BOOGY & TEE AND TWINKLE & HEW

Inspired by Edward Lear’s nonsense poem “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat,” a story centered on the passengers of two very different storm-tossed sea vessels.

Twinkle and Hew, a pair of fishermen, are out in their rickety old boat when a storm strikes, battering their little vessel. Meanwhile, Boogy and Tee are weathering the storm from the safety of their luxury yacht when they hit a rock, creating a hole in the side of their vessel. When Tee spots Twinkle and Hew clinging to what’s left of their boat, she admonishes Boogy to dump his possessions overboard to lighten their load and increase the yacht’s speed; as Tee puts it, “Stop your whining, your ME-ing and MINE-ing, / Or we are all sure to perish!” Grudgingly, Boogy complies, he and Tee save Twinkle and Hew, and the good deed goes rewarded: Twinkle mends the yacht, and a friendship rooted in reciprocal helpfulness is forged. (Here’s hoping the characters have an easier time remembering one another’s names than readers will.) The seaworthy rhymes, speckled with Lear-ian nonsense words (“drocks,” “kraylish”), give bounce to this plea for selflessness doubling as a rebuke to materialism. Hoffmann’s blocky, textured work, created with painted paper and colored pencils and executed in colors both stormy and bright (the four titular characters are green, blue, yellow, and pink), favorably recall cubist paintings.

A visually commanding parable about the perils of greed and the kindness of strangers.