cover image The Red Rock: A Graphic Fable

The Red Rock: A Graphic Fable

Tomio Nitto. Groundwood Books, $15.95 (32pp) ISBN 978-0-88899-669-5

In this unrealistic environmental tale, real estate developers encroach on a valley overlooked by a spherical red rock on a cliff. ""That rock's got to come down. It gives me the creeps,"" says a bald man, as designers plan a faux-nature resort and envision their boss's face carved on the rock. Old Beaver-the forest elder-and his fellow fauna soon confront a vista of tree stumps. The creatures ""build barricades"" of flimsy spider webs and pointy sticks. Meanwhile, an earnest girl tracks the wreckage on the TV news and looks sadly out at the stars: "" 'Please find a way to save the forest,' she wished with all her might."" At this, graphic illustrator Nitto abandons his soft, earth-tone nature imagery for a hard-edged black-ink comics interlude, a dream sequence in which a lightning bolt zaps from the rock and turns Beaver into a flying eco-warrior. The empowered hero halts bulldozers, takes the developer to visit scenes of devastation and turns an oily ""greed"" monster into a ""green"" one. The comics subside, and everyone awakens to a regrown forest. Nitto concludes that whether this dream came ""true or not,... you have to fight to defend this beautiful world."" Unfortunately, the conclusion suggests that only magic, not practical efforts, can combat those with economic motives for ruining wilderness. Nitto fails to propose any useful tactics for dealing with actual problems, raised decades ago in Dr. Seuss's The Lorax and Bill Peet's The Wump World. Ages 4-9.