Hirsute Heir? Mustache Baby by Bridget Heos

When  Billy is born, he parents get quite a surprise.

Baby Billy has an impressive mustache.

His parents are puzzled at what all this means.

"IT DEPENDS," THE NURSE SAYS.

"YOU'LL HAVE TO WAIT AND SEE WHETHER IT'S A GOOD-GUY MUSTACHE OR A BAD-GUY MUSTACHE."

At first, as Billy and his mustache grow to toddlerhood, it looks like a good-guy mustache--a lawman's crisp little cookie duster, suitable for a sheriff who rounds up the bad guys!

But soon that mustache begins to sprout and grow and curl into a maleficent-looking mustachio--a bad-guy mustache for sure.  It's a disrespectful  desperado's soup-strainer of a mustache, and Billy's behavior goes down the tubes, too. He's a cat burglar (burgling the family kitty), a cereal-stealing felon who even robs toy trains and purloins a Tootsie getaway car, and finally Mom has to collar this malefactor and stick him in behind bars (in his crib).

But time in the slammer seems to do the trick, and Mom bails him out, explaining to Billy's appropriately annoyed big sister and brother...

"EVERYONE HAS A BAD-MUSTACHE DAY NOW AND THEN!"

And there's an unsuspected hairy resolution to this super-silly hirsute tale, in Bridget Heos' Mustache Baby (Houghton Mifflin Clarion, 2013), illustrated with super silliness by Joy Ang in delightful mixed media layouts. Ang's art extends the story ably, especially in depicting the unmentioned reactions of the hospital staff  and neighbors to Billy's lip fringe, and his harassed older siblings' reactions to Billy's terrible two capers.

Kirkus calls this one as a "...mix of Saturday-morning slapstick, dramatic comic-book angles and mustachioed babies. Occasional badness has never been so good."