Deep Sea Divers

Dive beneath the waves and you land in "Deep Sea Divers," a cheerfully overstuffed scene from Martin Handford's Where's Wally series, first published in 1990. The picture splits into two worlds. Along the top, little boats rock on choppy water while crowds swarm across rocky islands. Below the surface, a great swath of blue swallows everything, packed edge to edge with mermaids, divers, fishermen dangling their lines, and sea creatures up to all kinds of nonsense. Every square inch holds a tiny joke or a small disaster waiting to be spotted.

The whole point, of course, is the search. Handford hid Wally somewhere in the watery muddle, along with a cast of other characters, so finding him takes patience and a sharp eye. Drawn in a flat, map-like view with bright cartoon colors, the image lets you scan the entire crowd at once without ever quite catching everything. These puzzle books swept the world in the late 1980s and 1990s and charmed kids and grown-ups alike. No hidden meaning lurks here, just the plain fun of hunting through the chaos and grinning at the goofy little stories tucked into the deep.