If' N Oof

Creatures with flower faces, leering robot monsters, and a charming mouse-eared hero are all drawn in a splotchy, scribbly style that gives truth to a line that occurs early in this strange, rambling yet engrossing book: "Operation Dreamworld must be realized." Chippendale, also known for his participation in the noise band Lightning Bolt, has a singular imagination and uses well-defined and -paced single-panel pages that lead us forward. Unexpected settings fill the page with lines—a bathroom with many obsessively drawn tiles, a flying space-city, a black-on-black dreamscape—before emptying out into white. Then a character leads readers, page by page, through empty space to a door leading back into the hectic frenzy of lines. Wonderfully peculiar characters speak in a variety of voices; robotlike instructions are interrupted by colloquial musings ("I mean, everyone here has been super nice, the pool is great, the garden rules, but..."). All are delightfully strange and once you enter, you don't want to leave this odd and imaginative world with its pleasantly bumbling heroes, If and Oof, constantly waking from one dream only to find themselves in another. (Nov.)