Dog Man

Dav Pilkey's Dog Man is a properly daft comic for 7 year olds about a police dog whose head ends up on a police officer's body.

What happens

Officer Knight is tough but not very bright. Greg the dog is clever but can't drive a car or throw a punch. Then Petey, the town's evil cat, leaves a bomb for them to find (and Greg growls at the wrong wire).

At the hospital the news is bad for both of them. Then a nurse has a brainwave. Why not sew Greg's head onto the officer's body? And just like that, Dog Man is born.

He's a brilliant cop. He's also still very much a dog. He licks the chief's face, chews up his tissues and naps on his brand-new couch, which drives the chief up the wall.

The book is four separate adventures. Petey builds a giant vacuum cleaner with teeth to suck Dog Man up. The chief gets swapped for a robot. Petey zaps the words out of every book in the world. Then a hot dog comes to life and raises an army of tiny sausages. Who knew a hot dog could be so ambitious?

It's comics from start to finish. The whole thing is meant to be made by George and Harold, the two boys from Captain Underpants. So there are big hand-drawn capitals, sound effects like KA-BLOOEY and plenty of their spelling (it's all "supa" this and "supa" that). One story is drawn as if they made it in first grade, wobbly letters and all, with a pretend letter from their cross teacher.

Then there are the Flip-E-Rama pages. Your reader swipes back and forth between two pages to make the picture move, and the book explains how to do it on a screen. Lots of the best jokes are tucked into the pictures, so most children will race through it in one go and then go straight back.

It's worth knowing that the humour is VERY toilet-based. There's poo in the chief's office, a lie detector test for some pee and a lot of trousers falling down. The operation is played completely for laughs with no blood, but there are cartoon explosions everywhere. If that's your reader's favourite kind of funny, they'll be in heaven.

There's a sweet side too. The chief shouts at Dog Man a lot, but on one wordless page Dog Man just snuggles up to him when he's sad.

What to read next

If they finish and want more straight away, Dog Man: Unleashed is the second book. It starts with a quick comic recap of how Dog Man came to be, so nobody gets lost.