There’s a point in most kids’ reading lives where they go all-in on comic-style books.
And it’s completely fair enough.
Books like Diary of a Wimpy Kid are fast, funny, and the child is telling the story. What’s not to love for an eight-year-old?
Greg’s voice is unfiltered, complainy, and recognisable to most kids of a certain age. They love being inside another kid’s head (not an adult’s idea of one).
It’s the same reason reality TV works (hi to all of my RHOBH fans).
Humans just love watching other humans, being humans.
The illustrations definitely help too. They look like kid’s doodles. And half the jokes live in the pictures. You can’t replicate that in a normal chapter book, and the kids who love this format are properly obsessed.
And the topics are super relatable. School chaos. Cafeteria politics. Locker drama. Embarrassing parents. Annoying siblings. Hopeless teachers. Stuff every kid will know about.
And the chapters are short bursts. Mini episodes, basically. A child can dip in for ten minutes, put the book down, come back an hour later to a fresh joke. Low commitment, high reward.
That’s the mix that makes them stick.
Why you don’t need to wean them off illustrated books…yet
A lot of parents I know worry that comic-style books aren’t serious enough.
Some even say, “they’re junk food for the brain.”
I don’t buy it.
These books have basically taken classics like Roald Dahl and dragged them into the 21st century.
The silly humour. The pictures. The family-friendliness. It’s all there. Just in a slightly louder, more visual shape.
The illustrated middle-grade format is its own art form.
Liz Pichon, Aaron Blabey, Dav Pilkey are seriously skilled writers, not stepping-stones to ‘proper’ books.
As a former English teacher, I’d put them on the same shelf as anything else.
Also, the shift toward longer, less-illustrated reads happens naturally. It comes with age, or with a child finding a story they can’t put down. Pushing it before they’re ready usually kills their reading habit altogether.
A child reading three Wimpy Kid books a month is reading.
There’s nothing else to it in my opinion.
Five books like Diary of a Wimpy Kid
But if you think they might be ready to switch it up. Here are five that would be my go-to.
Some of them look very similar. Others are doing a slightly different kind of silly.
All of them should keep the giggles going.
The Bad Guys: Mission Unpluckable (Aaron Blabey)
The Bad Guys – Mission Unpluckable
If your child reads Wimpy Kid mostly for the pictures, they’ll love this. It’s basically a comic strip in book form. Speech bubbles. Big cartoon faces. Drawings on every single page.
The set-up is genuinely funny. A wolf, a piranha, a snake and a shark decide they want to be heroes for a change. The wolf is the leader. The piranha is the troublemaker. They bicker the way primary-school kids bicker when they’ve been forced into a group project.
I will warn you though that it’s the kind of book that leads to your child reading the funny bits to you while you’re trying to load the dishwasher.
They’re really short books. A confident reader can finish one in a single bedtime. Loads of sequels in the series, so when your child wants the next one, you’ve got somewhere to go.
Mission Unpluckable is book two and a great place to start.
Dork Diaries: Tales from a Not So Fabulous Life (Rachel Renée Russell)
Dork Diaries – Tales from a not so fabulous life
If they love Wimpy Kid and you’d like to put a girl narrator in their hand for a change, Dork Diaries is the easiest swap. It’s a diary. Drawings on nearly every page.
The ‘do NOT read’ running gag is still there (which is the only reason any child has ever picked up a fictional diary, let’s be honest).
Nikki is 14, going to a private school where everyone’s richer and shinier than she is. She draws every cringey thing that happens to her.
The voice is Greg Heffley but written by a teenage girl. School lockers, mean classmates, embarrassing parents. The same world Wimpy Kid lives in, just from a different desk.
The series is fifteen-plus books long. When your child gets invested in Nikki, that’s months of bedtime reads sorted.
The 91-Storey Treehouse (Andy Griffiths)
This one is silly in a different way. Every storey of the treehouse is a new impossible thing.
A robotic forest. A spin-the-wheel-of-misfortune. A baby dinosaur petting zoo.
