Dog Man: Half Dog, Half Man, All Hero

Like lots of twentysomethings, I grew up reading Dav Pilkey’s gloriously silly Captain Underpants books. Starring pint-sized troublemakers George and Harold, whose homemade comic books take on a life of their own after they hypnotically transform their principal into the titular superhero, Captain Underpants convinced a swatch of young readers that books could be fun, with plenty of potty humor and features like the “Flip-O-Rama” chapter (in which readers are encouraged to flip the pages quickly to animate slightly different images, and of course to provide their own sound effects, with hilarious results). Now Pilkey is at it again, expanding the Underpants universe with a new series ostensibly based on another of George and Harold’s wacky creations: Dog Man.
After an explosion, a police officer and his partner, Greg the police dog, are sewn together in an emergency surgery to form a formidable crime-fighting hybrid. Endowed with the head of a dog and the body of a human, there’s nothing Dog Man can’t do, whether he’s fighting evil robots, battling giant anthropomorphic tacos, or hunting down his archnemesis, Petey the Cat. Pilkey knows his audience, tapping into the middle grade zeitgeist with humor, insight, and abandon. This isn’t Pilkey’s first foray into canine characters; his picture books Dogzilla and Dog Breath also feature man’s best friend. Nor is this his first robot rodeo; Pilkey’s engaging Ricky Ricotta series costars a giant robot, who serves as a burly protector to a shy little mouse. In some ways, Dog Man is a pastiche of some of Pilkey’s most popular themes (and yes, poo does make a guest appearance).

Each adventure is “written” by George and “drawn” by Harold in comic book format as Pilkey captures the timeless simplicity, exuberance, and earnestness of childhood creation. It’s clear that bottling that amateurish spirit is very much Pilkey’s intent; in his introduction, he reflects on growing up with dyslexia and how humor helped him overcome the frustration and embarrassment he felt at being unable to read with the same ease as his classmates. “I hope this book will motivate kids to use their imaginations,” Pilkey says, “and create their own stories.” The scratched-out typos and minimalistic drawings in Dog Man will certainly help with that, implicitly reminding the reader they needn’t be perfect at a skill to create something worthwhile, while giving them a sense of what an early draft of an effort can look like. Meanwhile, “how-to-draw” guides and the return of Flip-O-Rama explicitly prod kids into taking the all-important step into actually making art themselves.
With exciting adventures, an absurd backstory, and a hero kids can really sink their teeth into (so to speak), Dog Man’s got plenty of heart, and young readers for whom Captain Underpants sparked an interest in reading will find that Pilkey’s new work fans those flames.