At a sports area, a green pear wobbles on ice skates (a pear skater), a ballplayer shares a box with bulls (a bullpen), and a half-man, half-horse creature stands i mid-basketball court (a centaur circle). The Great Picture Hunt! follows Waldo through a series of “exhibits” – a disco, a portrait gallery, a pirate ship. Each page shows hundreds of characters in a whirligig of activity that often includes visual puns or plays on words. But they are as dense as Jackson Pollock spatter prints. Like all enduring picture books, the Waldo books also have illustrations that captivate children. (Now here’s a character children with ADD can identify with!) He’s a poster boy for exercise – he never seems to go anywhere without his walking stick. He wears glasses and a cap with a red pom-pom and keeps losing his belongings. And Waldo himself has a certain goofy appeal. Like jigsaw puzzles, they involve an activity that children and adults can share. One is that have an intergenerational appeal. The catch for parents is that, for all the carnage, the “Where’s Waldo?” books do have virtues. More recent volumes have heightened this aspect with add-ons such as the stickers and spot-the-difference pictures in The Great Picture Hunt!. Each book is a game of hide-and-seek in print. They’re about finding Waldo in settings that have ranged from Hollywood to ancient civilizations. And the “at least they’re reading” argument doesn’t hold up well here, because the books aren’t about reading. Why is the series so popular? You can’t explain the success of the Waldo books just by pointing to spin-offs the like video game, because they were bestsellers before they had brand extensions. Many parents buy new installments happily, even if they carefully monitor the ratings on movies and video games to screen out violent content and won’t allow their children to play with toy guns or read some of the more gruesome fairy tales. But the series also has a vast following among 3- and 4-year olds. The publisher bills the latest “Where’s Waldo?” book as fare for ages 6 and up. There’s so much carnage that the series might never have found an American publisher if Martin Handford hadn’t first had success with it in England. The same page shows: by my count, the following arsenal: 1 axe, 5 cannons, 22 pistols or rifles, and 55 swords or cutlasses. And that’s just on page 17 of Where’s Waldo? The Great Picture Hunt!.
Men get shot in the head, punched in the jaw, struck by a sword, whacked with a rifle butt, and blasted by a cannon ball. The latest book in the series is typical. A remarkable amount of violence has insinuated itself into the hands of preschoolers through them. The “Where’s Waldo?” books are subversive. Where’s Waldo? The Great Picture Hunt! With 50 Stickers. The carnage returns in the latest effort by Martin Handford while two other British authors offer a gentler seek-and-find book
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