THE NEW VESTMENTS
by Edward Lear & illustrated by DeLoss McGraw
Lear's slapstick poem about a man who dresses himself up in clothes made of different kinds of food and then gets attacked by ``Beasticles, Birdlings, and Boys'' who eat his clothes. The text is printed in big letters on snake-like strips that curve around the illustrations. McGraw (Hippity Hop, Frog on Top, 1994, etc.) creates gouaches that are as crazy as Lear's verses: somewhere between art brut and action painting, wild and violent both in subject matter and execution (the animals flying, the man bending in an arc, covered with stains), they take over the page. All the characters look as if they have been stitched together from pieces of fabric, and then had paint spilled over them. Nothing in the book stays still: the eye keeps moving, and reading becomes a roller-coaster ride. (Picture book. 4-8)