The Cartoon Introduction to Statistics. By Grady Klein and Alan Dabney. Hill and Wang; 225 pages; $30. Buy from Amazon.com IN 1993 the world shifted ever so slightly for American students trying to understand basic statistics. "The Cartoon Guide to Statistics" promised readers they would chew over binomial distributions and conditional probability with the same ease with which they enjoyed Spider-Man. It was an evil trick. The cartoon guide, by Larry Gonick, an illustrator, and Woollcott Smith, an academic number-cruncher, had nice pictures but was, essentially, a rather heavy stats textbook. Now, like a superhero coming to save the day, in flies "The Cartoon Introduction to Statistics" by Grady Klein, a cartoonist, and Alan Dabney, a statistics professor. This book (no relation to its predecessor) avoids maths formulae almost entirely and explains the basics of statistical thinking in a fun, easy-going way. Its biggest contribution is to tackle the difficulties that arise from collecting data "in the wild" - in the real world and not in the laboratory. This makes the book more useful than those that just stick to the concepts. Like its older rival, the "Introduction" uses the comic-book format to lighten the subject and turn it into a series of stories. In this case, two roughly drawn gents in white lab coats and with oversized eyes have to solve myriad problems, such as figuring out the length of all the worms in a swamp based on a small sample. So they call on statistics to help. "We don't know everything, but that doesn't mean we know nothing," reminds a globular character on a few occasions. If statistics can ever be made fun, then this book shows how. In one data-related puzzle, readers must ponder whether women or men fly dragons faster. But in order to do so, they must take into account a third variable: the different speeds of dragons themselves. Another section wonders whether the people of one planet hate the aliens on another - and shows brilliantly how to quantify non-numerical variables. It is not perfect. Readers have to wait until page 65 before reaching the first serious concept, standard deviation, which feels too late. And the book covers less ground than a stats primer ought. But it will serve as a useful field guide for people who know very little about statistics - and it has a high probability of being enjoyed.