The Corner Box

Dog Man Deep Dive! The Corner Box S2Ep07

• David & John • Season 2 • Episode 7

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Episode Summary

On this episode of The Corner Box, hosts John Barber and David Hedgecock talk about the genius of Dav Pilkey, life lessons from Captain Underpants, the true main character in Dog Man, the limitless possibilities of comics, and the promising future of comic book readers, and John gets a puppy, and David goes down an Avengers rabbit hole.

Timestamp Segments

  • [00:35] Everything that has happened since the last episode.
  • [01:52] David’s Avengers rabbit hole.
  • [06:09] Getting into Dog Man.
  • [09:02] Dav Pilkey’s origin story.
  • [13:12] Introducing Captain Underpants.
  • [16:06] The wild success of Captain Underpants.
  • [17:11] Captain Underpants Fun Facts.
  • [18:05] Captain Underpants life lessons.
  • [20:12] John’s theories of what comics are.
  • [21:37] The brilliance of Pilkey.
  • [25:23] The Adventures of Ook and Gluk.
  • [28:58] The origin of Dog Man.
  • [32:47] What makes kids’ jokes work?
  • [34:43] The Golden Age of Dog Man.
  • [41:15] The Tale of Two Kitties.
  • [49:29] Cat Kid Comic Club.
  • [51:50] Influencing and encouraging youth.
  • [54:02] Dog Man’s impossible success.
  • [57:15] The future of comic book readers.

Notable Quotes

  • “She’s a squishy little puppy.”
  • “If Pilkey did nothing else, that Captain Underpants is a true masterwork.”
  • “It’s okay to try things and fail.”
  • “The possibilities of comics are limitless.”
  • “If we could just get North American comics out of the superhero space for half a second and do anything else…”

Relevant Links

David's Fun Stuff!
Did Someone Say Fun Time? Let's GO!

John is at PugW!
Pug Worldwide

Dave Pilkey is Awesome!
pilkey.com

For scary transcripts and spooky show notes!
www.thecornerbox.club

Books Mentioned

[00:00] Intro: Welcome to The Corner Box, where your hosts, David Hedgecock and John Barber, lean into their decades of comic book industry experience, writing, drawing, editing, and publishing. They'll talk to fellow professionals, deep dive into influential and overlooked works, and analyze the state of the art and business of comics and pop culture. Thanks for joining us on The Corner Box.


[00:28] John Barber: Hello, and welcome back to The Corner Box. I'm one of your hosts, John Barber, and then with me, as always


[00:34] David Hedgecock: David Hedgecock.


[00:35] John: I feel like it's been weeks. We skipped 1 recording time, I think. I just feel like a million things have happened since then.


[00:41] David: I think you weren’t on the one before that, or were you?


[00:44] John: I was on the one before that, yeah. 


[00:46] David: You were? It's all blurring together, but yeah, it's been a couple of weeks, John.


[00:49] John: Yeah. I ran into Dave Baker in person at the LA Comic Con, which we didn't realize we were both going to be at. You went on a vacation. I got a dog. I'd like to introduce the audience to Tootsie, but when you hear the breathing and/or barking from this pudgy little wingless pale bat-- we'll see if she doesn't get kicked out of this room, but she’s just a baby. She can't help it.


[01:14] David: She's a little French Bulldog, right?


[01:16] John: Yes.


[01:17] David: Yeah, it's super cute, John. Nice pick. I wasn't sure about it, but when you held her up to the camera, she's a cutie.


[01:23] John: She is a squishy little puppy, and in honor of that, we had a special topic that I thought we should talk about, in honor of dogs, but before we get to that, we had a follow-up from our last episode. This is actually one we talked about, I think, last time, wasn't it?


[01:36] David: Maybe we should save that. Talk about the other thing first.


[01:40] John: Probably in the episode title.


[01:42] David: Oh, yes. Yeah, John, we're going to talk about Dog Man today. I'm very excited.


[01:49] John: What?


[01:50] David: Yeah, no, I know. Surprise, everybody, but before that, John, you sent me down a rabbit hole the other day.


[01:55] John: Like a dog chasing a rabbit.


[01:58] David: There we go. We were talking last time about just my obsession with Avengers, and I've been reading a bunch of old Avengers comic books. Specifically, though, the thing that started me down the rabbit hole, other than the fact that I'm trying to collect a full run of, I don't know, fine, very-fine full run, which again, I don't know if I'm going to be able to do it. It’s rather expensive. I think I'm going to have to settle for some low-grade copies of some of these things, or just not have them, at all. I don't know if my OCD will allow me not to have at least a copy. Anyway, what I found out, John, was that you were right. I was talking about Squadron Sinister, which is the first incarnation of the Squadron Supreme folks that showed up in Avengers, and they were DC Justice League analogs, Squadron Sinister, and you were saying that, around the same time, there was an unofficial crossover of sorts, and there were Avenger analogs that showed up in the Justice League series around the same time, 1971, and John, you were absolutely right, once again.

Justice League #87 featured the Champions of Angor. Here's the thing about the Champions of Angor. So, they were the Avenger analogs, and you get some of the similar characters, but the thing that I found fascinating and interesting about this is that, I didn't know this, one of my all-time favorite comic book series runs of all-time is Justice League International, the JM DeMatteis, Keith Giffen, Kevin Maguire Justice League, and then it turns into Justice League, and then there's Justice League Europe, with Bart Sears on the art. Also, amazing stuff. Also, as Justice League, you get Adam Hughes interior art basically for the only time, but he does a decent run, an incredible run of a couple of years there with a prolific body of work around Justice League, and some of my all-time favorite comic books. Justice League International, just the humor and the pathos and everything about it was so good.

I love that series, and in the second or third issue of Justice League International, the Champions of Angor are there. They're not called the Champions of Angor, but it's them. It's Blue Jay and Wandjina, and some of the others, and they show up. So, the Avengers analogs are in my all-time favorite Justice League issues, and I never even knew it. I did not know that that's what their origin story was, in terms of […].


[04:34] John: That's funny.


[04:35] David: That storyline in JLA introduces the Extremists, which are from the same world as the Champions of Angor. So, there's a ton of storylines and ton of characters that came out of that Champions of Angor, Justice League Issue #87, that I am totally in love with, and had no idea that I knew what we were talking about the whole time. So, anyway, I just wanted to bring that up. I’m now down a rabbit hole on that side of things, as well. There's just too many books to read, John. I can't keep up.


[05:11] John: I know. There aren't enough hours in the day. Puppies take a lot of your day, as it turns out. They don't make your comic book reading any easier.


[05:19] David: Has she chewed up any books yet?


[05:21] John: I mean, no, because she's really penned in all the time, but I mean, she has tried to.


