Okay, put Matthew Diffee on the Folks to Watch list, because Zip Zap Wickety Wack: A Story About Sharing (2025) is a good and intriguing book.
Before I discuss this book, I should mention that I had loved Diffee’s work for years, but hadn’t realized it: he’s created hundreds of cartoons for The New Yorker. Many of these stayed with me, and I’ve got a number of individual cartoons ripped from the magazine around the house.
This focus and practice really shows up in the illustrations for this book. The images aren’t just skillfully executed, they are economical and well-designed (like a good cartoon). Even though the characters are animals– well, animals and one alien–they communicate not just with words, but also with body language and facial expression.
The book is a striking blend of the traditional, even retro, and the new. The character are, as I mentioned above, almost all animals, specifically farm animals. They’re presented in quite a traditional style, so much so that they could appear in picture books from 50, even 100 years ago. The story is likewise familiar, and the lesson strikingly direct. The book starts like a farm and sound education book, with lines about how the cow says “moo,” the sheep says “baa,” and so on.
However, after the sheep says “Baa,” the goat points out that it also says “baa.” This leads to an argument over who can say “baa,” which the dog mediates, saying that they either have to share the word or come up with something new to say. The sheep and goat try new sounds, but the animals that own them (the pig for “oink,” the duck for “quack,” and so on) claim those sounds. Frustrated, the sheep finally says it will say something new, and blurts out the wonderful sprawl of words that starts with “Zip Zap Wickety Wack” and continues for several more lines of wonderful nonsense sounds.
It’s joyously new…except it isn’t. A tiny space alien shows up in tiny flying saucer and says that’s what it says. It suggests the animals just “wiffle,’ which is what that alien calls sharing. The animals agree that this sounds good and the frog and dog both say they’d like to share the flying saucer…which leads to another wonderful explosion of words, in which the alien threatens to destroy the Earth if anyone touches its ship.
It leaves, and the animals discuss how sad it is that the alien has no friends.
There are some more minor twists, but the sheep and goat agree to share.
But what wonderful surprises! A farm book becomes a space alien book. A book teaching one lesson (sharing) teaches another (people have different words for things) and another, even larger one (about hypocrisy). Along the way, it teaches lessons about conflict resolution.
And I like the frog.
