CHARLIE’S SUPERHERO UNDERPANTS

Without his special undies, what’s a young superhero to do? A windy day (“at the end of May”) causes all the laundry to blow away! An international search ensues for the world-famous Charlie’s powerful pants (which feature the message “POW!” blazoned across the front)—undersea, in the air and even in outer space, all humorously depicted—but the super shorts remained undiscovered. So Charlie packs some sandwiches, soap, etc., and, after a press conference, undertakes the quest for the missing shorts. He goes around the world in a lot fewer than 80 days, ballooning through Paris, hiking the Serengeti, climbing in Peru and eventually finding his super undies on a snowy Nepalese hillside—being worn by a shaggy Yeti (in a priceless two-page spread that requires rotation for full appreciation). A handful of geography lessons is tucked into Bright’s jauntily tripping verse, hilariously illustrated by Wildish, whose round-headed, dot-eyed hero exemplifies dauntlessness, even sans shorts. A winner—KERZAP! (Picture book. 3-6)