Little Red Riding Hood and her ...

Little Red Riding Hood and her be^te noire, the Big Bad Wolf, made their first joint appearance nearly 300 years ago in Charles Perrault’s 1697 collection of tales titled “Contes de Ma Mere L’Oye” (“Tales of Mother Goose”). The kid in the crimson cape, her nemesis and Red’s always at-risk Grandma have reappeared in so many versions since that jaded readers may wonder if yet another retelling is really necessary. The answer is an enthusiastic yes, if the new version is as inventively original and as engagingly illustrated as author-artist Lisa Campbell Ernst’s LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD (Simon & Schuster: $15).

The antic Ernst has transplanted her version to the American prairie and populated it with gently rounded, cartoon-like characters that have the huggable look of stuffed toys. There’s nothing huggable about Red’s strong-minded farmer Grandma, however, who proves more than a match for the muffin-munching wolf. This breezy, newfangled version of the story will have readers laughing out loud and then racing to the kitchen to test the appended recipe for Grandma’s wheat berry muffins.

A baker’s dozen of America’s leading children’s book illustrators talk about their life and art in Pat Cummings’ TALKING WITH THE ARTISTS, VOLUME TWO (Simon & Schuster: $19.95). In addition to sharing what Cummings labels as “My Story,” each artist answers eight questions, including the proverbial “Where do you get your ideas from?” and “Where do you work?”--the latter answer enhanced by photographs of the artists’ studios. Of particular appeal to kids--who are, after all, the intended audience for this delightfully browsable book--are childhood photographs of the artists along with samples of their own youthful artistic endeavors. In retrospect, some of these seem eerily prophetic; a case in point is William Joyce’s “Dinosaur Mambo,” drawn at age 5. The adult Joyce, of course, is the creator of “Dinosaur Bob,” one of the most popular picture books of the last 10 years.

Fans of David McPhail’s “Pigs Aplenty, Pigs Galore!” will rejoice at the reappearance of his pride of peripatetic porkers in PIGS AHOY! (Dutton: $14.99). This time around, the swinging swine are acting “wicked cool” aboard a cruise ship, where they run afoul of a stern captain who takes a dim view of their iconoclastic antics. There hasn’t been this much zany fun aboard a ship since the Marx brothers set sail in “Monkey Business.”

Welcome back as well to the animal heroes of German author-artist Helme Heine’s award-winning “Friends.” This time around, the FRIENDS GO ADVENTURING (McElderry Books: $16). Convinced that “nothing exciting ever happened on the farm,” Charlie Rooster, Johnny Mouse and Fat Percy the pig “set out in search of adventure in the great, wide world.” What they encounter has the same episodic extravagance as a small child’s imagination, gorgeously embellished by Heine’s splashy watercolor pictures.