A deep dive into Dog Man
Love to hate it, hate to love it.
I’ve spent the better part of my kids’ lives cultivating book-abundance because of the very few specific goals I have as a parent, one of them is to raise kids who love to read. We frequent the neighborhood library, a branch of which is luckily across the street from their school, and during the pandemic I would request and pick up piles upon piles of books on a weekly basis. I have run @kidsbookrecs, recommending curated picture books for years now, because I think some of the most free and imaginative thinking happens in the telling and illustrating of stories for children.
I also generally operate with a far more liberal attitude of abundance to book acquisition than any other consumption (candy, treats, eating out, clothes, etc. etc). This models a similar environment I grew up in: we spent many weekends at Borders or Barnes & Noble where the activity was to drink a flavored Italian soda from the cafe and mill around the bookstore for hours. Money was tight, but somehow never for books. But, nothing has challenged my orientation to providing book abundance more than the graphic novel series, Dog Man, a modern cultural phenomenon of utter contradictions that cannot be summed up very succinctly.
For starters: there comes a point when what you read to a kid and what a kid can read on their own comes to a very specific tension. The child’s comprehension is significantly beyond their reading abilities, so they’re sent back to the beginning in terms of simple sentence construction and recognizable phonemes. The books are—babyish—for lack of a better word, when their brains can handle the complexity of chapter books, but their reading abilities are at board book level. This gap closes in—and often fairly quickly—but where they often land in the world of independent beginning-to-read is precisely in the world of Dog Man.
Dog Man is the many-book series by the truly prolific Dav [sic] Pilkey, who also created multiple other series: Dragon Series, Dumb Bunnies, Big Dog & Little Dog, Captain Underpants, and Ricky Ricotta, all before he started Dog Man in 2016. Let’s start with the fact that the series was started relatively recently, and that there are already 13 only-available-in-hardcover editions, plus five books in the Cat Kid spinoff series since 2020, a musical, and a forthcoming movie. Wikipedia states that in 2020, 10 different Dog Man books made up 13% of all comic book sales, and this excludes sales by Scholastic, which is Dog Man’s actual publisher. Pilkey has alluded to the idea that there may be 20, 30, even 40 installments of Dog Man, raising the question of whether this is just the world’s most hardworking cartoonist, whether the books lack depth, whether this is just a maximally exploiting example of the series-based publishing model whose IP Scholastic is thirstily drinkig up, or whether these books are actually…good.
Dog Man, if you’re not familiar, is a spinoff of the aforementioned Captain Underpants series, and centers around a protagonist with the body of a police officer and the head of a dog that have come together to create a half-dog, half-man hero, also considered to be the world’s greatest cop. He is non-verbal, kind, and easily distracted, autobiographically influenced by Pilkey’s own experiences with ADHD. The other characters, a large and ever-growing assembly of animals, robots, and inanimate objects that end up coming to life, do speak, navigate a number of good / evil, relationship, and world-on-the-verge-of-destruction scenarios that are far too inane and non-linear to try and recap. (There is a very extensive Dog Man wiki though).
Dog Man lovers and even the hesitant supporters of all stripes share a common refrain: it made their kid fall in love with reading the way nothing else did. This is also true for Julian, who, before Dog Man, read ambivalently through some picture books or was only motivated to read when navigating Minecraft instructions. In the early Spring, the school had a Scholastic Book Fair, and in its aftermath he expressed remorse about not having chosen Dog Man and the Scarlet Shedder, the latest of the series. “Henry got the Scarlet Shredder[sic] at the book fair,” he relayed. “Javier got it at Barnes & Noble.” He could identify not just the friend, but also the bookstores and the point in time his many classmates had procured their latest of the Dog Man books, not realizing that parents like myself are plagued by their utter ubiquity and try to avoid that section of the bookstore.
“I was a skeptic until my hesitant reader daughter picked up a Dog Man and actually proclaimed she liked it,” says @maemaewatson in a comment on @themommybook’s post asking readers to rethink their skepticism of Dog Man, and credits Pilkey for enmeshing kids with a deep love of reading “at a time when our society is seeing an unprecedented drop off in reading for pleasure in the elementary and middle grades…”
This sentiment is echoed again and again, and when I asked on Instagram, if people’s kids read Dog Man, and how parents felt about Dog Man, again and again I heard it was a “gateway drug to reading” and that teachers saw evidence of this too.
But alongside the bouts of Julian now reading in silence, and for the first time staying up late to read to himself in bed, are the other parts of Dog Man that are much critiqued: the misspelled words, the constant reference to underwear, poop, and other potty talk, the exposed cartoon butts. It’s hardly a coincidence that at the moment of Dog Man being introduced into the home, something I’d successfully kept out of Ada’s hands (somehow), these behaviors escalated. Poop talk exploded, as did butt shaking, as did generally annoying behaviors of talking like an infantilized kitten in strange grammatical structures.
