Dog Man

This brief prologue serves as an introduction to the frame story surrounding Dog Man’s creation. It introduces the book’s fictional authors, George and Harold, who are also the authors and main characters of Pilkey’s earlier graphic novel series Captain Underpants. Captain Underpants ran for 17 years prior to Dog Man’s publication and developed a large international audience of young readers. Including George and Harold in a separate series provides Dog Man a natural appeal to readers who are already familiar with them through Captain Underpants.

Like the rest of Dog Man, this prologue is drawn and hand-lettered in an intentionally crude style to sustain the illusion that it was created by children. This implies that the frame story was also created by George and Harold, as opposed to existing outside their comic book. In the fiction of the book, George and Harold create this prologue to address their readers directly. This helps clarify their status as authors who are distinct from Pilkey and paves the way for their later asides.

Though they are not characters in the Dog Man universe, Dog Man’s content reveals and emphasizes elements of the young writers’ personalities that are already present in the Prologue. The boys are creative, upbeat, humorous, and precocious. They are also sophomoric pranksters who like to challenge authority. Their mutual attitude toward their comics is overwhelmingly playful; this sets a lighthearted and comical tone that remains consistent throughout Dog Man.

George and Harold’s art and writing display a lot of passion, focus, and talent, but it is also largely unskilled and riddled with mistakes. Pilkey intentionally includes these elements to support the fictionalized circumstances of Dog Man’s creation as the work of young artists writing extemporaneously for their own amusement.