Everything Goes: On Land (review)

First, the short description of the opening title in Biggs' new Everything Goes series: a little boy and his dad leave their quiet suburban home and step into their sedan for a trip into the city. Creeping through the insanely congested streets, the father and son converse about the types of vehicles; they pick Mom up at the train station and drive home. Now, what the fun is all about: Biggs cleverly directs the zany cartoon traffic so that each spread features a particular type of vehicle—e.g., truck, motorcycle, train, RV—in an eye-boggling array of iterations. Several models get a double-page spread cutaway-diagram treatment, with important parts (brake lever, gas tank, exhaust pipe) and goofy extras (nice socks, Miss Kitty) duly labeled. Numbers from one to one hundred are hidden within the deliciously jammed compositions; also a multitude of birds sporting hats are hidden, Waldo-style, in plain view. If this level of intricacy in the artwork isn't sufficient, viewers can try to correlate ads with businesses throughout the book or carefully inspect motorists and pedestrians for visual gags: the panicky White Rabbit rushing for the subway, the health-food vendor with no business, the tentacled alien on the trolley. Still not enough? How about a double foldout of about a half-mile of cityscape? Once you embark on this wild interactive journey, don't expect to get home for quite a while.