Pilkey closes as customary with drawing exercises, plus a promise that the canine crusader will be further unleashed in a sequel. The figures are studiously diverse, with police officers of both genders on view and George, the chief, and several other members of the supporting cast colored in various shades of brown.
With occasional pauses for Flip-O-Rama featurettes, the tales are all framed in brightly colored sequential panels with hand-lettered dialogue (“How do you feel, old friend?” “Ruff!”) and narrative. These begin with an origin tale (“A Hero Is Unleashed”), go on to a fiendish attempt to replace the chief of police with a “Robo Chief” and then a temporarily successful scheme to make everyone stupid by erasing all the words from every book (“Book ’Em, Dog Man”), and finish off with a sort of attempted alien invasion evocatively titled “Weenie Wars: The Franks Awaken.” In each, Dog Man squares off against baddies (including superinventor/archnemesis Petey the cat) and saves the day with a clever notion. What do you get from sewing the head of a smart dog onto the body of a tough police officer? A new superhero from the incorrigible creator of Captain Underpants.įinding a stack of old Dog Mancomics that got them in trouble back in first grade, George and Harold decide to craft a set of new(ish) adventures with (more or less) improved art and spelling. Though definitely an underachiever when it comes to merit badges, Hilda’s broad curiosity and willingness to stand up for the undergnome will make her a winner in most readers’ eyes. In the end, she both exonerates the nisses and saves the dog from hunters. Also, he adds not just gnomic nisses, but other small creatures, natural or otherwise, to his scenes and places Hilda so that she’s always easy to spot.
Pearson puts a dozen or more cartoon panels on each page, but his art is so simply drawn that the action is always easy to follow. Finally, one befriended nisse shows her how to enter a special space that, being the sum total of all out-of-the-way and unreachable nooks, is cluttered with misplaced bric-a-brac-and that turns out to be where the “Beast,” who is just a lonely oversized dog, is lurking when it’s not barreling destructively through houses. Meanwhile, Hilda’s patchy efforts to earn her camping and other scouting badges are derailed by her concern for the newly homeless nisses and other distractions. In a never-a-dull moment third outing, blue-haired Hilda joins Sparrow Scouts, finds out where lost household items go and meets some of Trolberg’s supernatural residents.Īs if sightings and news reports of a huge black beast in Trolberg aren’t troubling enough, an increasing number of nisses, helpful but sometimes-mischievous domestic sprites, are being ejected by human homeowners for supposed bad behavior.
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