[05:27] David: Nice.


[05:28] John: Yes. That's true. I did not ever piece all that together with Justice League, the Giffen/DeMatteis/McGuire.


[05:33] David: Yeah. So, that Champions of Angor world really does get fleshed out quite a bit, thanks to Keith Giffen and crew, up into more modern times, we get Grant Morrison, in his Multiversity storyline, brings in a bunch of those characters, as well, and adds to them, more Avenger analogues, essentially. Grant Morrison adds a bunch more. There's some that are added and subtracted in the Giffen/DeMatteis storylines, as well, but like I said, the entire Extremist villains that arrive are in that world, but I just didn't know that origin story there. So, I wanted to make sure I brought it up.


[06:09] John: So, one of the things I've been wanting to talk about, unrelated to having a dog, is to talk about Dog Man. I think we both have touched on before what that comic is. I actually wrote up a lot of notes here. Maybe this is something we can do, like you and Dave did, where I read my not-polished essay, and then we break and jump in.


[06:31] David: That sounds great. I've got a few notes, but I think I can just throw them in as you're talking.


[06:35] John: Okay, cool. I think you probably encountered Dog Man before I did. Your son was reading it.


[06:41] David: I think so. My son's a little bit older. Although, I don't know. Was your daughter into Dog Man, at all?


[06:46] John: No, she wasn't. She happened to not be. That actually came up a couple of times, and she wasn't really into it, and she was reading other graphic novels and stuff.


[06:56] David: Yeah. So, for me, me and my son loved Captain Underpants. I mean, we both, that was my jam, man. I love Captain Underpants, and so did my son. So, when Dog Man spun off out of Captain Underpants, we were first in line for the first book. We were rearing to go.


[07:13] John: Oh, wow.


[07:14] David: We've been fans ever since. My son has aged out of it. I think the latest one, which I believe is the Scarlet Shredder, we didn't get that one. So, at some point, maybe I'll pick it up for myself just to read, but it's really low priority now. My son's now moving on into manga. So, Kaiju No. 8 is his jam now. So, we're aged out of Dog Man now, but you're in the sweet spot, I think.


[07:43] John: I am, and I also totally love it, in a way that I love the comics of it. There's a handful of things that, as an adult, I would watch or read without kids. Bluey is one of them. Every adult that watches Bluey says that, I think. Gravity Falls is another great example. I would sit there and watch Gravity Falls by myself, but Dog Man is probably another one, but we can get to that. Perhaps our listeners are less familiar with Dog Man, or even people that are familiar with it, maybe don't know the whole history. I definitely dug up some stuff I didn't know about, while I was digging into it.


[08:19] David: Let's jump into it.


[08:21] John: Dog Man, I would say, contains multitudes. On one hand, it’s Dav Pilkey's bestselling series of kids graphic novels, following the comedic adventures of a cop with a human body and a dog head. On the other hand, it's really a collection of comic books written and drawn by two fifth graders, George Beard and Harold Hutchins. The same kids used to run around with Captain Underpants, but on the third hand, dogs have 4 hands, right? I think I still have one to spare in this metaphor. On the third hand, Dog Man is actually the story of the brilliant villain, Petey the Cat, and his journey to becoming a good father, but before I can tell you that story, I have to tell you this one. That's a Captain Underpants joke.


[09:01] David: Nice.


[09:02] John: Let's start at the beginning. Dav Pilkey was born in 1966, cool, and a bunch of stuff happened, and he suddenly found himself in second grade, and a young Dav had what was then called Extreme Hyperactivity, and today, it would be called ADHD, or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, as well as dyslexia. Incidentally, why the hell would anybody make “dyslexia” that hard of a word to spell? That is needlessly cruel. […] You know what I mean? Whatever. Anyway. There came a day, when Dav’s 2nd grade teacher was talking to the class and said something about underpants, and all the kids laughed. So, she told them that underpants aren't funny, which, don't ever say that to kids. I don't know if this is the teacher’s first 5 seconds of teaching, but that's a lesson you learn about kids, right quick, but anyway, they all laughed harder, and the teacher got madder, but Dav had a fateful realization. Underpants make people laugh. It was his, bat flying through the window, moment. So, he drew up a character called Captain Underpants, which made the kids laugh some more and got the teacher madder, and then she made him go sit in the hallway, which evidently was not an unusual situation.

His parents knew that he was having trouble with his ADHD, and that he loved drawing, and that his comics were getting him into even more trouble. So, they did, this is wild, they commissioned him to draw a comic just for them, one he wasn't allowed to bring to school, but he wound up making 20 issues of a series called Waterman, and his parents kept them all, and then I guess, they eventually gave them back to him when he was in his 20s. I saw an interview, those are the only ones of his actual childhood comics that still exist.


[10:45] David: Yeah, apparently, they gave it to him as a gift when he got his first book deal. They gifted it to him as a celebration.


[10:53] John: That's pretty funny. That's cool. Okay, but they were really encouraging, and they also encouraged him to work at his reading, which he did, and he fell in love with books. So, by the time he was 19, he pulled his love of drawing and his love of books together, and he made this anti-nuclear war children's book, called World War Won (won, like we did not lose), but I think that's probably ironic. He submitted it to a contest called the National Written And Illustrated By Awards Contest For Students, and won it, and the prize was that they published the book, and this award kept going through the 90s, but was eventually shut down. I think they brought it back a little bit under a different name in the 2000s, but apparently, the retail sales for books by kids that no one has heard of aren't super strong, but Pilkey was off and running. Incidentally, his name is spelled D-A-V, but it's because when he once worked at Pizza Hut, the thing that made the name tags cut the edge off of his name. So, he just kept it up, but it’s still pronounced Dave.


[11:54] David: Thank you, Pizza Hut.


[11:58] John: The decade after World War Won, I mean the book, World War Won, this is in the 1980s, into the 90s, Pilkey had a successful career as a kids’ book author and illustrator. I mean, he actually had the career you'd probably dream of having in that field. It's just that, compared to what happened next, it gets blown out of the water by what comes after, but in those ten years, he wrote and/or illustrated 22 books, including two book series, Dumb Bunnies and The Dragon, the latter of which spawned a 78-episode stop motion TV show, on Canadian TV, but still.


[12:38] David: It counts. It half counts.


[12:39] John: You got PBS money for your show, and he got a Caldecott honor for his book, The Paperboy, and that's huge. That's the biggest honor in children's books. There are children's books, authors, and illustrators that I know as Caldecott winner, their name, because every time their name appears somewhere, that's how they phrase it on the cover of the book, on the About The Author, anything.


[13:05] David: It's a big deal, John.


[13:06] John: Yeah, it is, except it doesn't even come up with Dav Pilkey, most of the time.


