Letter Lunch: A Chickadee Surprise
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Review by Scott Tingley, February 25, 2011

Well that is fantastic, just fantastic. 

A couple of hours ago I'm putting my daughter to bed and for her reading selection for the evening she picks the newest ChickaDEE magazine (March 2011 - "Arts and Crafts").  She loves this periodical and I am enjoying going through it with her - there are some nice biographies on the artists/cartoonists that contributed to the issue and there are some nice crafts that we are likely going to try out in the morning (It is a Saturday AND we are being pounded by a blizzard that promises to bring in 40 cm of snow...good times) when I turn the page, and there it is.  LETTER LUNCH, "a wordless story" by Elisa Gutierrez.  It is simply the story of a boy and girl in search of something to eat.  They harvest consonants from their garden, pluck them from trees, purchase them from the grocery store and, in a brilliantly choreographed sequence of panels, pick them from a stubby "z" tree on the top of a mountain.  Their resulting concoction is unpleasant to the taste until they literally spice it up with some vowels.  Good stuff.

Gutierrez' artwork is beautiful and subtly risk taking. I can't find much information about her (nor have I figured out how to put the accent on the first e in her last name - sorry), but you can see her next project here. Also, you can see her process HERE. Very interesting stuff.

Keep an eye out for this terrific storyteller.

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