The Toughest Cowboy

Grizz Brickbottom is so unremittingly tough that he drank a quart of Tabasco sauce a day, flossed his teeth with barbed wire, and kept a rattlesnake in his bedroll to cool his feet at night. Despite the boisterous company of his fellow Wild West frontier sidekicks Lariat, Chuck Wagon, and Bald Mountain, Grizz felt that something was missing. A local saloon offers a free dog, but she turns out to be Foofy the miniature poodle. She won't stand up to the local mountain lions and she won't help herd the cows, but Foofy catches tin dinner plates in her mouth, which gives Grizz the notion of making and marketing the discs as Grizz-Bs. Grizz and his pardners specialize in grossout humor, and the extraordinarily vivid full-color oil paintings display the cowhand quartet as caricatures with oversized heads; Grizz himself looks sort of like a more rough-hewn cross between Lyndon Johnson and Spiro Agnew, an interesting countenance for a child's picture book. Copyright (C) Muze Inc. 2005. For personal use only. All rights reserved.