Gr 5 Up-Originally published as a daily newspaper strip, albeit in small circulation, this collection introduces the daily expostulations and exasperations of preschooler Barnaby Baxter and his rotund, inappropriate fairy godfather. Mr. J.J. O'Malley uses his cigar as his magic wand and has a host of acquaintances from the magic world that casually abuts our own: a prankster leprechaun, a morose ghost, and other members of the Elves, Leprechauns, Gnomes, and Little Men's Chowder and Marching Society. The adventures are very much of the time in which they were written, with references to wartime rationing, scrap-metal drives, and machine politics, as well as many casual pop-culture allusions that may escape today's readers, but the chatty glossary at the back will help. The artwork is redolent of the ligne claire school, with little shading and with a slight stiffness to the characters' positioning. The humor can be a slow burn, immune to the gag-a-day requirements of many newspaper strips, with a cumulative effect causing an unexpectedly familiar chuckle every few pages and a sense of delight as the ever-expanding cast comes together en masse. Highly verbal and quietly unexpected, the strip is a clear antecedent of the sort of comic situations experienced by Calvin and Hobbes-and the visuals predict Johnson's own Harold with his purple crayon, but with a peculiar picaresque aggregation as each story line tumbles almost imperceptibly into the next chaotic chapter. Cleverly absurd, with solid contextual reference material to aid readers. Benjamin Russell, Belmont High School, NH