Dog Man and Cat Kid

The Dog Man book series has topped best-seller lists, been translated into 23 languages, and had an initial printing of 5 million copies(!) for the sixth volume, so I figured I might check this little series out. Actually, I have been meaning to read one of these books, a spin-off of the wildly popular Captain Underpants series, for a while now. So when my wife came home after picking up one on a whim for me, I finally had the chance to see what all the hubbub was about. Dog Man and Cat Kid is actually the fourth book in the series, and it did a great job of recapping prior books and getting me right into the narrative.

 

As you just saw, Dog Man is the result of an experimental surgery that grafted a dying dog's head onto the body of a dying police officer, resulting one strange living crime fighter. He fights for good, beset by his nemesis Petey the Cat. In his latest plot, Petey cloned himself but was bummed to find out that the result was a kitten. So he gets Dog Man to adopt the kitten, that way he'll have a double agent acting on his behalf. However, the kitten has other ideas and actually wants to be more like the virtuous Dog Man. Still, he has doubts and thinks he might be inherently evil, so he lets Petey sway him at times. When Dog Man's adventures get optioned for a major Hollywood movie, Dog Man ends up being hired as a bodyguard for the film's star, Yolay Caprese, and Petey decides to do everything in his power to ruin the entire enterprise.

This book has a little bit of something for everyone: bad puns, parodies of Hollywood action movies and actors, some bathroom humor, giant robotic hot dogs, slapstick scenes, riffs on Steinbeck's East of Eden and other literary works, and superheroic action scenes. And in the end, I feel like after all the silliness, there actually was a decent lesson about being able to make choices and determine how you want to act in the world. I know that this series and Captain Underpants gets a bad rap, appearing at the top of banned book lists, but I thought this book was a lot of fun and had a good moral. Sort of a contemporary version of MAD Magazine, with a critical skewering of the adult world.

This book was created by Dav Pilkey, a wildly successful children's book and comics author who has the Captain Underpants and The Dumb Bunnies series to his credit. My son and I are also quite partial to his parody/homages Kat Kong and Dogzilla. He speaks about his life, books, and a number of other topics in this interview.

I was not able to locate many reviews of this book, and they tended to be either "love" or "hate" ones. Kirkus Reviews concluded that this is a book "that will tickle fancies high and low." It currently has a 4.54 overall rating at Goodreads.

Dog Man and Cat Kid was published by Scholastic Graphix, and they offer more info about it here.