by Moe Zilla

Created on: March 10, 2009

It was 1976 when Jack Prelutsky first published "The Wizard" - though the story first appeared in a book called "Nightmares: Poems to Trouble Your Sleep." It was gentle nonsense as a poem - just some clever rhymes in a harmless tale. But Greenwillow Books commissioned illustrations for the poem, and brought its spooky possibilities to life. It's a book where Prelutsky shows that he knows his poetry, and he keeps a perfect rhythm, sometimes playfully repeating some of the same sounds.

The wizard, watchful, waits alone

within his tower of cold gray stone.

and ponders in his wicked way

what evil deeds he'll do this day.

(And Prelutsky even manages to describe his characters while rhyming.)

He's tall and thin, with wrinkled skin.,

a tangled beard hangs from his chin.

But with rich cartoon-like illustrations, it becomes a different kind of story. Brandon Dorman starts the book by drawing skulls on the shelves in the shadowy turret of the wizard's castle. There's spider webs, a raven, and some very old candles, and in later pictures he adds a black cat, and even octopus tentacles. Where the poem only suggested a wizard in the abstract, Dorman actually creates one. But this lends a dark realism to what had just been a poet's fantasy.

Using "elemental sorcery," the wizard turns a bullfrog into a fly - and Dorman draws it shining with a strange pink glow. The fly turns into a pair of mice, which levitate towards a cauldron bubbling with a thick green goo. (And once there, with a spectacular green splash, they turn into an extravagant cockatoo.) As the poem continues, so do the drawings, with the wizard zapping lightning from his crooked wand to reduce the cockatoo's size, and then shrink the colorful bird into a colorful stick of chalk. There's silver bells and fire, and eventually the bullfrog, returned to its normal state.

Which the wizard then banishes in a thick cloud of smoke...

There's a "fiendish smirk" on the wizard's face, according to Prelutsky, and now that his powers have been demonstrated, the pictures will show the wizard contemplating his next victim. But that's where the book ends. "Should you encounter a toad or lizard / look closely... it may be the work of the wizard." It's an ending usually found in horror movies - with the powerful monster still among us, ready to hatch more wicked schemes. While it's a nice, moody children's story, I think it works even better as a poem without pictures. If this book has a fault, it's that it's almost too real.

Do we really want to watch an old man torturing unsuspecting animals with magic?

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