Little Lit: Folklore & Fairy Tale Funnies [With a Story-Telling Board Game Inside]

In this provocative anthology, husband-and-wife team Spiegelman (Open Me... I'm a Dog) and New Yorker art editor Mouly enlist well-known artists to retell traditional tales and invent visual games. Spiegelman himself kicks things off with ""Prince Rooster,"" a typical be-yourself tale but for the references to R. Crumb's Mr. Natural, a guy whose knee-length white beard conceals his nudity. William Joyce offers ""Humpty Trouble,"" a revisionist egg-stravaganza featuring ovoid voice bubbles and delicate watercolor images, while David Macaulay submits a straightforward pen-and-ink ""Jack and the Beanstalk"" and the lone female contributor, Barbara McClintock, pens a gentle, old-fashioned ""Princess and the Pea."" Among otherwise Western folktales, David Mazzucchelli's elegantly drawn Japanese legend (""The Fisherman and the Sea Princess"") stands out for its active navy blue line, refined palette and generous use of negative space. Elsewhere, single-panel illustrations pay homage to brainteasers in Mad and nonsatirical children's magazines. Bruce McCall alludes to ""Rapunzel"" and his own What's Wrong With This Book? in a deliberately error-strewn painting, and Black Hole's Charles Burns contributes a gruesome scratchboard hide-and-seek that exhorts readers to ""find all the snakes and eggs in this picture!"" But by far the most adventuresome item comes from Jimmy Corrigan author Chris Ware, who turns the endpapers into a stylized board game called ""Fairy Tale Road Rage."" On Ware's ironic instruction sheet, two adults debate the game's ""collectible resale value"" before punching out the coin-sized paper playing pieces. ""Road Rage"" cuts to the ambivalent heart of Little Lit's fusion of cheap comic strips and glossy picture books. Spiegelman and Mouly's sophisticated collection, unified by a tongue-in-cheek fairy tale theme, lingers at the crossroad between kids and adults, classics and parodies, children's literature and comics. All ages. (Oct.)