In the first Harry and Horsie adventure, the imaginative boy and his toy friend were seen rocketing into space. In Cookiebot!, they take on snack time. Harry has been happily playing with Lego until his stomach starts grumbling. Entering the kitchen, he finds the cookies out of reach. Naturally, his only option is to construct a six-storey robot to get them down. But when the robot gets a taste for cookies, it goes on a rampage through the streets of Manhattan, with Harry still inside. Will Horsie be able to save him?

While Cookiebot! is enjoyable, there is really nothing new here aside from the  book’s striking visual style. Calgary’s Lincoln Agnew uses a retro-poster look (bold crayon colours, screentone-dots shading, and faux-distressing), along with his own distinctive chunky cartooning. The result is dynamic, yet still abstract, allowing the reader’s imagination to run wild. However, Agnew’s images don’t always mesh with the story by Montreal’s Katie Van Camp. There are certain beats missing, which makes for a jarring read. There are some incongruencies, too: when Harry goes to the kitchen, we’re told he can’t reach the jar, yet the picture has him seemingly in reach of the top of the fridge.

Cookiebot! is a little like the opening scene in Toy Story 3: a super-charged story drawn from the overflowing imagination of a child, one saturated with the visuals of cartoons and Hollywood films. That’s a plus: the overall execution may be a little clunky, but there’s no shortage of action here.