SIMPLE SIMON

Unlike other recent recyclers of 19th-century kitsch Peppe confines his campy line engravings to the puffy comic-strip balloons that represent Simon's thoughts and fantasies -- thus keeping them one dimension removed from his own robust, textured figures while adding yet another dimension of characterization to the rhyme's prototypical Little Moron. There are fourteen verses cataloguing Simon's stupidities here (the same, incidentally, that are listed in The Annotated Mother Goose) and more than that many laughs and asides built into the broadly old fashioned, briskly inventive rustic scenes.