HOCUS POCUS
by Sylvie Desrosiers & illustrated by Rémy Simard
Insouciant bunny meets slow-witted bulldog in this nearly wordless romp.
No sooner do Mr. Magic the magician and his canine sidekick stretch out for a snooze than a blue rabbit hops from the top hat on the nearby bureau. A bucket of veggies in the adjacent kitchen looks enticing—but there’s a problem: how to get past the sleeping dog? Very simply drawn and colored in an angular retro style, the figures in Simard’s unframed sequential panels display cartoonishly exaggerated expressions. These are perfectly suited to a chase that begins with the crunch of a stepped-on peanut and escalates into a kitchen free-for-all in which spilled milk and sprayed ketchup play major roles. Sound effects and speech bubbles that often contain nothing but single images or punctuation marks give a handy assist: "FLUMP!"; "[light bulb]"; "PBBTTTHH!"; "!?" In the end the bunny gets its carrot, and the poor dog definitely comes off second best.