Mixing together a pantry of ingredients, Bobo rolls a motley dough into something he calls a “jum-jill.” He offers it to the Funny Thing, saying it’ll make his tail longer and the blue spikes on his back more beautiful. Bobo, pitying all the children who would be deprived of their dolls if he did what was asked of him, comes up with a solution. Bobo, aghast, refuses, and instead offers him what he feeds the other creatures. One day, a haughty, evil-seeming, dragonlike entity named the Funny Thing-a self-described “aminal”-appears and requests a meal made of doll heads, his staple food. It tells the story of “a good little man of the mountain” named Bobo, who lives in a cozy, well-appointed cave and spends all his time cooking customized, delicious-sounding meals for the local animals: nut cakes for the squirrels, seed puddings for the birds, cabbage salads for the rabbits, cherry-sized cheeses for the mice. “The Funny Thing,” published in 1929, is, like Wanda Gág’s other books for children, fairy-tale familiar but also strange and unforgettably specific.
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