Twenty Percent True: December 2022

The latest publishing drama/hate click bait is an article on The Cut. I'm not going to give the link, because they don't deserve the traffic.

In the article, the author posits that there are no "good" children's books. It seems they are specifically referring to middle grade books, although they don't use the term "middle grade." They also never define what would make a "good" book. They say that their children are voracious readers, and although the author seems to be pleased at how much their children read, they're upset that everything the children read is garbage. They then go on to describe how it is impossible to find more books, as if they have never heard of librarians, recommendation lists, Goodreads, or Google.

Now, there are many conversations to be had around this (the relatively small offerings in middle grade as opposed to young adult, how juggernaut titles take over genres, how adult sensibilities need to be set aside to write fiction an 8-year-old will love, etc etc). But this article does not engage with any of those. In fact it spends most of its word count singling out Dav Pilkey's "Dog Man" and complaining about how annoying it is.

If you're not familiar with Dog Man, let me give you the skinny. The whole thing is a comic drawn by two middle school boys, George and Harold, who are the main characters from another Dav Pilkey series called Captain Underpants. The art (in early books in the series) looks like it was done by middle schoolers, and there are spelling mistakes and words that are misspelled, crossed out, and then rewritten. The story is that, once upon a time, there was a police officer and his K9 unit. They were in a horrible accident caused by Petey the Cat, where the cop's head was died and the dog's body died, but someone had the great idea to combine the surviving parts, creating Dog Man! Half cop, half dog. The first few books are Petey having an evil plan (which are as ridiculous as you would expect from the Dog Man premise), Dog Man catching him and throwing him in jail, and then Petey escaping again.

But then, Petey has an idea. He can clone himself and then there would be two of him to be twice as evil! However, when he clones himself, he creates Little Petey, who is a little kid, hopeful and innocent, and with none of Petey's jadedness. Petey is infinitely frustrated with Little Petey's childishness. Over the course of several books, Little Petey starts to wear Petey down, thawing his icy heart. And here the series starts to get into deeper themes: not just that Petey's literal clone is good and maybe there's good in Petey too if he just chooses kindness, but it also gets into cycles of generational trauma. One of my favorite parts is that when Petey is in jail, Little Petey lives with Dog Man, which ends up being "on the weekends," which is a set up similar to kids with divorced parents who have to travel between houses.

Also there are a lot of fart jokes. And fart songs.

The author of this article does not like the fart jokes (and yes, for me--an adult--they get old). The author of this article doesn't like that the jokes repeat over and over again (and, yes, for me--an adult--they get old). My kid cackles every single time, rolling around in his reading spot, scream laughing as he sings, "Stinkle stinkle little fart!" But I think the author of this article fails to understand several points about the humor. 1. Kids think that's funny, and the book was written for kids and not for adults. 2. Even if the joke wasn't repeated multiple times across several books, your kid would read that one section over and over and roll around and cackle. 3. This actually is teaching children humor (now hold on a second, let me finish). Kids learn by repeated exposure. That's why a lot of modern curricula are set up as "spiral curricula" where you keep coming back to the same concept over and over and over. Yes, these books tell the same jokes over and over, but each time your kid learns a little more about structure and expectation. At one point, Petey (who is also furious that Little Petey keeps telling the same joke) explains about the structure of knock knock jokes and why they're funny, which in turn is a perfect set up for one of Little Petey's jokes that ends with "popped on your head."

And that got me thinking. The writer of this article:

Comically dislikes Dog Man.
Hates that they keep telling the same bad jokes
Wishes that everyone could just grow up already

Y'all. I think Petey wrote this article.

And that makes me feel better.

First of all, even though I know this is click bait and I should ignore it, it's much easier to ignore it knowing that Petey wrote it. It's just Petey being Petey. Ignore him.

But also, one of the big critiques of this article that keeps cropping up is a concern that this parent's disgust for their child's choice of reading material might result in the child feeling shamed and no longer wanting to read. But if this is Petey writing this, then we know how that's going to turn out: Little Petey will not be deterred. Eventually Petey will see the light and let kindness into his heart.

And if Petey didn't write this article, then at least these children are reading Dog Man, and they have Little Petey as a role model of how to not give up.

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