THREE WISE OLD WOMEN

There are three of them, and they're elderly and female, but they're certainly not wise—and therein lies the fun of this nonsense rhyme by Corbett, a 19th-century poet. The trio sets off for a walk—"One carried a basket to hold some berries,/ One carried a ladder to climb for cherries,/ the third, and she was the wisest one,/ Carried a fan to keep off the sun." Spooked by some ursine-shaped clouds (as Han interprets it, at any rate), the women fear that they might be pursued by a ravenous bear, attempt a silly escape atop a pile of rocks and succeed in getting blown out to sea: "And every time the waves rolled in,/ Of course the poor things were wet to the skin." With a lot of luck and a smidgen of goofy ingenuity, however, they end up safely back at home, in Han's spirited spreads if not in Corbett's open-ended poem. The artist revels in portraying the women's Wagnerian emotions, their zaftig figures and their slapstick responses to the comic calamity (pantaloons can be glimpsed on more than one occasion). Undulating shapes and striations of high-octane color define the fanciful landscape, echoing the singsong meter of the rhyme. Ages 3-up. (Feb.)