
supposedly useless beans out the window. But then, Teague is off and running in a different direction. In fact, Jack is off and running, leaping
downstairs in the morning so enthusiastically that he seems literally to be
flying through the air, his feet never touching the wooden steps leading down
to the kitchen. Hunger gone! Problem solved! End of story!! Umm….no. There’s
trouble afoot, and it starts quickly. Yes, yes, “Jack ate the porridge” that
his mother made from the beans from the stalk, writes Teague, adding, “It
wasn’t the best thing ever, but it beat starving.” True enough, and the beans
are so plentiful – this is a giant beanstalk, after all – that there are enough
to keep the whole village from starving, and Jack’s generous mom makes sure the
“nutritious and delicious” vegetables are given to everyone. And given and
given and given. Uh-oh. Soon there is a groundswell of anger against Jack as
the purveyor of beans, of which everyone is soon very tired indeed. Teague
shows Jack running lickety-split away from an angry crowd of school bullies and
other classmates who are sick of all beans, all the time. Well, apparently no
good deed, such as saving everyone from starvation, goes unpunished. So eventually
Jack climbs the beanstalk to get away from the townsfolk – meeting, in passing
on the way up, an exceptionally large praying mantis – and sure enough, he gets
to the clouds and the giant’s home and walks into a room where Teague is
careful to show a goose that lays golden eggs, a singing harp, and bags of
gold. But those are from a different version of the story. In this one, the
giant gets only as far as “fee fi fo” before asking his wife what’s for lunch
and becoming thoroughly disenchanted when told they are having beans. Again.
Soon giant and Jack are both complaining loudly about beans all the time, and
now that they have something in common, they become friends – and Jack brings
the giant down to ground level (scaring away the bullies) and the two,
together, plant a vegetable garden. And that takes care of the
nothing-but-beans problem. And that brings us to potatoes, which after all are
vegetables. Hence the eventual appearance, on the very last page, of the French
fries of the title – with Jack holding up a gigantic plate of them (as big as
he is) while a giant hand pours “Ye Olde Tomato Ketchup” onto them. It is
altogether a happy, and inarguably silly, ending.
There is never a definitive
ending to Jim Toomey’s Sherman’s Lagoon
books, since they are compilations of Toomey’s comic strip and the strip just
goes on and on and on. And that is a good thing, because Toomey seems capable
of essentially infinite variations on the activities and personal shortcomings
of Sherman the exceedingly dim shark, his much more sharklike wife Megan,
Hawthorne the dishonest and money-grubbing hermit crab, Fillmore the lovelorn
and over-intellectual sea turtle, and various other deep-sea denizens that are
as likely as not to end up being Sherman’s dinner. And that does not even count
the “hairless beach apes” (deemed “humans” in some quarters) on whom Sherman
snacks from time to time. Toomey finds all sorts of new ways to twist life in
Kapupu Lagoon in the two latest collections of the strip. In Tales from the Deep: That Are Completely
Fabricated, Fillmore guest-lectures at an English class and, when he asks
the students to write a sentence using a semicolon, discovers that the only way
they know to use it is by creating a winking emoticon. Sherman and Megan
journey to Australia to commiserate with the blobfish, which has been voted the
world’s ugliest animal, only to be told, “In our blobfish culture, ugly is beautiful.
We celebrate ugly.” Ernest, the eyeglasses-wearing all-around fish brain and
mischief-maker, gets together with Sherman to steal a spaceship after the two
are taken to Jupiter’s moon Europa (this
makes weird sense in context). Ernest discusses ocean acidification – Toomey
has a genuine concern about the oceans and manages to introduce some serious
topics amid the hilarity – and Sherman asks if he can blame his lousy golf
scores on it (leading Ernest to ask, “Are you running out of excuses?”). In Happy as a Clam, the lagoon denizens
encounter a cartoonist who draws a comic strip about a shark, “Norman’s Reef” –
a bit of self-referential humor there – and find themselves disappointed to
learn that cartooning is “just work,” although it does have compensations (such
as the ability to turn Sherman into a giant bratwurst in one panel). Megan
laments that she will never be as a cute as a seal, so, Sherman explains, “she
eats a lot of seals.” Sherman and Fillmore take a trip to the Great Pacific
Garbage Patch, which really exists and is a matter of ecological concern –
another bit of reality intruding into Toomey’s unreal world. Sherman meets a
Navy-built underwater drone, a robotic shark that folds out into “a quality gas
grill.” Fillmore laments his inability to enjoy a meal even as fine as
“truffle-infused shiitake mushrooms garnished with fresh chives,” while Sherman
delights in chowing down on a dead seagull. Hawthorne learns to play the
bagpipes so he can make money by getting paid not to play them. And so on.
There is a lot of “and so on” in Sherman’s
Lagoon, and Toomey shows no sign of letting up – which is a good thing,
since adults as well as children need all the amusement they can get.
Variations upon silliness are much appreciated as long as they result in
variations upon laughter. Chortles and guffaws, for example, are acceptable.
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