These questionably-literary choices are a pro to some and a major con to others. Some parents and teachers appreciate that the books speak to kids “on their level,” or noted that for kids with autism or ADHD, the humor and characters and relationship of the author to these conditions affected their perspective. As user @drj113 says in this review, “We live in a PC world, where kids are not allowed to be silly. I am all for a world of silliness and excitement, in the context of imaginative play — a world where spelling and grammar don't have to be perfect, and a world where we can talk about poo.”
Dog Man books also heavily feature cops, which is fraught for obvious reasons. Dog Man himself, is an ambiguously-aged half-cop, and then there’s the Chief (of police) and an array of other law-enforcement professionals, who are neither portrayed as particularly effective or intelligent, nor as malicious. They are, however, central to the plot and the police talk is constant. Many go nameless and are only known as “Mean Cops,” or “Mean Officers,” in addition to about a dozen named cops, like Maude, Milly, Buster, etc. who have slightly more dimension. All of the cops engage in a variety of behaviors with heavy reference to toilet bowls, pooping in one’s pants, pooping in each other’s filing cabinets, throwing bombs, wanton destruction of property, and so on.
This leads to a lot of the types of responses I got on my instagram (whose handles I’m leaving off on purpose, but thank you for your responses!):
When I looked deeper into the Dog Man Reddits and Goodreads and Amazon reviews it was a contrast of elation and despair shared far and wide. It’s hard to hate the content, and love the impact (on your kid’s reading habits) because we so want to believe that you are what you eat—or in fact, what you read. It’s also hard for a lot of people who love reading-at-all-costs and who endorse the idea of raising a reader to oppose any kind of book-limiting on principle. But, at the same time, standing for books centered around crass language, misspellings, what can appear as “copaganda,” and bad jokes that actually lead to visible evidence of fairly shitty behavior is hard to endorse.
The comment that really hit the nail on the head, was when one mother reviewed the books as such: “These books are truly disappointing because they're not entirely terrible.” This is the perfect encapsulation of where I stand: in the murky waters of Dog Man annoyance, waiting for this wave to pass while keeping my mouth tightly shut, deeply hoping Pilkey does not, in fact, write 40 installments. At the same time, I listen to my kid’s laughter from the other room, and then hear the quiet, and find him lost in a stack of books, flipping and flipping, and smiling to himself.
Throwing assorted recs at the wall:
To read: Kafka’s Baby, a newsletter of writing on parenting that I was glad to discover this week.
To eat: the black sesame soft-serve ice cream at Taiyaki NYC (in W’burg and Chinatown and maybe elsewhere)
To visit: The Pier 26 Science Playground in Tribeca featuring giant, climbable sturgeon that the kids loved and went to two days in a row last week.
To watch: Alex Edelman’s TV special, Just for Us, which I was sad to miss live but is an incredible piece of both craft and physical comedy.
To watch: Challengers, which I saw after a dinner of wine and popcorn, late at night in a crowded theater, and had some real critiques of but basically enjoyed. (6/10 but still worth seeing in a theater b/c aesthetics and the sound design).
To listen: Vibe Check with poet Ada Limon, who has the world’s most pleasing voice. I love what they say about poetry being as muchabout feeling as structure, word choice, or craft—and how poetry education leaves so much to be desired.
To listen: I know truly nothing about the fashion industry (except for shooting a lot of runway shows at NY Fashion Week in my early twenties), but am enjoying Fashion People, Lauren Sherman’s new podcast. I especially liked this conversation about The Dark Art of Celebrity Styling, which I listened to just before the Met Gala.
To make: This recipe for pickled rainbow chard stems (via my friend Leah). I didn’t have chard but replaced with fennel + red onion and i’ve eaten it on everything all week long. Beans, greens, rice, salads, etc, etc perfect.
Tell me all your deepest feelings about Dog Man, or other kid lit you love/hate. Also, Happy Mother’s Day to all who celebrate.
Am I the only one who found Dog Man to actually contain some deeper positive content, underneath all the other stuff? True, I haven’t looked at them in a while, but I feel like there were storylines that touched on the concept of kids dealing with divorce, or having a loved one in prison, and even the whole complicated adult’s-parent relationship (as in, you weren’t parented well, and now you’re trying to navigate dealing with your parent while figuring out how to raise your kid at the same time, and essentially fix what was modeled for you…) Was I putting way more into Dog Man than was there? 😆
Love this deep dive :) It's something I've thought about too as a mom of elementary readers who enjoy the books and a librarian at a public library who sees kids gravitate to the Dog Man shelf of the graphic novel section. I'm all for kids enjoying books they love! Sometimes, especially if kids mention they're on repeated readings, I'll also show them other graphic novels that are similarly fun like the Sparks! series by Ian Boothby or Bird & Squirrel by James Burks. (Here is a blog post I wrote with other favorite graphic novels https://maybeillbecomeafarmer.wordpress.com/2021/12/02/giant-list-of-graphic-novels/)
One other thing on this I only thought about recently is the fact that Dav Pilkey is dyslexic. I don't really like that some of the words are misspelled in the book, but a parent of a dyslexic child mentioned to me about how that aspect of the book is appealing to her child because the phonetic spelling is how he would expect it to be spelled. It was a take on it I hadn't thought of before.