[13:09] David: I know.


[13:11] John: So, in 1997, he wrote and illustrated The Adventures of Captain Underpants, and that's when things really blew up. Presumably, you weren't reading it in 1997.


[13:21] David: No, I didn't know anything about it.


[13:24] John: I remember, I think, seeing it in stores and stuff, but not paying any attention to it. Neither of us had kids. We were both too old to be looking at that kind of thing. It wasn't a comic book. It was a black and white paperback chapter book with copious illustrations, that stars these two 4th graders, named Harold Hutchins and George Beard, who go to Jerome Horwitz Elementary School, and they are good kids, but they get in trouble a lot, as the book tells us. Mostly, they play pranks. A recurring one is that, if they see a sign with movable letters, like an old movie marquee, they'll take the letters and rearrange them to spell something funny. I think on page one, they pass a flower shop that has a sign, reading “pick your own roses,” that they make it say, “pick our noses.” Stuff like that, and that's indicative of the humor of Captain Underpants. It’s kids’ potty humor. Not bad stuff. Just operating under the correct assumption that toilets and farts, and nose-picking, are inherently funny. If you've ever met a kid, you know these things are inherently funny.


[14:26] David: Nice.


[14:27] John: So, George and Harold also make comic books, like the real life Dav Pilkey. Obviously, there's a lot of autobiography in there, and that gets them into trouble, and their best character, in their comics, the book tells us, is Captain Underpants, and over the course of that first book, they get a hold of a ring that lets them hypnotize their archnemesis, the school principal, Mr. Krupp, into thinking that he's their made-up character, Captain Underpants. The prank gets out of hand, and then in real life, Dav Pilkey's book sells well enough to become a series.

So, throughout the next many books, George and Harold, and Principal Krupp, as Captain Underpants, all start having real-world adventures, not unlike the ones they write about. It doesn't become realistic. The world's just goofy and weird, and they do over-the-top stuff, like battle mad scientists with names like Professor Poopypants. Then, within a couple books, Principal Krupp gets actual superpowers, and they start traveling through time and all kinds of zany stuff. I actually haven't read all the Captain Underpants books.


[15:25] David: Oh, you haven't?


[15:26] John: No.


[15:27] David: They're great. They're fantastic. Yeah, I've read all of them. I love them. I don't know what to say about Captain Underpants, other than every interaction that I have with that series, I love. The movie is great. The Netflix TV show is great. The books are fantastic. Just wildly imaginative and fun, and really appropriate to the age level that it's speaking to, and also filled with life lesson-type things, without being preachy or hitting anybody over the head. Showing inherent goodness, inherent sweetness in all things. So, yeah. Great series. If Pilkey did nothing else, that Captain Underpants is a true masterwork, in many ways, for many different reasons.


[16:16] John: Yeah, for anybody else that would have been--


[16:19] David: The nadir, the highlight, the pinnacle of a career, for sure. 90 million books in print. Captain Underpants. 98 million books.


[16:30] John: Yeah. If you had that many of those, there'd be 90 million books in your house. That's hard to wrap your head around.


[16:39] David: Those books all sell for around $10 a pop. So, $900 million worth of gross revenue, just in the books alone. That’s 3 years’ worth of—


[16:52] John: This podcast?


[16:54] David: That's 1/2 a year's worth of gross for our podcast. It's a lot. The comic book industry, as a whole, it takes about two years for the comic book industry, as a whole, to do that number.


[17:07] John: Yeah. I have a couple of fun facts about Captain Underpants, and I know that's not what we're here to talk about. Some of this pays off later. George and Harold's first names, do you know what they're from?


[17:21] David: No.


[17:22] John: They’re inspired by Curious George and Harold and the Purple Crayon.


[17:25] David: Oh, okay.


[17:27] John: I think really apt, […] the big influences on Pilkey, I guess, but the curiosity and the drawing, and the drawings coming to life.


[17:35] David: Yeah. I never heard that.


[17:37] John: How about their last names?


[17:38] David: Let's see. It's Hutchins. What's the other one?


[17:41] John: Beard.


[17:42] David: Oh, Beard. That's right. I don't know. I don't know anything.


[17:44] John: They and Principal Krupp, they're all the names of actors from the Our Gang shorts from the 1930s and 40s, that Pilkey used to Watch on TV. Jerome Horwitz, the name of their school, that's the real name of Curly from the Three Stooges, which he also used to watch on TV.


[18:04] David: That's great.


[18:05] John: Yeah, and I think there's something of that comedy at play, where, especially at that time, or any time, it's a little transgressive, anytime past the 30s, and what I mean by that is, I just worked on this comic for a client that’s a big corporation, and it’s not a comic book company. It's another company that has cartoon mascots, and the notes on the script remove every element of edge or interest from the stories. They just sand it down to make it real smooth. Back in 1997, when Captain Underpants debuted, you had that “I can't believe they said that” edgelord humor that was going on. That's the same year that South Park debuted, and Captain Underpants isn't anywhere near South Park, in terms of social issues or anything, but that potty humor and the old timey, “it's funny when somebody gets hit in the head” thing, for a kid, is pretty transgressive. At that time, through now, I think, you have that. You feel like you're getting away with something, I think, as a kid, when you're reading it, and I think that makes the lessons you're talking about more real. This isn't a book where you have some moral lesson. This is an earned life lesson that is being passed on, maybe. I don't know if that's-- it's not saccharine. You know what I mean? Even if it were, the toilet jokes are going to take away that saccharinity.


[19:34] David: Right. That's a good point.


[19:36] John: And Captain Underpants took off, no pun intended, became huge, and it was also controversial, because not everybody appreciated that kind of toilet humor and stuff. I guess, in 2013 and ‘14, Captain Underpants was the most challenged book series in America, and it had the double whammy of being both scatological and socially progressive. You have plenty of poop and pee, and vomit, but this never comes up, almost, but Harold's gay, and that got the book banned in places.


[20:05] David: Fantastic. Jesus.


[20:07] John: At the same time, it’s becoming huge, but it's also attracting fire. Now, the Captain Underpants series, it’s illustrated books, and without going off into a big “John's theories of what comics are” digression, which is probably outside of the scope of discussing a comic we haven't talked about yet, the pictures are subservient to the words in the Captain Underpants story. If you took away the illustrations, the story would still work. Now, there's some stuff, like the gag about “pick our noses” that I was talking about earlier. That only happens in the pictures. The text never says any of that, but the stories themselves unfold through the words, the picture’s illustrating the events of the stories, but in most of the Captain Underpants books, there'd be a chapter of George and Harold's comics, the ones that they make in-story, and the art was in the basic style Pilkey was drawing in, but way cruder, with misspellings and grammar mistakes, like two 4th graders made it. It's recognizably the work of the same guy, but deliberately rough, like Diary Of A Wimpy Kid would be, in a couple of years. This predates that, but that kind of thing.

