cover image Scuttle's Big Wish

Scuttle's Big Wish

Sean DeLonas, Ryan DeLonas. ReganBooks, $16.95 (40pp) ISBN 978-0-06-072645-4

Sean Delonas, the Page Six cartoonist for the New York Post, teams up with his young son for this surreal, rodential version of the King Midas story. When Scuttle the mouse is granted the ability to turn everything he touches into cheese, there seems to be no downside-until Scuttle's best friend Tweet the bird inadvertently touches him and is transformed into a block of the stuff. The chastened mouse begs to have the gift reversed, and ""for the first time, Scuttle realized how beautiful the world was, even if it's not made of cheese."" There's certainly nothing cheesy about the crisp storytelling, which gleans an aura of fairy tale timelessness courtesy of a calligraphic-like typeface. But the real attraction here is Sean Delonas's glorious, hyperrealistic paintings. He portrays Scuttle's world as a fever dream of excess, where nothing escapes exaggeration or distortion. The cheese is a glaring, extraterrestrial yellow (its hue bears a striking resemblance to the sauce for macaroni & cheese). The close-ups almost invade readers' personal space, while the perspectives evoke maximum menace and dread (e.g., from the center of a spider web or within the cat's mouth). And poor Scuttle doesn't just turn fat from all his gorging-he becomes a bloated mass of flesh whose head nearly disappears into the folds of his huge stomach. Even the penultimate ""life is good"" spread gives off a vaguely hallucinogenic vibe. In short, it's very Goth-great for kids who like their fairy tales etched in Heavy Metal, but perhaps not the cup of tea for more dainty sensibilities. All ages.