The ‘plot’ is mostly the two main characters climbing through madness. Your child will read it laughing and then go grab some paper to draw their own treehouse with all their own daft inventions.
Drawings on nearly every page. The pages are short and the jokes are thick and fast. Kids flip back and forth to re-read their favourite bits. It feels like an activity book and story rolled into one.
This is the seventh in the series with plenty more to come. Once your child is into the rhythm of these books, they’ll want all of them.
Griffiths writes other ridiculous books too (Just Stupid!, Zombie Bums from Uranus, Killer Koalas From Outer Space). The titles alone are doing the work.
Captain Underpants and the Attack of the Talking Toilets (Dav Pilkey)
Captain Underpants and the Attack of the Talking Toilets
For the child who has just discovered toilet humour and genuinely believes they invented it: Dav Pilkey is your man.
Captain Underpants is comic-strip drawings on most pages and unapologetic silliness all the way through. The flip-o-rama pages, where you actually flip a corner back and forth to make a tiny animation, are a Pilkey signature. Kids go completely feral for them.
It’s pitched a bit younger than Wimpy Kid (around age 7), so it lands best for the seven- or eight-year-old who’s just got into Wimpy Kid. For older readers, point them at Pilkey’s Dog Man series, which tends to be the bigger hit.
Parents who go a bit green at toilet humour, I hear you. But this is the gateway to a writer kids love. You’ll find yourself reading bits of it back to your friends within a week.
My Brother is a Superhero (David Solomons)
This is a bit of a longer one. Fewer drawings, more story. But the jokes are the same brand of funny as Wimpy Kid, so your child won’t feel like they’ve been handed a completely foreign book.
Luke is a total comic-book nerd. His older brother, while Luke is in the toilet (of course), accidentally meets an alien and gets given superpowers. Luke spends the whole book trying to get over the unfairness.
Wimpy Kid is mostly diary entries about everyday school chaos. This has a story your child will actually follow from start to finish.
There’s a full series too (My Cousin is a Time Traveller, My Evil Twin is a Supervillain, My Gym Teacher is an Alien Overlord), so when your child finishes one, there’s another waiting.
If they’re ready for something a bit longer
These two are bridges, not graduations. Wimpy Kid fans will spot the humour straight away. They just have a tiny bit more reading to do themselves.
Billionaire Boy (David Walliams)
This one feels the same in terms of humour.
Fewer illustrations than Wimpy Kid, but the jokes hit in the same way. Walliams writing in the Roald Dahl tradition. The obvious next step for a Wimpy Kid fan.
The story follows a boy with a billionaire dad who’d swap it all for a real friend. Funny on the surface, with a warm friendship story underneath. There’s an emotional pull Wimpy Kid doesn’t have. Your child will laugh in one chapter, then root for Joe the next. They might even get teary near the end (you have been warned).
Chapters are short but the jokes definitely land the same. Your eight-year-old will fly through it.
Cosmic (Frank Cottrell Boyce)
This one is funny and absurd. A boy who’s tall for his age keeps being mistaken for an adult, and through a chain of mishaps, ends up in space.
Your child will giggle for the first chapter and keep turning pages for the next ten.
The sentences are longer than Wimpy Kid sentences. The paragraphs are too. By the end, your child will have read a chunky middle-grade book. Still funny, just stretchier.
Good for the eight or nine-year-old who’s halfway through Wimpy Kid and wants something with more story.
Explore more without the cost
Trying something new can feel a bit nerve-wracking. Where do you even start? Invest a small fortune in a new set of paperbacks? Or test your patience joining the waiting list at the library?
If you fancy the variety without the cost, all seven books in this article are on Little Reads. Your child can start with The Bad Guys tonight and work their way through the rest at bedtime.
Little Reads is built for children who already love books. If your little one is still finding their feet with reading, there are better-suited apps out there with phonics tools and reading levels.
But if you’ve got a Wimpy Kid fan who just needs more, there’s 3,000+ hand-picked books to dig into.