The Bad Guys 7 – Do-You-Think-He-Saurus?!

Aaron Blabey's seventh Bad Guys book is a very silly dinosaur comic for 7 year olds, and it's called Do-You-Think-He-Saurus?!

What happens

It picks up straight from the cliffhanger at the end of book six, Alien vs Bad Guys, so your reader will want that one first. The gang were meant to be stopping an alien invasion. Instead, their escape pod sent them back in time. Now they're 65 million years in the past, surrounded by dinosaurs.

Wolf's big idea is to keep very still, because dinosaurs can't see you if you don't move. Legs (the tarantula) has to break it to him. He's mixing them up with the T. rex, and velociraptors can TOTALLY see him.

Then Mr Snake turns up in a headband, bonks a raptor on the head with a rock and starts giving orders. Shark gets the job of being a tree, which means standing there naked with leaves stuck on his head. Who knew Snake had it in him?

Back at the wrecked pod, Legs is sure it can still get them home to their own time. Piranha just has a bad feeling about a button marked DO NOT PRESS. Whether anyone presses it is for your reader to find out!

Reading it alone is nothing like reading a novel. Nearly every page is a picture with speech bubbles. Some pages carry nothing but one enormous ROOOOAR stretched across two pages. The words are big and short, often in capitals, and lots of the jokes are in the faces. Plenty of children will race through the whole story in one sitting. If you've got a reader who finds a page of solid text a bit much, this is a very kind way in.

There are daft moments everywhere. A cloud shaped like a bottom. Piranha stuck up a T. rex's nostril (no one must ever know). Legs in happy tears because Snake called him Mr Tarantula. There's a sweet moment too, when Wolf tells Snake he's proud of him and Snake just says yeah, yeah, whatever.

It ends on a TO BE CONTINUED. The last thirty or so pages are extras rather than story (a spoof TV show, a quiz, a word search, jokes and a maze).

New to the gang? Start with the first book, Episode One, and meet Wolf, Snake, Shark and Piranha before the dinosaurs do.

What to read next

If it's the time-travel muddle they love, try The Fran That Time Forgot. Franny K. Stein is a mad scientist who builds a time warper to change her own embarrassing middle name, then can't resist a peek at the future. It's a short chapter book, so it's a good next step on from comics.