ONCE UPON A ROYAL SUPERBABY

For a new highlight in the annals of Good Cooperation, the creators of Once Upon a Cool Motorcycle Dude (2005) reprise the winning premise and bring back much of the original cast. Two young narrators paired for a storytelling exercise have very different ideas of how the story should go: For him, there’s nothing finer than a mightily thewed superhero king—portrayed by Goto in suitably pulp-comics fashion astride a flying motorcycle outfitted with missile tubes—but she posits a flaxen-tressed Queen named Tenderheart (depicted with airy delicacy by Heyer) who marries “some guy, I forget his name” and decides to have a baby. Wrestling their plot back and forth, the two youngsters ultimately end up with superbaby riding a chopper of his own (the missiles replaced by a brace of formula bottles), rescuing his royal parents from a cyclops and flying them back home on a robot unicorn to a happily-ever-after. The artistic mashup illustrates the value of collaborative effort as hilariously as does the tumultuous tale. (Picture book. 6-9)