Hire-A-Hero: The Superheroes Employment Agency by Marilyn Singer

We're B-list superheroes,
You've never heard of us.
We're B-list superheroes,
But our talents are A-Plus!

No task's too small or hard.
We're always on alert.
(Pay now by credit card--
you'll get a free T-shirt!)

The Avengers may be big box office, but if Spiderman and the Hulk are already booked, don't be bummed! There're always the B-listers, those alternative avengers. How about the super-spangled Blunder Woman?

Wherever I worked,
assisted, or clerked,
without lifting a hand,
by mental command,
I'd make hard drives expire,
and phones go haywire.

A one-woman stealth Stuxnet, Blunder Woman can cause industrial mayhem and electronic malfunction wherever she works. And if The Terminator is tied up elsewhere, there's always The Verminator.

For thugs, you've got the Terminator.
For rodents, me, the Verminator.

And then, if, er, Twilight sets in around the place, and things around the house begin to, um, bite, who you gonna call? Muffy the Vampire Sprayer!

When there's a lot at stake,
And a stake's not enough,
Call on Muffy.
She's got the stuff!

She's a specialist, a chosen one,
With a permit for a Guardian Gun,
Filled with secret garlic foam
To zap those stinkers in your home.

The Superheroes Employment Agency has just the cut-rate caped crusaders to meet your needs. Aging "Old School" heroes like The Masked Man and Sir Knightly are happy just to be employed and will courageously take on all school events and birthday parties. If Superman has gone out for some kryptonite, there's always Stuporman, who can subdue the most venomous villains with boring poetry readings, and The Hulk will be green with envy when he sees his alter-ego, the lacrymose Bulk, sink bad guys with torrents of sentimental tears.

Not-ready-for prime-time heroes are the spoofy stuff of Marilyn Singer's forthcoming The Superheroes Employment Agency (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012). Veteran witty rhymster Marilyn Singer and comic illustrator Noah Z. Jones pair up to form a dynamic duo in this poetical parody of the paranormal heroes who have ka-powed across our pages and sha-zammed across our screens for so many decades. Their B-list budget heroes and heroines have got your back!

We've helped good folks everywhere,
On land, in air, at sea.
(Hire us eleven times--
The twelfth job's always free!)

"Using a free range of page designs from sequential panels to full-spread scenes, Jones reflects both the changing rhythms and the overall buoyancy of Singer's rhymes with simply drawn, brightly colored cartoon views of each S.E.A. member in action," says Kirkus Reviews.

"Tis the Season: The Night Before Christmas, illustrated by Robert Ingpen

Clement C. Moore's classic poem "A Visit from St. Nicholas" has inspired legions of illustrators.

It is a picture book artist's dream--well-known text lines in a perfect anapest which trip off the tongue--describing sweeping moonlit landscapes, snow-swept and lighted with a silvery glow, graceful reindeer, a chubby comical elfin saint swooping out of the night, cozy holiday interiors which have run the picture-book gamut from Cajun cabins to Victorian mansions, cherubic children snugly sleeping as they dream of sugarplums, and the delicious chance for the bemused pater familias to spy upon the elfin Christmas benefactor as he goes about his secret midnight gift-giving. It is an opportunity which must make a veteran illustrator's fingers itch to grab that pen and paintbrush and create their own scenes.

Another of this year's entries into that august but crowded genre is Aussie artist Robert Ingpen, whose new The Night Before Christmas (Sterling, 2010) and is a worthy inheritor to this venerable illustrative tradition. Ingpen, whose draftsmanlike skills have a strong realistic bent, here lets his imagination loose. His landscape is typically wintry and typically stunning, with shifts in perspective which show his "jolly old elf" Santa as a jovial, rotund, but tiny figure, with his miniature sleigh--not the usual generously-proportioned rococo Victorian conveyance--but a smallish, Finnish-style sled shaped of carved rounded wood. Depicted in a sepia and gray palette, his farmhouse is a solid English stone house, graced with a steep slate roof, several chimneys, and small shuttered windows suited to a harsh climate. Ingpen varies his view, from a closeup of a jolly little Santa to a sweeping wide-angle view of the reindeer precariously parked on the roof's peak.

