Dog Man: Twenty Thousand Fleas Under the Sea

Dav Pilkey's Dog Man: Twenty Thousand Fleas Under the Sea is a VERY silly comic for 7 year olds about a news story that gets totally out of hand.

What happens

Piggy, the boss of the baddies, has been shrunk and locked up in Mini Jail. He wants out. His old pals Crunky and Bub would honestly rather stay put and bake cupcakes (they've also joined a superhero club called the Friendly Friends).

Meanwhile Petey, the cat who used to be a baddie himself, needs to rebuild his lab. Nobody will help. Builder after builder finds an excuse, and poor Petey decides he'll always be the bad guy.

Then Sarah the reporter passes on a tip that something's going on "under the C" at a sandwich shop called The Beach. By the time the newsroom has punched it up, it's the headline on the cover. Everyone panics. Piggy couldn't be happier. And then a flying submarine turns up for real!

It's a comic from start to finish, and some of the funniest bits have no words at all. Piggy calls everyone selfish while hogging every cupcake in the canteen. The Friendly Friends keep bursting into a song you can sing to Jingle Bells, which drives him up the wall. Is there anything worse than a sing-along you can't escape?

There are giant capital letters, sound effects everywhere and Flip-E-Rama pages, where you swipe back and forth between two pictures to make them move (a page near the start shows you how on a screen). There's even a comic inside the comic by Li'l Petey and his friend Molly. They run out of ideas, so it ends on empty boxes.

There's a cheeky grown-up layer too. The newsroom boss says it's all about the clicks. That will probably sail over younger heads, but the giant pie fight won't!

Under all the silliness it's about not giving up when people judge you. It's Sarah who tells Petey and the kids that quitting isn't how a hero acts, and it lands.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

The humour is very bottom-and-toilet based (there's a joke society called FARTS and a fair few butts). A huge toothy mite turns up later on, but it's goofy rather than scary. If your reader already loves this kind of funny, they'll lap it up.

What to read next

This is the eleventh Dog Man book, but a Meet the Cast page at the front helps a newcomer keep up. If your reader hasn't met Dog Man yet, though, the very first Dog Man book is where it all starts.