What a Trip!

Taking a tip from MAD magazine’s fold-ins, longtime collaborators Yorinks and Egielski (Hey, Al ; Sid and Sol ) create a book with two trick spreads. Their title refers to a boy’s mysterious drop “into another dimension” after tripping on the sidewalk, and it also implies the groovier meaning, since young Mel has a hallucinatory experience: “The bushes and the trees and the houses seemed the same.... But wait! Everything was pointy!” When Mel accidentally exits this “pointy dimension,” he longs to prove it exists. However, his friends mock him, and when he trips himself on purpose, his parents send him to “a specialty camp for klutzes.” A first scored page closes over the middle quarters of a spread to show Mel re-entering the dimension; when the spread is unfolded, readers see Mel’s surprised father, who was with him a moment before. A second spread finds Mel menaced by his doppelgänger “pointy family,” then folds in to hide Mel, as if the dimension has sealed. Beyond the gimmickry, the pointy dimension offers little; the comedy is in Yorinks’s shtick-heavy language (“Oh, where’s my Melville?” shrieks Mel’s mom) and Egielski’s vaudevillian scenes. All ages. (Oct.)