So, while Pilkey was working on the Captain Underpants books, he was still making other books, and one of them became his first actual graphic novel, The Adventures of Super Diaper Baby, which was a full kids’ graphic novel, all in the style of the in-universe George and Harold Comics, and it was ostensibly made by George and Harold. They're credited in the book. I actually don't know, when it first came out, if Pilkey was even credited on it. He certainly is now.


[21:36] David: Yeah, I don't know, but I do think that this is the brilliance of Pilkey. The true brilliance of Pilkey is that his recognition of doing it in a manner and style that is inviting to kids of the age that I think he's appealing to, so that they feel that, and I've seen it, at least with my child. They are not intimidated by what Pilkey's doing, and they themselves think they can do it, and then often do, and I think that's a really great, cool, clever trick that Pilkey pulls off, to make something look so simple and so easy that it invites kids of the age that are reading it, these young kids, to participate. So, you're not just participating by having the book read to you or reading the book yourself, but also participating, in that you can create your own adventures in your head or on paper, and it's okay to do that. It's fine to do that, and “look at these kids that are doing it in this book that I'm reading.” I love that about Pilkey’s work. I think it's the most brilliant part of his work, and I think it's really prevalent in Super Diaper Baby.


[22:50] John: Yeah, I totally agree. I think it's a big, huge piece of the success, and it's all easy to read and follow. I mean, it doesn't make those mistakes that kids would make, where usually if you see an actual kid’s drawing, the problems you have with that usually involve you asking, “what is this supposed to be?” or “what happened here?” but he bypasses that stuff, but yeah, I completely agree. I can't remember if we talked about this on a show before, because we've been doing this for so many years. When I was a kid, for me, it was seeing Bill Sienkiewicz that made me think I could do it, and when I would look at stuff, Jerry Ordway is always the guy think of, but anybody, George Perez, anybody that was super pristine and clean, and everything looked right. Sienkiewicz was rough and scratchy, and I didn't realize how good Sienkiewicz actually was, but I knew I could do rough and scratchy, in a way that I couldn't do the other stuff.

I mean, this is a weird thing to argue, because I like really good art. I like seeing art that's excellently done, the work of people that are far better at drawing than I am, but I, for a long time, thought that's been a barrier to a lot of traditional superhero comics, or a lot of mainstream comics now, is that that level of art is so high, compared to what it was when we were kids, or I mean, more pointedly, there's these inflection points where kids come in, and I think you have it in manga boom in the early 2000s, where up till then, when you had manga, you were seeing these guys, like Otomo and Shirow, that are impossibly good. When the manga boom happened in the 2000s, it petered out and continued to be rebuilt to where it is today.


[24:25] David: Right. That first boom.


[24:27] John: Yeah. Then especially, it was stuff like CLAMP or Ai Yazawa, where they're good, but it at least seems learnable. It at least seems like something that you could maybe learn to do, and then, in our beloved 1990s, if you were the good artist at your school, you were absolutely literally as good as some of the artists drawing at Extreme or Homage, or even Marvel. You weren't Jim Lee, but you were as good as the guy they get to do a fill-in issue on third-tier book. They were getting high school kids. That's who's doing it. That was a point that a lot of kids got into it. They didn't all get in for the investment. Yeah, I completely agree with you.

Pilkey wound up taking a break to help his terminally-ill father, and he came back in 2010 with a contract with Scholastic to publish Captain Underpants, and then two new graphic novels, ostensibly from George and Harold, The Adventures of Ook and Gluk: Kung-Fu Cavemen from the Future, which he'd wind up delisting 10 years later after a Change.org petition, that I guess had a little less than 300 signatures, claimed that it perpetuated negative Asian stereotypes. Although, it's fair to say, that isn't universally agreed upon, and I have never read this book. So, I have no opinion, and also, a second Diaper Baby graphic novel. Did you read either of those ones?


[25:48] David: Yeah. So, I actually really liked Ook and Gluk. I read those. We got copies of them when they were still available, I guess, and I was a little surprised to read that they had been removed, because I certainly didn't seem to find anything in those that were offensive, but I have to give Pilkey some pretty hefty kudos, because not only did he withdraw those books and have Scholastic withdraw those books and cease printing of them, he took all proceeds that he ever earned from that book and donated it to organizations that promote diversity and end violence against various communities. He really, I think, went above and beyond, in terms of, he made a full and true, contrite apology, I think, with his actions on that. I liked those books. I don't know what was offensive. I wasn't part of whatever it was that was happening. I can't possibly imagine what it was that was offensive, but I give the guy credit for accepting that he had offended people and making, like I say, a full and contrite apology, by any measure.


[26:52] John: My understanding is, there's a sensei-type character, or I guess it's not a sensei because it’s Kung-Fu, and okay, you know what? That's probably the racist part, but it was something, I think, that involved a character that's teaching the two characters. Again, I've not read it. So, I don't know. I’m reaching out blind. It is interesting that, among all the controversies that he had, that he didn't withdraw anything on any of this stuff, that that's when he did. That was clearly a situation that, if that was a problem he was causing, he didn't want to cause that problem, as opposed to the potty humor, or not bowing down to everybody that tells him something's not right about what he's doing. I don't know. One of the key things with the second Diaper Baby graphic novel, though, and we'll just file this away for later, it introduces a new antagonist, Petey the Cat, the most evilest cat in the world, but we'll come back to him a little bit later.

So, in 2015, with the 12th volume, the Captain Underpants series ends, Principal Krupp loses his powers and stops turning into Captain Underpants. I guess, it leaves a semi-cliffhanger as I think George and Harold go into the time stream to find their missing pets. This is never resolved. Though, in interviews, Pilkey tells us that the pets are fine, and everything worked out. I think, technically, it's like an indefinite hiatus.


[28:14] David: Yeah, that was the impression that I got, when we read it. All the books are self-contained stories, with maybe one or two exceptions. It does get a little “to-be-continued” towards the end there, but yeah, it always felt like maybe he was going to come back to it, eventually, if he had something else to say.


[28:34] John: Yeah. Like you mentioned, in 2017, there was the animated movie, and then the 2018-2020 Netflix show, very faithful to the spirit of the books.


[28:43] David: Oh, yeah. 100%. They're really great.


