The Adventures of Captain Underpants

Dav Pilkey's The Adventures of Captain Underpants is a VERY silly comic-book adventure for 7 year olds, and it's the book where the whole series begins.

What happens

Meet George and Harold. They're best friends and next-door neighbours, and they're nearly always in trouble. Harold draws, George makes up the stories, and together they've made hundreds of their own comics.

Their favourite hero is Captain Underpants, who flies about in nothing but his pants and a cape. The boys sneak copies on the school photocopier and sell them in the playground. Their grumpy head teacher, Mr Krupp, hates the comics (and the boys even more).

Then they wreck the big football game. Pepper in the pom-poms, bubble bath in the band's instruments, itching cream for the team. But Mr Krupp has it all on hidden camera. Unless the boys do exactly as he says, the tape goes straight to the football team.

So George digs out an old advert for a hypno-ring. What could go wrong? Quite a lot. Soon Mr Krupp is down to his pants, with a red curtain for a cape, and off to fight crime. Bank robbers are waiting, and so are two robots and a villain in a nappy who wants to blow up the moon.

It reads like a comic and a chapter book rolled into one. The chapters are short (one is three words long), there's a drawing on nearly every page and some KA-BOOMs take up most of a page. George and Harold's own comic is in there too, spelling mistakes and all.

The big fight is in Flip-E-Rama. You flick quickly between a pair of pages and the boys bash the robots in wobbly home-made animation (which is half the joke). Most children will gobble it up in one sitting.

It's worth knowing that George and Harold are proper pranksters, and the book is firmly on their side. Mr Krupp blackmails them, and once he's hypnotised they make him cluck like a chicken. There are poo jokes (a rubber dog poo is the secret weapon) and a chapter called The Extremely Graphic Violence Chapter, which is two boys whacking robots with planks. It's an American edition too, so pants sometimes means trousers. Most children will just howl, but a child who copies everything might need a quick chat about what's only a joke.

What to read next

If this one goes down well, the Attack of the Talking Toilets is next, and it's in the library too. Or for another boy who turns his friends into superheroes with a pencil, try Cartoon Kid. Casper draws his best mate with enormous feet and Big Feet Pete is born (Pete names him right back).