46 pages • 1 hour read
Dav PilkeyDog Man Unleashed
Fiction | Graphic Novel/Book | Middle Grade | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Dav Pilkey
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism.
David “Dav” Pilkey is an award-winning author known for his graphic narratives for younger readers. He is best known for the humorous graphic novels in his Captain Underpants and Dog Man series. He began writing early in life. Pilkey has both dyslexia and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and when he was still in elementary school, he was often sent to work in the hallway as a punishment for disrupting class. He began to work on his Captain Underpants character in that hallway. In 1987, he won a competition for student writers. As part of the award, his first book, World War Won, was published.
From 1991 to 1993, Pilkey published the five books in his Dragon series. These books were later adapted into a Treehouse TV television series with 78 episodes that aired from 2004 to 2007. From 1994 to 1997, Pilkey published the Dumb Bunny series under the pen name Sue Denim. He published his first Captain Underpants book, Captain Underpants, in 1997. This book was so popular that Pilkey wrote 13 more books in the series, concluding it in 2015. While writing this series, Pilkey also authored the full-length graphic novels The Adventures of Super Diaper Baby (2002), The Adventures of Ook and Gluk: Kung-Fu Cavemen from the Future (2010), and Super Diaper Baby 2: Invasion of the Potty Snatchers (2011). These three books are spin-offs from the Captain Underpants universe: the protagonists of the Captain Underpants books, two children named George Beard and Harold Hutchins, are supposed to be the authors of both the Super Diaper Baby series and Ook and Gluk.
Pilkey began the Dog Man series in 2016; these books are also published under the names George Beard and Harold Hutchins, as if these Captain Underpants characters were the writer and illustrator of the Dog Man series. Pilkey has written dozens of other books as well, including the Cat Kid series and the Ricky Ricotta’s Mighty Robot series. The Captain Underpants series has inspired two films and a television series adaptation.
Pilkey has won multiple honors and awards, including the 1997 Caldecott Honor for The Paperboy and the 1998 California Young Reader Medal for Dog Breath!: The Horrible Trouble with Hally Tosis. In 2016, he received the Milner Award as the year’s favorite children’s book author, and in 2019, he was named Comic Industry Person of the Year.
Pilkey is committed to inclusive representations in his books after the scrutiny that The Adventures of Ook and Gluck: Kung-Fu Cavemen from the Future received, specifically that it perpetuates racist stereotypes and imagery in its depiction of Asian characters and cultures. In 2021, Pilkey and Scholastic, his publishing house, made the joint decision to cease publication of the novel. This decision came after Billy Kim, a Korean American father, started a Change.org petition and demanded an apology from the publisher after borrowing the title from the library to read to his children. Pilkey later apologized to Kim and his older son for the book’s racist imagery and stereotyping of Asians. Pilkey has since donated all proceeds from the title to organizations focused on preventing violence against Asian people and promoting diversity in publishing (Morales, Christina. “Scholastic Halts Distribution of Book by ‘Captain Underpants’ Author.” The New York Times, 2021).
Series Context: Dog Man
The Dog Man series of comedic graphic novels for young readers began in 2016 with Dog Man. To date, the series includes Dog Man, Dog Man Unleashed, Dog Man: A Tale of Two Kitties, Dog Man and Cat Kid, Dog Man: Lord of the Fleas, Dog Man: Brawl of the Wild, Dog Man: For Whom the Ball Rolls, Dog Man: Fetch 22, Dog Man: Grime and Punishment, Dog Man: Mothering Heights, Dog Man: Twenty Thousand Fleas Under the Sea, Dog Man: The Scarlet Shredder, and Dog Man: Big Jim Begins. In 2025, DreamWorks and Universal Pictures released an animated movie, also titled Dog Man.
These books feature a police officer who has the head of a dog and the body of a man—along with the strengths and weaknesses of both. He is supposed to be the world’s “greatest cop” (11). Dog Man’s nemesis for the early part of the series is Petey the Cat, an irritable and crafty ginger-colored cat full of absurd criminal schemes. In the series’ first book, Petey is responsible for creating Dog Man from a police dog, Greg, and a human police officer, Officer Knight. Petey blows them up with a bomb, and the only way they can be saved is via an operation that joins Greg’s head to Officer Knight’s body. Later in the series, Petey has a redemption arc after becoming a father. Dog Man and Petey work together in some of the later books and become friendly.
The Dog Man series is a spin-off from Pilkey’s Captain Underpants series. In the Captain Underpants books, George Beard and Harold Hutchins are two young people who write and illustrate comic books; the Dog Man books are supposed to be some of the works they have created together. The Dog Man books share the same absurd sense of humor that characterizes the Captain Underpants books, and they are illustrated in the same bright, energetic, and cartoonish style. The Captain Underpants series frequently appears on the American Library Association’s list of titles people most frequently attempt to censor or ban due to its “toilet” humor and complaints that it includes “offensive language, unsuited for age group, [and] violence” (Hossain, Samia. “Fighting for Captain Underpants.” ACLU, 2014). Because there is not as much of this humor in the Dog Man series, these titles have seldom been the target of book-banning efforts.
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