[28:45] John: Yeah, Sean Astin narrates, at least, the TV show, and he's delightful as a narrator, but what were we here to talk about? Oh, yeah. Dog Man. Sorry. Dog Man is actually mentioned in the very first Captain Underpants book, as one of the other non-Captain Underpants comics that George and Harold used to make, and then in the 2012 book, Captain Underpants and the Terrifying Return of Tippy Tinkletrousers, we flashed back to the kindergarten age of George and Harold, and in the middle of the book, we get to see their first Dog Man comic, drawn in the style of them when they were kindergarteners. So, it's real rough, real, I don't know, scratchy. You have the basics there. The bomb detonates, blowing up a cop and his dog partner, the man's head is dying, the dog's body is dying, the doctor doesn't know what to do, but nurse lady (there's a little arrow pointing at her that says, “Nurse Lady,” though much later, we learn her name is Genie S. Lady, RN and BSN,) Nurse Lady says to put the dog's head on the cop's body, and Dog Man is born.

He battles Petey from Super Diaper Baby. I guess, you'd need to hold on to it for that long. Though, I guess in the in-universe chronology, George and Harold would have drawn this before they drew Super Diaper Baby, which they would have drawn in 4th grade. So, you were reading Captain Underpants, and you got to a chapter of Dog Man in it, right?


[30:09] David: Yeah.


[30:10] John: Nobody knew what that character was. There wasn't that character until right then, right?


[30:13] David: Right, yeah.


[30:14] John: Was it just another one of the comics in there? Was there anything unusual?


[30:16] David: Yeah, it didn't feel like he was going anywhere with that. It felt like it was just a clever little fun thing. Again, I think it was just, I don't know, in the time, if I remember, I’m trying to remember how my son's reaction was to it. It's hard for me to remember what his reaction to it was, but for me, I remember just thinking it was just another example of “hey, you can do this, too,” in a way.


[30:42] John: Yeah.


[30:4r] David: It's just really fun and clever, and I loved that it made mistakes and just kept going, but no, I didn't see or think that this was supposed to be set up for something else. It certainly didn't feel that way.


[30:58] John: I’d actually forgotten about that, until you started talking about that, but around that time, there was a web comic called Axe Cop, that a little bit later, would get turned into a cartoon, where it was, I forget who did it. somebody who was a cartoonist and it was their younger brother or son, or something, was telling him the story.


[31:17] David: It's the brother. His brother was five years old, and he was in his early or mid-20s, or maybe late 20s. So, quite a gap between.


[31:26] John: Malachai and Ethan Nicolle are their names. When Captain Underpants ended, or went on indefinite hiatus, Pilkey launched Dog Man as a new series, producing 2 full-color graphic novels a year with Dog Man. Everything up to here had actually been black and white. Now, if you pick up these books, I think they've all been turned into color books, in the exact same format as Dog Man, or exact same physical profile as Dog Man. He's kept that rate of production, 2 a year, going, more or less, up to the present day. Although, as you might expect by now, it gets a little more complicated, but anyway, the first Dog Man book starts with George and Harold, back in the present day, after the end of Captain Underpants, now entering the 5th grade, and they're in their treehouse, where they used to make their comics, and they come across the old Dog Man comics they used to make in kindergarten, and they decided to start making new Dog Man comics, and the graphic novel series is those.

George and Harold only appear in the introductions, which they've supposedly written and drawn. There's no interaction between them and Dog Man, like you had in Captain Underpants. The first one expands his origin. It turns out Petey set the bomb that made Dog Man, and it pits him against Petey and some other bad guys. We’re introduced to the cast of characters, Chief, the world's greatest police chief, Sarah Hatoff, the world's greatest TV reporter, and Zuzu, the world's greatest poodle, over the first two books, and the adventures are like what you'd see in Captain Underpants, and very in-line with the other George and Harold OGNs, or at least Diaper Baby, which I've read. The jokes are kid jokes.

That's another key part of it, I think. Not only is it in this style, emulating kids. It's a style emulating the jokes kids are making. So, when you see Petey’s Secret Laboratory, there's a big light-up sign on the building, on the outside, that says “Petey’s Secret Laboratory,” but that's not making fun of kids being dumb. That's the joke that the kids would make, if they were making the comic. So, I think it's an important distinction that I think some stuff gets wrong when they do that kind of thing, and it's not making fun of the kids that are reading it. It puts you in on the joke, which is a key thing to this stuff working, I would argue, and I think you can go back to MAD Magazine or MAD Comics, when it first started in the 50s, and that made you feel like you were part of something. There's no barrier to joining that something, but once you're there, you're in, and I think Stan Lee would do that, too.

For everything everybody says about what Stan didn't do, rightly giving credit to Kirby and Ditko, and everybody, but his scripting with this whole “hang on your hats, true believer. You're going to be telling your grandkids about how you were there when Johnny Storm went toe-to-toe with Paste-Pot Pete,” it lets you in on the joke, and once you're in there, there's drama and pathos, and everything. That's a way into it. I think Mark Millar has that, too, that if you ever meet him, you’re just in on the gag with him, you're part of that club. It's maybe more off-putting to people that don't have that entry, or whatever, or they haven't had that entry, but anyway, I think that's another thing, along with the style, that is part of the magic that makes it work.


[34:31] David: Yeah, exactly. That's an interesting way to look at it. I hadn't thought about that particular piece of it. You said it eloquently. There's nothing I could say other than to agree with you. That's a good observation. I like that.


[34:42] John: Dog Man. The adventures continue with a lot of the same kid-centric potty-type humor, but it's less foregrounded, I think, than it is in the Captain Underpants stuff. There's still lots of toilets and poop jokes, but there's a loopiness to the storytelling that reminds me of the sense of enthusiasm that would carry the narrative in Golden Age comics. I just read this Doctor Fate comic from the 40s where he confronts a leopard woman. It’s just like, “So, I heard, you want to meet a leopard woman.” “Oh, yes. Let's go meet the leopard woman.” What the fuck is a leopard woman? I don't know. It doesn't explain it, and in the end, they unmask the villain, and then it's like, “oh, it’s the guy's name,” but they’ve never said the guy's name before. So, it doesn't make any sense. It's barely coherent, and maybe that was because of the competence of the creators. Maybe it's because of how fast it had to get made, but it's still propulsive, and you got into the 50s and 60s, when the technical quality of comic book art in America got way higher than it was in the early 40s and late 30s.

This disregard for story logic had atrophied, in certain places, into this disdain for the audience. “Who gives a shit? The kids will never know.” That attitude. Not everywhere, but the stuff that isn't like that really stands out positively against this morass of a lot of this stuff, a lot of stuff we don't even bother reading nowadays, because why would you? But I get the sense, sometimes, that there's just these jaded writers who don't care, and artists who are just wrong, whatever, and in the late-30s, early-40s stuff, it was just exciting that something was getting made, at all, that moved the story forward, and Pilkey channels that attitude, but in a much more controlled way. There's a coherence there, but that's not the most front-facing aspect of Dog Man.

