My meeting with Dave Pilkey

 

There are these comic book series from a certain author that are children bestsellers around the word. The author goes by the name of Dav Pilkey. He is the best-selling author and illustrator of the wildly popular Captain Underpants and Dog Man graphic novel series, as well as many picture books, including Dog Breath and The Hallo-Wiener. He won a Caldecott Honor for his picture book The Paperboy.

Captain Underpants is a hero with an under-pant and a cape. George and Harold, two school children thought of it and played around with a hypno-ring on their school principal Mr. Krupp. Mr. Krupp, a very strict and rude principal who hates children, George and Harold the most. He turns into a super hero - Captain Underpants at every finger snap he hears. Just a little water and he’s back to his old self. Originally Captain Underpants didn't have any superpowers. On one of George and Harold's reality adventure, they tried to escape an alien spaceship and on the way George snagged some super power juice which he gave Captain Underpants while he was fighting a huge piranha plant. The ever powerful Captain Underpants since then are an integral part of several George and Harold's adventurous stories and in the series based on him.

Dog-man. a Dog n' a man. Dog-man was introduced in one of Captain Underpants’ episode introduction by George and Harold.  The story starts on how Dog-man came to be. It starts with a bomb explosion, that kills the weakest part of a police officer (his head) and the weakest part of a dog (his body). A nurse came up with an idea to sew the dog's head to the police officers body to make the greatest police office there ever was. Petey, a criminal turned to a good Samaritan who helps Dog-man in many episodes. Petey also tried to clone himself but was unfortunately left with his clone Lil Petey as his son. Lil Petey is Dog-man's serious sidekick.

When I was in grade 3, I was surprised when my school took me to the Opera House for a meet with Dav Pilkey. There were hundreds of students from many schools in the audience and on the stage the he was, the great author himself, Dav Pilkey. He talked about how he started as a writer and loved reading. He talked about the first book he published which was rejected 23 times. The main memoir for me that day was when he had a live drawing and asked the audience to guess the character. Li'l Petey I replied when he asked me to answer from the audience when I had my hands raised to his question. Since I got the answer right, I had won his drawing with his autograph on it!