Sunday, April 11, 2021

Dog Man: Mothering Heights

Bought at Foreign Languages Bookstore, Shanghai, China.

Title: Dog Man: Mothering Heights
Publisher: Scholastic / Graphix
Date: 2021
Writer: Dav Pilkey
Artist: Dav Pilkey
Colorist: Jose Garibaldi

So, as it turned out, Dog Man: Grime and Punishment (reviewed here) was not the end of the series. This new installment includes a romantic subplot between Chief and Nurse Lady, a bit more about Petey's mother (hence the title), giant evil animated sippy cups, lots of malic acid, and some references to the first law of thermodynamics. Oh, and poop jokes. Lots of poop jokes, because apparently the series had not actually moved beyond poop humor so much as to take a brief scenic detour away from it.

As with most of the more recent Dog Man books, the serious stuff here was quite well done, and never felt like it slowed things down or weighed things down. The bathroom humor has never been a favorite of mine, but my son (13 now) still finds it hilarious. The main source of much of this was Molly the psychokinetic tadpole, who is Lil' Petey's best friend, which seemed a bit weird because this wasn't an aspect of her character in previous appearances.

I did feel like this relied a bit too much on tropes and gimmicks from previous installments, while not adding too much to the longer-term plotlines. That being said, it was still cute fun, with several really great jokes.

Rating: 7/10

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