A Drooping Daisy

Dr. Seuss was a national treasure; this inspired master of nonsense verse and wildly imaginative illustration was a kind of American Edward Lear. Though he differed from Lear in being occasionally too prescriptive, the self-styled “doctor� nevertheless brought inspired wit and outrageous invention to even his most didactic efforts. The result was great critical acclaim--including a Pulitzer Prize--and even greater commercial success: When he died, at age 87 in 1991, his 43 books had sold more than 200 million copies.

Accordingly when the doctor’s widow discovered, among his papers, a treatment for a film about a girl whose head sprouts a daisy, his publisher found irresistible the temptation to issue the unfinished work as a picture book. Too bad. DAISY-HEAD MAYZIE (Random House: $15; 4 and up) is a disservice to Dr. Seuss’ memory. It’s not even clear how much is borrowed from the animated Hanna-Barbera special, which recently aired. The cadence of the verse, for example, is “semi-Seussian,� but the use of language is uncharacteristically clumsy, while the art is mechanical and the use of Seuss’ beloved Cat in the Hat as a narrator is clearly a commercial gesture having nothing to do with the narrative. There is the seed of an idea here about the loneliness of the celebrity but--unlike Mayzie’s eponymous daisy--it never blooms.

A much more inspired bit of nonsense is THE RATTLEBANG PICNIC (Dial: $14.99; ages 4-8) by New Zealand’s national treasure, Margaret Mahy. American illustrator Steven Kellogg invests the comical story of the McTavish family’s ill-starred picnic--and Grandma M’s inedible pizza--with his patented manic energy and gives us a spicy, textbook example of how an inspired illustrator can capture an author’s tone and comedically expand it through visual jokes not specified in the text.

Another author who is lucky with pizza and her editor’s choice of illustrator is UCLA Professor Virginia Walter, whose charming first book “HI, PIZZA MAN!� (Richard Jackson/Orchard: $14.95; ages 2-4) is enriched by Ponder Goembel’s ink and acrylic pictures, which show us how a hungry little girl and her mother playfully pass the time while waiting for their pizza to arrive; they imagine how they would greet a veritable menagerie of offbeat deliverers ranging from a duck to a dinosaur. Author Walter’s pizza parlor is clearly an equal opportunity employer! And hers is a delightful and imagination-stretching book for parents to share with their preschoolers.

For upper-elementary readers there is the more complex WAR GAME (Arcade: $16.95; ages 8-12), written and illustrated by British artist Michael Foreman, who has poignantly personalized his story of World War I by introducing as characters his four uncles, all of whom perished in the conflict. Foreman’s masterful watercolors convey the horror and gritty reality of lives at the front, where the four young soldiers exist in trenches “like soggy moles in a world of mud.� To heighten the reality of their experience Foreman has juxtaposed black-and-white reproductions of period posters and photographs with his original art. The result is a powerful indictment of war and a haunting memorial to four too-brief lives.