Quick answer, because the school holidays are long and you have things to do. The Dog Man books are for ages 6 to 12 on paper, and 7 to 9 in practice. That’s usually where the obsession really takes hold.
And yes, the books. If what you actually want to know is whether the Dog Man film is alright for your 5 year old, that’s a cinema-ratings question. This is about what age is Dog Man for as a reading series, which is the version that takes over bookshelves.
Dog Man is Dav Pilkey’s comic-style series about a police officer with a dog’s head (long story, there was an explosion), and it sits firmly at the daft end of the funny books shelf. If your child has found it, you already know there’s no going back.
So what age is Dog Man for? (It depends who you ask)
Look this up and you’ll find 6 to 9 on one site, 6 to 10 on another, 6 to 12 from the retailers and 7 and up somewhere else. Helpful.
They’re all describing different children. A 6 year old reads Dog Man with a grown-up nearby and howls at the pictures. An 8 year old inhales one in an afternoon, then reads it again. A 10 or 11 year old still keeps them on the shelf the way you keep a favourite film. There’s not much text on a page and the drawings do a lot of the storytelling, which is exactly why it works across such a wide band.
So the honest answer is 6 up, no real upper limit, and nothing in the later books changes that. Unlike some series (looking at you, Harry Potter), Dog Man does not grow darker as it goes. Book 13 is the same size and just as silly as book 1.
What’s actually in them
Cartoon violence of the anvil-and-explosion sort, a lot of toilet humour, and a villain cat called Petey whose schemes never quite work out. Nothing scary, nothing sad for longer than a page, no language worse than “butt”.
If the name Pilkey rings a bell, that’s because he’s the Dav Pilkey behind Captain Underpants, and Dog Man began life as a comic drawn by George and Harold, the boys from those books. Same style, slightly younger feel.
Is Dog Man OK for a 5 year old?
As a shared read, absolutely. The pictures carry the story, the chapters are short, and a 5 year old will get pretty much every joke (most of them involve the word “butt”).
Reading it alone is a different question, and it’s less about age than stage. Whenever your child is reading short chapter books happily on their own, Dog Man is comfortably within reach. If you want a general rule for judging this sort of thing, our guide on how to tell what age a book is for breaks it down properly.
What age is Bunny vs Monkey for?
Same shelf, same answer, with a British accent. Bunny vs Monkey is Jamie Smart’s strip about a woodland where Bunny would like some peace and Monkey (who arrived by rocket) would like the opposite. It started life in The Phoenix comic, so it’s built from short strips with a joke every page, and it suits ages 6 to 10.
If anything it skews a touch younger than Dog Man, because the strips stand alone. A child who can’t yet manage a whole story arc can still open it anywhere and cackle.
Read the lot five times? Four books with the same vibes
The real Dog Man problem isn’t age. It’s speed. They come out roughly once a year and your child finishes one in a weekend, so here’s what to hand the Dog Man devourer who wants more to read. All from our library, all with that same pictures-doing-the-heavy-lifting feel.
Captain Underpants and the Attack of the Talking Toilets by Dav Pilkey
Captain Underpants and the Attack of the Talking Toilets
Start with the obvious one. Same author, same universe, and where Dog Man actually came from. George and Harold accidentally created the greatest superhero in their school’s history, and now they’ve accidentally created an army of evil talking toilets set on taking over the world. Somebody needs to flush them out. If your child hasn’t met Captain Underpants yet, they are in for a treat.
The Bad Guys: Mission Unpluckable by Aaron Blabey
The Bad Guys – Mission Unpluckable
Mr Wolf and his crew of scary-looking animals are trying very hard to be heroes, and this time the mission is rescuing 10,000 chickens from a high-tech cage farm. Between the lasers, a feisty tarantula (yikes!) and a team member known as The Chicken Swallower, what could possibly go wrong? Comic drawings, snappy dialogue, huge laughs. New readers should start at book one.
Tales of Bunjitsu Bunny by John Himmelman
Tales of Bunjitsu Bunny
Isabel is the best bunjitsu artist in her school. She can throw further, kick higher and hit harder than anyone else, and she never hurts another creature. Short illustrated stories with a martial-arts twist, ideal for the younger end of the Dog Man crowd, around 6 and 7.
Monster Doughnuts by Gianna Pollero
Monster Doughnuts
Ten-year-old Grace runs a bakery, and her doughnuts are also her secret weapon, because monsters can’t resist a sweet treat (they just don’t know about the exploding baking powder). When her Monster Scanning Machine picks up Mr Harris, a people-eating, board-game-playing cyclops, she’s up against her biggest challenge yet. Silly, snappy and full of pictures. For 7 up.
And if it’s the sheer daftness they love, Lenny Lemmon and the Alien Invasion is a shorter one for 6 up, in which a fake alien costume boosts gran’s ice-cream sales right up until the costume turns out to be empty. For the child working their way through every illustrated series going, our books like The 13-Storey Treehouse list carries on in the same spirit.
Just so you know…
Little Reads doesn’t currently stock Dog Man or Bunny vs Monkey, so I won’t pretend otherwise.
What we do have is 3,000+ hand-picked books for children aged 5 to 11, including every book above and a very deep funny shelf.
A free account gives you 100+ free books, and full access is £7.99 a month after a 7-day free trial. Cancel anytime.
We’re a library, not a classroom, so it’s not the app for phonics or learning to read.
But if you’ve got a Dog Man devourer waiting for the next one to come out, we can fill the gap.