Cat Kid Comic Club by Dav Pilkey

The Cat Kid Comic club, a spinoff of the popular Dog Man series, invites young readers to experiment with their own comic stories and styles.

Cat Kid Comic Club series by Dav Pilkey. Scholastic Graphix, 2020-2022, about 220 pages

Reading Level: Chapter Books, ages 7-9

Recommended for: ages 6-10

Spinning off Dog Man

Cat Kid, also known as Li’l Petey, is the adopted son of Petey the World’s Most Evilest Cat (now reformed). Mollie is Petey’s best pal, an amphibian who hovers in the air and moves things with her brain. She looks like a large tadpole. Flippy is a crab, who has somehow become the adopted father of 17 baby frogs. All these (except the frogs?) are characters from Pilkey’s Dog Man series.

The Comics Club is Cat Kid’s art class, in which Mollie is the v-p and Flippy is the chaperone. Flippy takes his job a little too seriously—his insistence on clean comics with virtuous themes threatens to stifle the frogs’ imagination entirely until he learns to chill.

Calling all Baby Frogs and Aspiring Comic Creators

The comics themselves, presented in a variety of styles with plots an actual 7-year-old might concoct, are supremely relatable to the target age: crashes, explosions, dinosaurs, and monsters. One exception is the surprisingly beautiful haiku submission by Summer and Starla, who would seem to have a future in photography as well as poetry. Then there’s the Chubbs McSpiderbutt comic submitted by the Hacker Brothers, featuring insult comedy alongside photos of fantastic toy mashups. Artwork varies from smudgy pencil to fairly sophisticated paper collage.

In Perspectives (Vol. 2), the baby frogs actually learn something about perspective while siblings Naomi and Melvin try to outdo each other at sibling rivalry. The third volume, On Purpose, takes its theme from the epigram by Dolly Parton: “Find out who you are and do it on purpose.” The potty humor isn’t as prevalent in this series as in Dog Man (at least so far!). Sibling spats resolve and readers may be inspired to experiment with various media to create their own comics. (I think that might be the idea.)

Bottom Line: A tour of art styles and viewpoints for very young cartoonists.

Consideration:

A character in the second volume goes by the name “El” and is identified as “binary,” using they/them pronouns. Parents, take note–depending on the age and maturity level of your child, this could be a good time to discuss what “binary” means, or it could be a good time to avoid the series altogether, at least for now.

More at Redeemed Reader:

• Reviews: Aspiring comics artists, check out our review of Comics: Easy as A-B-C. Older artists can benefit from Understanding Comics.

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