As a serious progresses, without losing that anarchic spirit, it gets a little more coherent, but it gets that way because George and Harold are getting better. Harold's art’s getting more consistent. He mentions, in the first book, he's trying to draw more simply. He has goals. George’s spelling and grammar get better, and his stories get more depth. It's mostly invisible book-to-book, but if you jump back from Volume 10 to 1, you can definitely see the changes, and I'm sure there's some of that that's Pilkey getting better at drawing this particular world, or getting more refined, in terms of how he renders these characters and environments, but he's been at this nonstop since the 1980s. So, I think, unintentional change is probably less significant than I'm making it sound, and the idea that the kids are getting better is what's driving the stylistic evolution of the series.


[37:15] David: I think you're 100% right. I think the meta-narrative is driving a lot of this bus, which is what makes it so cool, on another totally different level, but that level is, I think, the thing that really engages the kids that are reading this stuff. It's pretty damn smart.


[37:32] John: And I think, when you go back to that first story in Captain Underpants, or occasionally, there's a back-up in Dog Man, especially early-on, where the conceit is that we're looking at one of the kindergarten versions of Dog Man, I can absolutely see the difference, the stark contrast in there, and those stories are a dubious canonicity, in terms of the ongoing graphic novel, which creates something interesting, too, that I think is attractive to kids, beyond just, “you can get better at drawing,” and that’s that there's this unknowable comics history to Dog Man, and it's one the authors know about and they can refer to, they can reference past adventures, or they can redo, ultimate-tize their old comics that don't actually exist in the actual real world, but the experience of that is a lot like reading a contemporary mainstream comic or seeing a Marvel Cinematic Universe movie, and knowing that the Infinity Gauntlet existed before, but it was different, and it was something from another era, and it was presented in a different way, and that's how I felt when I was reading Marvel Comics, as a kid.

When I'd go back, and I'd read the old Lee/Kirby stuff, they felt stilted and weirdly stylized, both writing and art, in a way that made them feel less real to me than what Byrne or Claremont, or Stern, or Simonson were doing, and a lot of those stories were unavailable then. There wasn't an app that you could call up or […] you could go to that had the history of Marvel Comics in print. You were just at the mercy of what they chose to reprint, and DC was even more like that, because when I started reading DC Comics, the in-universe history of the DC characters had been altered or completely eradicated by the events of Crisis on Infinite Earths, and you just didn't see those stories around very often. So, they were beyond my grasp, and Pilkey here, whether by design or just by the actions of making it, he's created this unknowable Golden Age of Dog Man, and this book, unlike Captain Underpants, came out in the MCU era of childhood.

It came out in this world where, in 1997, sure, kids knew what superheroes were. I absolutely know what Superman is. He's a guy who wears the underpants on the outside, and he puts on a red cape, and that's what Captain Underpants is. Dog Man, which we'll get into in a minute, a little bit, but it gets into the superhero territory, but it's this world where that is just the background noise that you have all the time when you're a kid. Of course, you know who Iron Man and Star-Lord is. Every kid does. I guess, one of the things I'm getting at is that, in the late 90s, the mantra for what would make comics appealing to wide ranges of people, or comic characters appealing to wide ranges of people, was a clean, simplified origin story, and Captain Underpants is just about the archetype of a superhero. Red cape, underwear on the outside, boom, does good things, he says, “tra-la-la.” He's not that different than Mighty Mouse, other than, he's put in different situations. He's like Mighty Mouse stuck in South Park, almost, in a weird way, but the world of Dog Man is not that world.

It turned out, that wasn't what people wanted. What they wanted was complex histories of characters that they could never grasp. A Lovecraftian pantheon of heroes and stories that did or didn't exist, that you can never grasp in your head, at the same time, and that's what Dog Man is. It's not overwhelming, in the same way it's not overwhelming when you're watching one of the phase one or two Marvel movies, but it's there. There's a further world beyond this that you're not seeing, and you can't see, because it doesn't really exist. An even bigger thing starts happening around book three, Tale of Two Kitties, that adds two big changes to the series that are absolutely key to making it what it is, and the Tale of Two Kitties, which is also the title of a 2006 Garfield movie, which seems real hacky, but it isn't, because what's important to the Dav Pilkey Dog Man: Tale of Two Kitties is the actual Dickens reference.

The meta-story here is that George and Harold, as they progress through school, they have to start reading classic novels in school, and you know what? They love them, and the Dog Man comics from here on out are all infused with the storytelling of these classic novels, like Wuthering Heights [Mothering Heights], Catch-22 [Fetch-22], For Whom The Bell Tolls [For Whom The Ball Rolls], but the stories aren't parodies of the books, and they're not following the plot of the books. They're just dealing with some of the same themes as the books, and then also going to, sometimes, great length to set up puns with the narrative, like having to fetch 22 psychokinetic fish in Fetch-22, but the themes of the ideas explored in those novels are deliberately being overlapped onto the ongoing Dog Man story.

The other big thing, though, is Li’l Petey, and in Tale of Two Kitties, Petey, the villain, decides to clone himself to have a just-as-evil partner-in-crime. So, he buys a U Clone ‘Em brand cloning machine from the Internet. Two to three days later, it arrives. He pulls out a whisker from himself, which by the way, he is missing that whisker from that point on. From that panel to the present day, he doesn't have it.


[42:50] David: That's awesome. I didn't catch that.


[42:53] John: He puts the whisker in the machine, and out pops his clone, but Petey didn't read the last step of the instructions, “wait 18 years for your clone to reach adulthood.” So, he winds up with a little kid version of himself, and he wants nothing to do with the kid. He tries to get rid of him. Li’l Petey winds up making friends with Dog Man and goes to live with him. Li’l Petey becomes the heart of the Dog Man books, from then on, and Pilkey stated as much, but it's evident, just reading it. He is the throughline from then on, or the throughline is really the journey of Petey, who’s, I would argue, the real main character of this graphic novel series. Even though he wants nothing to do with the kid, at first, he starts to accept that he's a father, and then he wants to make Li’l Petey follow in his own evil footsteps, but Li’l Petey wants to be good, and they're genetically the same. So, does that mean that evil comes from inside, or is it a choice they can make?

