Elmer In The Snow by David McKee

"It wasn't long before all the elephants were throwing snowballs at each other."


Short story in which Elmer the patchwork elephant leads his elephantine friends out of the jungle and up a snowswept mountain.

There they have all sorts of fun before eventually returning home again.

Elmer seems like a fairly benevolent character, driven primarily by the simple desire to give his friends a good time. At this he clearly succeeds. When he teasingly builds a lifesize snow-model of himself and pretends to have frozen with the cold, the narrative treats you with enough respect not to spell this out.

The art is nice and colourful, but suffers from a significant inconsistency in Elmer's spots. Strangely, one of his vertical stripes seems to retain the same set of colours, while an adjacent one varies. Maybe this ability is explained in another volume?

Or maybe, that's Elmer's world.