Every now and then, there pops up in the world a man who can take the trials and traumas of the people around him and reduce them to child-like simplicity. Often, the books these men produce are taken for children's stories, but actually they are much more adult than most adults care to admit.

Jonathan Swift was such a man with Gulliver's Travels. Lewis Carroll with Alice in Wonderland, and Walt Kelley with Pogo are others. And now to this list is added the name of Frank Tashlin and his things that aren't.

Tashlin is a Hollywood director because he likes to eat. He is a cartoonist because that's the only way he can tell people about themselves. His The Possum That Didn't and The Bear That Wasn't may be remembered as two of the freshest books of drawings to appear on the absurd ideas of people and animals. His latest, The World That Isn't, is just as clever, it not as original.

Tashlin tells the story of the world that was created, "brand-new, bright, and shiny," and the first two people on it, a 20th century man and woman. From here he traces man's evolution to "the Age of Civilization," where all men wear fig leaves and live in the Garden of Eden.

In between, he follows man through the stone age (tenement dwelling), the ice age (wild cocktail parties), and the age of reason (where man learns superstitions). The story is told with a minimum of text and many marvelously clear drawings.

The text, alone, sounds plausible enough. "Man discovered the wheel," says Tashlin, but in the middle of a double page spread of havoc on a street corner where undertakers give bargain sales on coffins and ambulance drivers count victims on adding machines.

"Man discovered art," he goes on, next to the picture of a public men's room wall covered with crude sketches of nude women. And, "Man worshipped many Gods," appears on a page where men and women are bowing before sex, money, alcohol, cigarettes, and Hopalong Cassidy.

The rest of the story, how man discovered the atom bomb and began to think and then DID something about it, is as delightful as it is simple. Tashlin has taken an old idea and given it his own special poke, which makes The World That Isn't laughable, believable, and desirable.