Li’l Petey believes in redemption, and Petey starts trying, and as he's doing that, we start learning more about Petey's life. We learn that his father abandoned him and his mother when he was Li’l Petey's age. His dad just isn't a good dude. He eventually shows up and becomes a character in the series, and Li’l Petey wants to give another chance, but adult Petey's been burned too much, and the rest of the series, up to now, even while it's dealing with super-genius telepathic fish, Flippy, in the story they're trying to make a serious Dog Man movie, called The Dog Man, and that movie gets ruined, and they make a Claymation movie instead, but then a giant gyro statue from that movie comes to life, and all the bits with Dog Man chasing balls instead of crooks, or pooping in file cabinets, or Dog Man becoming the superhero, The Bark Knight, Li’l Petey becoming the vaguely Wolverine-like Cat Kid. The rest of the series is all about Petey trying to learn how to be a good father and a good cat, and it’s powerful stuff, and it feels real and honest.

Pilkey’s taking the immediacy and propulsive anything-could-happen childlike storytelling from the Golden Age of comics and making the central question of the superhero and/or cop story about, is it about redemption or incarceration? And the comic just straight-up deals with how mass incarceration leads to recidivism, and the social and societal structures that make it difficult for ex-cons to change. It takes that redemption narrative and makes it the central part of the story, and there's plenty of comics where a villain becomes a hero, or whatever, but very few feel as earned or as subtle as how Petey does it, and this is all in the midst of these Three Stooges-inspired, somebody-getting-bonked-on-the-head-is-funny gags.


[45:35] David: Yeah.


[45:37] John: It isn't talking down to kids on this stuff, and it isn't going over their heads with it.


[45:41] David: I think you're exactly 100% correct. I agree. I agree, entirely. The story does become 100% Petey’s redemption arc, in many ways, with Li’l Petey as his conscience, in some ways, and Li’l Petey is such a great foil for both sides, for Dog Man and for Petey, in that he's just relentlessly positive, I guess is the word, which allows Petey, his dad, to change. He creates the space that allows Petey to be able to change, and the redeeming part of Petey is that he eventually comes around to that. He takes advantage of that opportunity, which-- it's really great. It's really good. Like I said, it's done in such a way that it never feels like you're being hit over the head with this stuff, but I know, reading it to my kid, I was like, “this is great. I love that we've got this character who's displaying these personality traits,” and also the other side of it.

In these books, and all Pilkey’s stuff, there's a lot of, “it's okay to make a mistake.” There's a lot of that in all of the books, in a lot of different ways, but that message keeps coming through, over and over again. It's like, “hey, just because you did that, that's not who you are,” and “hey, it's okay to try things and fail. It's okay to make mistakes. You don't have to be perfect.” All these really great little lessons that are not being-- never does any of Pilkey’s characters come out and say, “hey, it's okay to make mistakes.” They just make mistakes and then they move on, and sometimes, they're distraught over the mistakes that they've made, but then they get through that. So, I don't know. I think you're 100% right. Pilkey certainly finds his, I don't know if it's designed that way, or if he just found his reason for these books, through Li’l Petey and Petey, but it certainly becomes that, after that. Dog Man is just the hub around which all the characters really spin, and we learn a lot about all the other characters. We don't really ever learn a ton about Dog Man. He's the foil for the things that happen, in a lot of ways.


[48:00] John: The story of Dog Man goes utterly unexplored, and that's another call-back to old comics, I think, where Lee and Kirby never talked about the Fantastic Four's origin after Issue #1. They never went back to that story. It wasn't until later that it became a key part of things, and even the old Superman, in Action Comics #1, the 1930s version Superman, the question was, “how is he so tough?” “He's from another planet.” Okay. That's it. That's Krypton. So, nobody talks about the fact that Petey killed a dude. I mean, that part goes away because Dog Man's fine. Dog Man's great. He's okay. It's almost like Orange is the New Black, where Dog Man's the door in to telling these stories about these other characters that you wouldn't be able to make your main character and sell it to a corporation, to have it be released to the masses.


[48:58] David: Yeah, that's a good way to put it, and I think that's exactly it.


[49:02] John: I doubt that was the plan. I mean, my guess would be that, if Pilkey hadn't happened upon Li’l Petey, I don't think we would still be talking about Dog Man now. I bet we'd be talking about Captain Underpants Volume #18 or something.


[49:16] David: Or something else.


[49:17] John: Yeah. I just mean that, I think that is an enthralling part of it that has kept him interested in this, when he has other equally viable things he could go and do. You know what I mean?


[49:28] David: Yeah, I think you’re right. I think it's also evidenced by Cat Kid Club, which has come out since Li’l Petey's shown up, I think. You, fairly soon after that, start getting Cat Kid Club.


[49:40] John: That's the other piece is, I think this is the next really amazing stroke of genius that he has. He has Li’l Petey, Cat Kid, starts working with Molly, a psychokinetic tadpole, to teach these young frogs, who have been adopted by a reformed Flippy, how to make comics, and then that is what Cat Kid Comic Club, the graphic novel, is. The series has this framing device, where Li’l Petey and Molly teach a class, but the main thing is that you read the comics in each one of these graphic novels, and they're ostensibly made by different young frogs, and they work in a bunch of different styles, and I don't think there's ever been a book series more actively encouraging kids to be creative, and I mean, holy shit, to make comics.


[50:23] David: Right? Yeah, I know. There's all the different ways that you can do this.


[50:27] John: I don't say this lightly, but man, I wish I had that when I was a kid. I'm happy with the comics I had when I was a kid, don't get me wrong, and I'm grateful that Larry Hama stuck these real formalist aspects into G.I. Joe. I think, like a lot of American kids my age, the silent issue of G.I. Joe was one of the things that made me think about how comics, as a form, worked, and Pilkey’s always playing these formal aspects. We haven't brought it up, but most flamboyantly, it’s this thing he has called Flip-o-Rama, which has been reoccurring since Captain Underpants and in Dog Man. It's a two-page flipbook, and you're meant to flip between the two pages, so it kind of looks like it's moving, and somebody's about to be bonked on the head, then flip, bonk, then flip, they're about to be bonked again, and you just go back and forth. If you ever look at a kid's copies of Dog Man, you can see how beat up those particular pages are, but in Cat Kid, the formalism's really different. Like you said, it’s “here's a bunch of different ways you can make comics,” a lot of which aren't even that accepted, in terms of comics. A lot of it's, I don't know if avant-garde is the right way to say it, but some are pencil art, some are photos of toys that have been posed, like a twisted toy fair, but there's one that's an […] one, that's all nature photographs and haiku creating these non-narrative comics. The possibilities of comics are limitless, and here's a comic telling kids that, and that they can do it. That’s awesome.


[51:48] David: Yeah. Awesome. I agree. In addition to it just being that, what you described, all these different Pilkey books, like Captain Underpants, Dog Man, Cat Kid Club, specifically Dog Man and Cat Kid Club, though, even more so, I would say, specifically encouraging youth to not only read comic book-style storytelling, but also to create that style themselves, or invite them, or show them that it's possible at the level that they're at, allowing them into that space. So, that's being done, and at a really high level of quality, but then on top of that, there's 10s of millions of copies of this out there. He's like the Johnny Appleseed of comic books right now. There's nobody in this space that's even remotely close to what Dav Pilkey is doing, in terms of making the youth of the United States aware of the fact that comic books exist and that they can make them.