Ingpen's interiors suggest sturdy comfort rather than elegance, with ordinary woolen stockings of various lengths hanging from a small, plain fireplace mantel, adorned only with a single candlestick and carved duck decoy. The dazed, abruptly-awakened father, his single candle drooping dangerously, is startled to see the sooty intruder picking himself up from the fireplace opening, scattering soot all over the floorboards, but he quickly recovers as the little saint chuckles at his embarrassment, bestows his goodies, and makes his exit expeditiously the way in which he came.

Illustrators from Leonard Weisgard to Tasha Tudor, from Tomie de Paola to Jan Brett, from Tom Browning to James Marshall have taken up this classic story over the years, and all of their versions are delightful and delighting in their own way. Robert Ingpen's latest version, The Night Before Christmas takes its place rightfully with the wonderful retellings of that Christmas Eve visitor.

For more nostalgic holiday atmosphere, there is also Ingpen's wonderful illustrated version of Dicken's A Christmas Carol.

Could Be Verse! Poetry for the Funny Bone

If the way to a man's heart is through his stomach, the way to a kid's poetical heart is through his funny bone. Here are some laughable lyricists to launch a love for poesy among elementary readers.

The title of Shel Silverstein's Runny Babbit: A Billy Sook tells the tale. This is a consumately and unabashedly silly book of silly verses (or villy serses) that nevertheless goes straight to the heart of what poetry is--the joyful wedding of the sound of language with its meaning. Runny Babbit and his friends, Toe Jurtle, Ploppy Sig, Pilly Belican, and the like figure in letter flipping verses which, like optical illusions, at first seem nonsense syllables and then suddenly flip into rib-tickling sense, all in rhyme:

Runny fad a hamily,
Matter of fact he had
A sother and two bristers,
A dummy and a mad.
His mamma fed him marrot cilk
And parrot cie and such.
And all of them were happy
In their cozy hunny butch.

It's not Shakespeare's sonnets, of course, but for beginners, Runny Babbit is probably better than the Bard to draw kids to poetry. What kid could resist poems with titles like "Ploppy Sig Reans His Cloom," "Mot Ne!" or "Runny the Ficken Charmer," in which we learn that Runny doesn't know a ficken from a grole in the hound.

But he forgot to cheed the fickens,
And he didn't pean up the cloop.
So the hoosters, rens, and chittle licks
All just clew the foop.

Other vetted verse can be found in kid-pleasing collections such as Jack Prelutsky's Pizza, Pigs, and Poetry: How to Write a Poem (or any other title by the prolific and poetical Prelutsky), and Bruce Lansky's Kids Pick The Funniest Poems, which features a kid's-eye-view of an infant sibling by Babs Hajdusiewisz, which goes like this:

He sucks and sucks
And wets his diaper.
Then he grunts
And needs a wiper.
So it goes with baby brother--
In one end and out the other.

Lansky's sequel to this popular book is A Bad Case Of The Giggles : Kids Pick the Funniest Poems, Book #2 includes more of his laugh-out-loud selections. Another humorist-poet, Alan Katz, celebrates the funny faux pas of life in his Oops! Here's a sample of his selections of silly slapstick:

The wind is blowing,
Quite a breeze.
The wind is blowing
On my knees.
The wind is blowing
its spring dance.
It tells me
I forgot my pants.

Drawer-dropping verse isn't for everybody, of course, but as a means to get wriggly young readers to sit down and soak up some poesy, it has a long and honorable history in English literature. If it gets those nay-sayers to go for poetry, well, let Runny Babbit wead the lay!

For an earlier review of a killer-diller set of silly verses, see my post on Take Me Out of the Bathtub and Other Silly Dilly Songs here.