Trivia / Dog Man (Dav Pilkey)

• Cowboy Be Bop At His Computer: The Wikipedia page for the series was heavily vandalized by displaying fake titles for future books, so much so that the page was eventually deleted and merged within the Captain Underpants franchise’s page.
• Creator-Driven Successor: The series is an in-universe spin-off of Dav Pilkey’s Captain Underpants.
• Sequel Gap: Dog Man: Twenty-Thousand Fleas Under the Sea was released in March of 2023, two years after the last book, Dog Man: Mothering Heights, which is an unusual time gap between books in the series. The reasoning was that Pilkey was more focused on the spin-off series Cat Kid Comic Club in the time between. Now, apparently all Dog Man books will be published a year after the other in March, with Cat Kid Comic Club books being released in between.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The original Dog Man book was announced at the end of "Captain Underpants and the Sensational Saga of Sir Stinks-a-Lot" under the title of “The Adventures of Dog Man: World’s Greatest Cop”, with a very different cover and being described as the “fourth epic novel by George Beard and Harold Hutchins”, keeping publishing continuity from the previous three Captain Underpants spin-off graphic novels. However, the book ended up simply titled “Dog Man” without being referred as “the fourth epic novel”.
  • The FLEAS were originally going to have a fourth member, a penguin named Honk. However he was removed. Dav Pilkey did state that Honk was going to be Refitted for Sequel in "Dog Man: Fetch-22" under a different name, but he ultimately did not appear for that book either.
  • During a how-to-draw video on Piggy, Pilkey stated that the character would return in "Dog Man: Mothering Heights", but he ultimately would not return to the series until the book that came afterwards, "Dog Man: Twenty-Thousand Fleas Under the Sea".
• Write What You Know: Pilkey based the character of Petey on himself and his struggles through childhood, as well as basing the character’s mother and their relationship with himself. He also based Li’l Petey on his mother.