Dog Man: Grime and Punishment

Dav Pilkey's Dog Man: Grime and Punishment is a big-hearted comic for 7 year olds where Dog Man gets the sack and sneaks back to work dressed as a cat.

What happens

It's the ninth Dog Man book. A George and Harold comic at the front explains how a police dog's head ended up on a cop's body, so nobody's lost from the start.

This time Dog Man digs up the Mayor's roses, slobbers all over his glasses and somehow brings City Hall crashing down. The Mayor is fed up. He takes Dog Man's badge that same night, and the police station cries so hard it floods (Chief insists it's just allergies).

So Li'l Petey and 80-HD build him a cat mask with ears that meow and hiss when you press them. Who could possibly see through that? Nobody, it turns out. The Mayor hires "Cat Man" on the spot.

Meanwhile Grampa, Petey's own dad, has invented a helmet called the Motor Brain. It turns him into Crud, a huge spider-like cat who smashes his way across the city. Then he finds a giant paper lunch bag and a can of spray that brings things to life. You can probably guess how that goes.

It's a comic, so it's speech bubbles, BIG capitals and sound effects on every page. There are Flip-O-Rama pages, where flicking between two pictures makes them move (badly, which is the joke). When 80-HD needs to explain something, he makes a film, so a few pages are photos of clay models.

The jokes never really stop. A fish tries to teach a class of frogs about adverbs at exactly the wrong moment.

But the heart of it is Petey and Li'l Petey. Petey is still SO angry with his own dad, and he tells his son that sometimes you just have to hate. Li'l Petey keeps gently asking why. Those talks over supper are surprisingly tender for a book with a fire-breathing lunch bag in it.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Petey explains that his dad walked out when he was a kitten, while his mum was ill. Near the end there's a quiet visit to her grave. It's all backstory and it's handled very kindly, but a child who has lost someone, or whose family has split up, might find it close to home. For plenty of readers it'll be the part they want to talk about afterwards.

What to read next

If they haven't met Dog Man yet, go back to the book where Dog Man began. It's in the library too.