I read all of the Dog Man books
new blog post is up!
Remember when I read dozens of Baby-Sitters Club books? Yeah, I did that again, but this time with the Dog Man series. Read the full post here; a few paragraphs of preview are below.
So I decided to read all the Dog Man books
The most common reference requests I get at the library are probably where to find the Dog Man books and where to find the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books. And while I’m young enough to have once been the target audience for Wimpy Kid, I was certainly past that age for Dog Man, a spinoff of Captain Underpants that began in 2017. I started to wonder why kids love these books so much; when the movie came out, our 200-odd copies of the series pretty much disappeared from the shelves. At one point, I swear we only had two copies that weren’t checked out.
As you may know, I recently spent a month rereading the Baby-Sitters Club books, and it was incredibly fun and also deranged. So why not do something even more deranged and binge-read a series that I’m entirely unfamiliar with? Prior to this, I had only ever read one Dav Pilkey book: my cousin’s beaten-up copy of The Adventures of Ook and Gluk, which went out of print a few years back because of racial stereotypes that Pilkey apologized for. Not exactly the best introduction to his work. In comparison, Dog Man is woke AF, and this is literally a series about a police dog.
Dog Man lore you may not know
Dog Man is created when a bomb, fashioned by a villainous talking cat named Petey, blows up a policeman’s head and a dog’s body, so a team of doctors sew the remaining parts (policeman’s body, dog’s head) together into Dog Man. Dog Man and Petey proceed to have a dynamic reminiscent of Perry the Platypus and Dr. Doofenshmirtz from Phineas and Ferb. Petey tries to do evil things, often with odd contraptions; Dog Man always arrests him and disables the contraption. Dog Man never speaks and rarely even barks, which I was surprised by. Not sure why Petey can talk and Dog Man can’t; I think it’s a Goofy vs. Pluto situation.
Petey starts to undergo some significant character development as the series progresses, and the story starts to become more about him than about Dog Man himself. (The thing about Dog Man himself is that his character has to be fairly stagnant just because of the nature of the story; the whole shtick is he’s a man and also a dog and will behave like a dog forever.) Early on, Petey clones himself to try to do more evil and ends up with a loving, good-hearted kitten, and “Li’l Petey,” who calls him Papa, slowly but changes Petey’s heart as well. He’s the sweetest and probably my favorite character in the series because of how much he’s willing to see the good in everyone.
From there, you get more and more of a view into Petey’s (incredibly tragic) backstory: His dad left the family, he and his mom became homeless, his mom died, he committed a crime and went to jail, and when he got out of jail, nobody would give him a job, so he had to resort to a life of crime. At some point, probably because of his dad, the tip of his tail got cut off. I truly did not expect this book series to tackle homelessness, childhood trauma, and prison recidivism, but in fact, those aren’t even all the societal issues you’ll hear about. I told you, Dog Man is woke in comparison to Ook and Gluk.
Want to experience my gradual descent into madness as I get way too deep into these books? Read the full blog post!
Other news
The one-year anniversary of Dear Wendy’s publication was last week! Can’t believe it’s been a whole year; I feel like this has been the wackiest year of my life.
I’m going to be doing the Chicagoland Indie Bookstore Day crawl this weekend and signing copies of Dear Wendy along the way. I may or may not send out a list of stores that have a signed copy afterwards; we’ll see how many I manage to hit.
Next month (May 14), I’m giving a presentation at the Helen Plum Library in Lombard, IL on how to get published. If you’re in the area, maybe I’ll see you there. Registration is required.
I don’t believe this has been officially announced by the library yet, but I’m doing a book talk at the Schaumburg Township Library on July 23. I’ll have more details when it gets closer to the event.
xoxo,
Ann
Congrats on the one-year anniversary for Dear Wendy! Also--my youngest sister (10) loves Dog Man. It seems surprisingly deep, especially Petey's character.