34 pages • 1 hour read
Dav PilkeyA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Background
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
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Objects and characters throughout Dog Man have labels scrawled on them, including a bomb (labeled “bomb”), the chief’s police cap (labeled “Chief”), the mayor (who wears a shirt with a large “M” printed on it), the mayor’s car (labeled “Mayor”), a security guard’s desk (labeled “guard”), and a garbage bag (labeled “trash”).
Many buildings are also labeled. These include the chief’s house, “Petey’s Secret Lab,” the hospital, the police station (labeled “cops”), the chief’s office, “Cat Jail,” the robot factory (labeled “Robo-Time Industries”), and all the mayor’s “rotten businesses”—“Tim’s Burglar Supplies,” “Bully Supplies,” and “Illegal Stuff 4 Sale.”
Some of these labels, such as the ones on the bomb and the mayor’s car, apparently exist outside Dog Man’s diegesis. This implies that George and Harold included them for clarity. Other labels—like those proclaiming the names of businesses—exist in-universe as billboards and signs. However, they are stylistically indistinct from the clarifying labels. Like most of the text in Dog Man, both types of labels are clumsily scrawled in pencil, with little consideration of formatting and no visual depth.
Throughout Dog Man, sections of text are blacked out and crossed out, implying that George made mistakes while lettering. The individual panels are also shaky and uneven; there are lines, nicks, and protrusions in the gutters between panels. For example, in Panels 2 and 6 (134), the saleswoman’s hand pokes out of the frame. Young and inexperienced artists often rely on labels to clarify drawings that don’t communicate their content in the way that they desire.
Elements like these strengthen the illusion that Dog Man was written by children. The labels serve the function that George and Harold intend for them: They allow Pilkey to identify some of the vague and simple drawings throughout Dog Man without breaking character. These labels and mistakes also create opportunities for self-referential humor.
Dog Man is rife with anthropomorphic characters. The most obvious examples of this motif are the cats and dogs. Dog Man himself is a Frankensteinesque fusion of dog and human body parts; his head donor, Greg the Dog, apparently possessed human cognitive abilities but was otherwise a completely normal dog. Petey the Cat, meanwhile, walks bipedally, speaks English, and has paws that function like human hands. Based on the inmates at “Cat Jail,” this seems to be the norm for cats in Dog Man canon.
Anthropomorphism in Dog Man can also be the product of fantastical technology. The evil robots—Petey’s giant vacuum and the Robo-Chief—are mindless automatons, but they also have legible faces. Robo-Chief also has a humanoid body plan. In “Weenie Wars,” Petey acquires “living spray,” which brings inanimate objects to life. This anthropomorphizes an army of hot dogs, providing them arms, legs, faces, and human-level sapience.
The prevalence of anthropomorphic characters in Dog Man establishes the book’s tone as surreal and cartoonish. These elements also hearken to George and Harold’s stated interests in cape comics, horror movies, and Saturday morning cartoons. Much as in classic cartoons— Fleischer Bros, Looney Toons, Hanna-Barbera—humans and anthropomorphic animals interact casually in Dog Man without an in-universe explanation of this relationship. Gigantic, monstrous threats like Philly, the giant vacuum, and Robo-Chief are also staples of superhero media, Kaiju movies, and sci-fi films of the atomic age such as Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958); Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959); and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953).
At the beginning of Chapter 1, the chief buys a new couch and has it moved into his office, announcing that he “can’t wait to be the first one to sit on it” (14). He walks into his office, only to find that Greg the Dog and Officer Knight are already asleep on it. This is the start of a running gag wherein Dog Man repeatedly gets up on the couch and/or damages it, much to the chief’s consternation. The couch is a main point of tension between Dog Man and the chief and was previously a catalyzing conflict between the chief, Greg, and Officer Knight.
The chief’s couch is a symbol of his personal interests and comfort. It also serves as a stand-in for the types of things adults enjoy and worry about, filtered through George and Harold’s childish perspectives.
Getting up on the couch is a common thing dogs are not allowed to do in households. Like most dogs who break this rule, Dog Man is not breaking rules out of malice. He is simply struggling to curb his impulses. He misbehaves as a real-life dog might: thoughtlessly and impulsively. At the end of “Weenie Wars,” Dog Man accidentally destroys the chief’s couch completely. Rather than yelling at Dog Man as he did for much less egregious offences in earlier chapters, the chief is more concerned about Dog Man’s safety. This illustrates his development as a character: He cares about Dog Man more than he cares about the couch.
The friendship between George and Harold is a staple of Dog Man, Captain Underpants, and the other Pilkey publications that they appear in. Their friendship is the in-universe catalyst for Dog Man’s existence, and the fun they have together imbues the books with their optimism and buoyant sense of humor. Likewise, the friendship between Greg the Dog and Officer Knight leads to the creation of Dog Man—their teamwork and friendship become literal when they are combined into one being.
The strained friendship between the chief and Dog Man is also a significant motivation for the characters in these stories. In each chapter, Dog Man wants to impress the chief and make him proud, but he struggles to behave himself. The chief is a simultaneously harsh and caring authority figure. He appreciates Dog Man’s hard work and abilities, but he finds his overtly canine behavior frustrating and destructive. The final chapter of Dog Man culminates in the chief’s setting those differences aside and wholeheartedly accepting Dog Man. Conversely, the consequences of rejecting friendship are a significant plot point in “Weenie Wars.” If Petey had treated the sentient hot dog with respect and kindness, it is implied that the hot dog would not have become bitter and warlike, and Petey would have been spared the jail time that he endured.
By Dav Pilkey