Dog Man by Dav Pilkey

This graphic novel (essentially a long comic book) begins by introducing George and Harold. If you have read the Captain Underpants books, you will recognize the boys. They explain how they became friends in Kindergarten and started making comic books together. Dog Man is one of their comics.

Dog Man was created after a police dog and police officer were injured. The police dog’s body was dying and the officer’s head was dying, so they cut off the dog’s head and attached it to the officer’s body. What they created was the greatest cop ever.

His first case is to capture Petey, a villain cat. Petey comes after Dog Man with a giant vacuum but Dog Man jumps in the water. Dog Man is sucked into the giant vacuum. The vacuum bag is filling up with water and Petey accidentally claws through it. It explodes! Dog Man captures Petey and brings him to cat jail.

In his second case (Chapter 2), Dog Man spies on the mayor and finds out that she has an evil plan. She gets the police chief fired and makes her evil robot the new chief. The mayor helps Petey escape from cat jail and then makes bad guy stores like Hackers “R” Us. The robot chief tells the police officers they cannot go anywhere near the new stores. Petey doesn’t like bad guy competition though and scares them all away. The mayor sends the robot chief to recapture Petey, but Petey ends up destroying the robot. Dog Man captures Petey again. The town honors Dog Man for his service and at the ceremony Dog Man reveals the mayor was behind everything. The old police chief is reinstated.

In another adventure, Petey wants to find out why Dog Man is so smart. He escapes from jail and spies on Dog Man. He sees Dog Man reading and knows that is what makes him smart. So Petey invents the “Word B Gone 2000” which takes all the words out of every book in the world except for his own books. After a couple of days, the whole world turns dumb. Petey can do whatever he wants to and no one is smart enough to stop him. Many disgusting and ridiculous things happen. While trying to figure out who pooped in the chief’s office, Dog Man follows Petey and finds his secret stash of books. Dog Man reads and becomes smart again. Then he takes the books and brings them to the school so the children can become smart again. Petey finds out and tries to stop him, but is unsuccessful. Dog Man brings him back to jail. Dog Man then discovers that he is the one who pooped in the chief’s office.

The final adventure for Dog Man in this book begins with Petey in jail. He receives a package of “living spray” which brings to life anything it is sprayed on. He sprays it on his hot dog and it comes to life. The hot dog steals the keys to open his cell and Petey makes a quick exit. The hotdog takes the living spray and sprays all of the hotdogs in the cafeteria. They form a hotdog army to take over the world. Meanwhile, Petey has blasted a dog whistle through the town and captured all the dogs, including Dog Man, in a cage. The hot dog army sprays the living spray on a giant Philly Cheese Steak mascot. It comes to life and tries to take over the world. Dog Man angers the Cheese Steak, so it rips the top off of the dog cage. Then the can of living spray is accidentally put in the fire where it explodes and destroys the giant Cheese Steak. All of the dogs run around and eat the living hot dogs and Petey is put back in jail.

Dog Man follows Dav Pilkey’s basic formula. It’s all about easy, usually disgusting, laughs with crazy over the top adventure. I have no problems with laughs and crazy adventure, but the entire book is pretty much dripping with gross potty humor and mindlessness. There is A LOT about poop in this book. There are certainly books that are worse and reading “fluff” is sometimes good. It’s a bit much for me, but here are the specifics for you to decide for yourself.

Language: Dumb, hate, poop, poo, panties, pee, ghost, darn, sucka, and gangsta are used. There are also purposely misspelled words like”supa” and “amn’t”.

Questionable behaviors: There is a sketch of a rear-end. Petey pulls down people’s pants and we can see their underwear. When everyone is “dumb”, two cops smash a pile of Dog Man’s poop between their hands

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1. Harold and George get really excited about comic comics together. They spend a lot of time on writing their comics. Is there anything you get really excited about and spend a lot of time on?
2. Petey discovers that reading makes Dog Man smart. Do you think reading actually makes you smarter? Why? Do you think the more you read, the smarter you will become?