Dav Pilkey
Dav Pilkey is an author.
Long before the underwear there were dogs. Pilkey's credits open in the early 1990s with picture books and easy readers: the Dragon stories, a monster-movie parody starring a giant dog, a sausage dog with a Halloween problem, a family of extremely stupid rabbits, and a quiet, sincere book about gargoyles that sits oddly beside all of it. The drawing is loose and confident and the jokes are relentlessly, deliberately childish.
Then Captain Underpants, which reframed the whole enterprise. The conceit is that two fourth-graders, George Beard and Harold Hutchins, write and draw the comics you are holding, hypnotise their principal into becoming a superhero in his underwear, and narrate the results badly on purpose. Misspellings, flip-o-rama pages you animate with your own thumb, comics-within-the-book drawn in a deliberately worse hand than the rest. It is engineered with total precision to look like it was made by children, which is exactly why children trust it.
Dog Man extended the trick into full-colour graphic novels and became the larger success, and the Cat Kid Comic Club books push it further by handing the pages to a cast of young characters making their own comics in wildly different styles. Pilkey publishes under his characters' names as well as his own. The whole body of work is aimed squarely at the reluctant reader, the kid who has been taught that books are homework, and on that specific job nobody in children's publishing has been better.
Books (61)
- The Adventures of Captain Underpants (2002)
- Dog Man and Cat Kid (2017)
- Dog Man Unleashed (2016)
- Cat Kid Comic Club (2020)
- Captain Underpants and the Attack of the Talking Toilets (2002)
- Three More Wedgie-powered Adventures in one (2006)
- Ricky Ricotta's Mighty Robot #1 (2003)
- Captain Underpants and the Perilous Plot of Professor Poopypants (2002)
- Captain Underpants and the Preposterous Plight of the Purple Potty People (2006)
- Captain Underpants and the Wrath of the Wicked Wedgie Woman (2001)
- Captain Underpants and the Invasion of the Incredibly Naughty Cafeteria Ladies from Outer Space (2004)
- The Adventures of Ook and Gluk, Kung Fu Cavemen from the Future (2010)
- The All New Captain Underpants Extra-Crunchy Book O' Fun 2 (2002)
- The Dumb Bunnies (1995)
- The Dumb Bunnies go to the zoo (1997)
- Captain Underpants and the terrifying return of Tippy Tinkletrousers (2012)
- Captain Underpants and the Big, Bad Battle of the Bionic Booger Boy, part 2 (2005)
- Dragon's Fat Cat (Dragon Tales) (1995)
- Cat Kid Comic Club #3 : a Graphic Novel (2022)
- The Invasion of the Potty Snatchers (2011)
- Dragon's Halloween (Pilkey, Dav, Dragon Tales.) (2003)
- Ricky Ricotta's Giant Robot Vs. the Voodoo Vultures from Venus (Ricky Ricotta) (2001)
- Dragon gets by (1991)
- The Scarlet Shedder (2020)
- Captain Underpants and the Tyrannical Retaliation of the Turbo Toilet 2000 (2014)
- Captain Underpants and the revolting revenge of the radioactive robo-boxers (2013)
- The Captain Underpants Extra-Crunchy Book O Fun (2001)
- Cat Kid Comic Club : Influencers : a Graphic Novel (2023)
- Ricky Ricotta's Mighty Robot vs. The Unpleasant Penguins from Pluto (Ricky Ricotta's Mighty Robot #9) (2016)
- Ricky Ricotta's Mighty Robot vs. the Uranium unicorns from Uranus (2005)
Where to start with Dav Pilkey
For a child who does not want to read, Dog Man is the answer: full-colour comics, big panels, a story about a police dog and a policeman combined into one officer, and a reading level that never gets in the way of the joke. It is the single most effective book in this list for converting a reluctant seven-year-old.
The Adventures of Captain Underpants is the original and still the funniest, and the sequels are interchangeable enough that Captain Underpants and the Attack of the Talking Toilets or Captain Underpants and the Perilous Plot of Professor Poopypants serve equally well as a second helping. Ricky Ricotta's Mighty Robot #1 is the gentler option for a younger or more anxious reader, giant robot included, toilet humour largely absent.
Then Cat Kid Comic Club, the most interesting thing he has done lately: a book about making comics, carrying a spread of art styles inside it, and the closest a children's book has come to being a drawing workshop. The picture books, Dogzilla and The Dumb Bunnies among them, are early Pilkey and hold up fine.
Dog Man
The graphic-novel series that turned into the biggest thing in children's publishing. They are genuinely well-made comics, with running gags that pay off books later, and the Cat Kid spin-off is explicitly about teaching children to make their own.
Captain Underpants
Twelve books of deliberate bad taste, frequently banned and frequently the first book a reluctant reader finishes on their own. The flip-o-rama pages are much of the reason: they make the book a thing you do rather than a thing you read.
The picture books and the other series
The work before and alongside the big series. The Paperboy is the outlier, a quiet Caldecott Honor picture book with nothing funny in it at all. The Dumb Bunnies and Hallo-Wiener are the comic ones, and Ricky Ricotta is the illustrated chapter series for younger readers.