Review - Otto’s Orange Day by Frank Cammuso and Jay Lynch
It’s an old lesson, but one that each generation has to learn for itself in its own way — be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.
For a kid, that sounds like a promise, to be sure, but any adult with his or her fair share of realistic luck — that is, consistently neither bad nor good, just a little bit here and there of either — knows that even the best things can go horribly wrong. But who wants to tell a kid that? It’s a horrible thing to have to reveal, and so we try to get it across in dribs and drabs.
In the third release from Toon Books, Frank Cammuso and Jay Lynch offer the easy reader graphic novel “Otto’s Orange Day,” the old situation of a genie in a lamp and the pressure to not waste a wish is brought into the mix with absurd results. Otto loves orange and attempts to change the world to suit his enthusiasm. The book is clever with the results, taking a logical look at what would result from everything turning orange — safety issues galore! Further veering from the genie in a lamp formula, the creators sit up a game whereby one party has to be more clever than the other in order to set the world straight — a situation of one-upmanship that threatens to make everything worse.
The creators are old pros in the field — Lynch comes from the underground comics of the 1960s, as well as work on Wacky Packages and Garbage Pail Kids, while Cammuso is a political cartoonist, as well as an established children’s book illustrator. Together, they pair their backgrounds into a subversive and smart cautionary tale that will make any kid crack up — and maybe soak in a little lesson in critical thought early on.
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