[52:47] John: Yeah.


[52:48] David: There's nobody doing it on a bigger stage, at that higher level. Nobody. He's the king of it right now. It's incredible what he's pulling off, what he's doing. Just, hats off to the guy.


[53:04] John: In a way, it's like if the Sex Pistols in Manchester 1977 were the Taylor Swift Eras Tour. That's the legendary concert that spawned Joy Division and Siouxsie and the Banshees, and The Cure, and all these people, and more people claim to have been there than could have possibly fit in the room. It's bizarre to think about, if you stop and think, that meta-textually, it's George and Harold, drawing a comic about frogs making comics, and then George and Harold making those comics, each in a radically different style. Back in Dog Man, when that Claymation gyro monster attacked, it was represented by photos of Claymation figures, digitally superimposed over line art. It doesn't make sense. The kids are making the comics in their treehouse, but that's part of the anarchic spirit of the child-like wonder. It doesn't feel like that “who gives a shit? The kids will never know.” It feels like “comics can be anything for anybody,” and that's what you should know.


[54:01] David: Yeah. Agree.


[54:02] John: Since fall 2016, when the first Dog Man came out, the series has, in print, more than 40 million copies in 43 languages. This next part here is meaningless, but if you divide that up into what a monthly comic would have to sell to get that, that's 417,000 copies a month, every month, for eight years. Dog Man: Mothering Heights wasn't just the bestselling comic of 2021. It wasn't the bestselling kids’ book of 2021. It was the #1 book in America, and this is the thing I love about comics, sometimes, is ever since I was a little kid, or ever since I could make decisions about the media that I consume, I generally felt like the bestselling books or albums, or movies, aren't usually my cup of tea. Sometimes they are, but sometimes, though, the bestselling comic is actually really good, and I think Dog Man's really good. I think it's a great comic.

From my point-of-view, personally, I think it fulfills the promises that were made by people like Jay Stephens in the late 90s, back when Captain Underpants was just starting, and Stephens is doing JetCat and Tutenstein, and all these kids comics aimed at adults, because who else is going into the comic bookstores in the late 90s? It was an alternative comic for adults, the same way that like when Raina Telgemeier, some years later, when she was doing Smile as an alternative comic for adults, it was actually a mainstream comic for kids, but back then, when somebody would try to make the Jay Stephens stuff actually for kids, they'd change it a lot, make it a lot safer, and a lot more like other stuff. I'm talking about the Discovery Kids Tutenstein cartoon, but that's not what's happening with Dog Man.

I mean, the comics are sold to kids. They come from a big corporation, Scholastic, who has tendrils into every school to sell their product, but still, Dog Man feels really alive and vital, like Captain Underpants. It looks like maybe it’s going to carry over to the film adaptation. There already was this off-Broadway musical, but with the Dog Man movie trailer dropped, and as jaded as I've become about Easter eggs in comic book movies, I was genuinely excited when I realized that in one shot of Chief’s desk, you could tell it wasn't actually from the same scene as the other shots, and you can see Flippy, dead in a fishbowl, and when my son got home that day, I was like, “they're doing the Flippy story.”


[56:20] David: That's awesome.


[56:21] John: That seems more meaningful, to me, than a reference to a superhero costume from when I was a kid, or something. It's not a reference to make a reference. Dog Man's not vampiric, staying alive by sucking the blood out of past things. It embraces the past, old movies, old comics, also new comics. To me, I think that points the way forward to the next thing in comics. I think it's building a generation that's going to be the next thing in comics, and I’m happy to be on-board and reading it.


[56:51] David: Well said, John. That was a great ending. Nothing, really, to add, other than, if we are going to have a comic book selling 400,000 units a month, since 2016, I'm glad that it's this one. I think it's of very high quality. I think Pilkey’s probably one of the best storytellers we have out there. Certainly, one of the best in the comic book space, and he's leading a charge that hopefully means that we're going to have a couple more generations of comic book readers, which we could really use. Now, if we could just get North American comics to get out of the superhero space for half a second, and do anything else, maybe we could take advantage of this massive tidal wave of 10s of millions of books, graphic novels, just from this one man, poured into the heads of America's youth.


[57:46] John: I think it’s a real thing. I think you'll start seeing this in the next few years, is that the people that have grown up on these graphic novels are transitioning into adulthood, and the same publishers that are publishing kids’ books, if they're smart, they're going to start trying to figure out how to make this be just a part of people's diets, going forward, and the stigmas about comics, I feel like that's gone away. I mean, I feel like, on the literary side, it's been eaten away. I feel like, on the Pop culture side, it's been eaten away. I don't think there's anybody that sees somebody reading a comic and makes a derisive comment, or maybe they make a derisive comment about a particular comic, but not about the concept of comics.


[58:23] David: I think that, in our lifetime, has well and truly been defeated. I think, once the librarians got onboard, it was all good, and they're certainly onboard now. I think they lead the charge, in some ways. I think you're totally right on that. I don't think there's a stigma attached to that, at all, anymore. Certainly, our generation below don't have that hang up or that problem, and yeah, with Pilkey’s work, it seems like that's relatively ensured, that that will continue. This was great, John. Thanks so much for doing this deep dive on Dog Man. What a great choice.


[58:56] John: It is one of the things that, it gets funny, because the comic criticism culture is not based around this. You know what I mean? This is a great example of a thing that I don't think there's that much-- you can find a lot of think pieces about, whatever, Hickman's X-Men or whoever's Batman, but this gets overlooked, falls into a nebulous space. So, yeah. I'm happy to get to talk about it a little bit.


[59:20] David: Yeah, I'm glad you did, and I think it's exactly the stuff that we need to talk more about and shine a spotlight on. Not that Pilkey or Dog Man needs it, I mean, obviously, but I think the comic book direct market industry, as a whole, should be more embracing of this phenomenal success, and looking for ways to try to learn lessons from it. So, I'm glad you did the breakdown, which is great. Thanks, John.


[59:47] John: Alright.


[59:48] David: Thanks to all four of our listeners. Yeah, thanks, Dav Pilkey, for making some great books and helping to get me and my son through many an evening of trying to get somebody to fall asleep.


[60:00] John: See you next week, here on The Corner Box.


[60:02] David: Thanks, everybody. Bye.


Thanks for joining us, and please subscribe, rate, and tell your friends about us. You can find updates and links at www.thecornerbox.club and we’ll be back next week with more from David and John, here at The Corner Box.