Three Cheers for Inventors!

Williams’s introduction to the world of inventors is a treat. Her familiar comic strip narratives may not provide the mechanics of an invention like the James Watt cylinder with any clarity, but she more than makes up for this with the wit, drama and incidental social history in her pictures. She has a strip for each of nine well-known individual inventors from Gutenberg to Logie Baird; and a couple of pages for a variety of other inventions and their instigators; and, around the margins of each page, there’s a chorus of other characters – birds, baby dragons and tortoises – who make their own comments on developments. The birds are particularly impressed by Alexander Graham Bell, whose telephone wires give them somewhere new to perch. Williams paces her narratives perfectly, varying her frame size from postage stamp to double page spread, depending on the demands of the story. She carries it all off with verve and enthusiasm. Thomas Edison believed that genius consists of 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. If Williams perspired at all, there’s no sign of it on the page. Her readers, for no sweat of their own, get 100% information and entertainment.