A boy, a yellow hard hat, and a dizzying urban landscape, from the
artist of Who Needs Donuts?
Yellow Yellow is a charmingly simple story of a child whose playground
is a gritty urban cityscape, written by Frank Asch and drawn by Mark
Alan Stamaty. With no parent in sight, the boy wanders the sidewalks to
find a yellow construction hat that quickly becomes his favorite
belonging, earning him many compliments from strangers on nearby stoops.
Eventually the boy meets the owner of the hat and must return it,
leading the child to make his own yellow hat.
Yet the story comes alive via the visual feast of urban oddities that
the Who Needs Donuts? cartoonist Stamaty packs in the background of
this rediscovered children's classic. As the boy innocently wears his
yellow hard hat down city streets, he is oblivious to his surrealist
fun-house surroundings filled with fantastical neighbors, such as an old
lady on a unicycle and a punk with a head full of fish vacuuming the
sidewalk. In scratchy black ink drawings, Stamaty builds a bygone city
filled with small storefronts--shoe stores, bookshops, delicatessens,
and barbershops--all packed with detail upon detail. Delightfully
grotesque humor lurks in the scenery of Yellow Yellow from page to
page, rewarding multiple readings. Stamaty's imagination to fill the
space is as limitless as the world was to a young boy in 1970.