THE GROUCH AND THE TOWER AND OTHER SILLIES

Intentionally or not, O'Brien's limericks are awful--but the far-out situations imagined therein provide sufficient provocation for the bizarre whimsy of his heavy black-line illustrations. A musician, mistaking a saw for a bow, dissects himself and his bass fiddle; a cloud becomes an ice cream cone, then balloons, then a cloud again; a boy detaches his bottom half and carries it through the air. Some of the cartooned jokes have no words at all and some illustrate verbal puns as bad as the limericks. The often witty wordless sequences come off best--but overall these silly strips are too clever and deliberate, if not too harsh, to set a young imagination soaring.