Yellow Yellow

A boy, a yellow hard hat, and a dizzying urban landscape, from the artist of Who Needs Donuts?

Yellow Yellow is a charmingly simple story of a child whose playground is a gritty urban cityscape, written by Frank Asch and drawn by Mark Alan Stamaty. With no parent in sight, the boy wanders the sidewalks to find a yellow construction hat that quickly becomes his favorite belonging, earning him many compliments from strangers on nearby stoops. Eventually the boy meets the owner of the hat and must return it, leading the child to make his own yellow hat.

Yet the story comes alive via the visual feast of urban oddities that the Who Needs Donuts? cartoonist Stamaty packs in the background of this rediscovered children’s classic. As the boy innocently wears his yellow hard hat down city streets, he is oblivious to his surrealist fun-house surroundings filled with fantastical neighbors, such as an old lady on a unicycle and a punk with a head full of fish vacuuming the sidewalk. In scratchy black ink drawings, Stamaty builds a bygone city filled with small storefronts—shoe stores, bookshops, delicatessens, and barbershops—all packed with detail upon detail. Delightfully grotesque humor lurks in the scenery of Yellow Yellow from page to page, rewarding multiple readings. Stamaty’s imagination to fill the space is as limitless as the world was to a young boy in 1970.

Frank Asch is a children’s book author living in Vermont. He has written many books, including Moonbear.

Mark Alan Stamaty is a cartoonist, illustrator, and children’s book author living in New York City. He is the author of the cult classic Who Needs Donuts?