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Dog Man by Dav Pilkey is the best-selling superhero comic book series in the world. It is also the best-selling comic book in the English-speaking world, full stop. With print runs of five million copies, that’s Asterix numbers. Published by Scholastic Graphix, the eleventh book in the series, and the first in two years, is Dog Man: Twenty Thousand Fleas Under the Sea. It will be published on the 28th of March, 2023 in the USA, Canada and the UK. It follows Dog Man: Mothering Heights which was the best-selling book of all in America in 2021.
Spinning out of Dog-Man was the Cat Kid Comic Club series, which teaches children how to make their own comic books. The latest edition of that series, Cat Kid Comic Club: Collaborations, will be published at the end of November, and will likely be the best-selling comic book of the year as well.
Dav Pilkey stated : “I am humbled and grateful to do what I love for a living. Since the pandemic began, I have been inspired to create even more stories and to learn and grow as an artist–from experimenting with various mediums to make comics using photography, poetry, and calligraphy, to building character models and sets by hand, as well as exploring different themes and storylines. My hope is that my books foster creativity and imagination, and instill a lifelong love of reading.”
The publication of Dog Man: Twenty Thousand Fleas Under the Sea marks Dav Pilkey’s 35 years of writing and illustrating award-winning and bestselling books for children. His first-ever graphic novel, The Adventures of Super Diaper Baby, was published in 2002, fourteen years before the release of the first Dog Man book. When Dav Pilkey was a kid, he was diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia. Dav was so disruptive in class that his teachers made him sit out in the hallway every day. He spent his time in the hallway creating his own original comic books — the very first adventures of Dog Man and Captain Underpants. In college, Dav met a teacher who encouraged him to write and illustrate for kids. He took her advice and created his first book, World War Won, which won a national competition in 1986. Dav made many other books before being awarded the California Young Reader Medal for Dog Breath (1994) and the Caldecott Honor for The Paperboy (1996).
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