#too busy making dog man comix | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

biolizardboils · 2 years ago

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Sooooo i wrote up the whole Dog Man Comix thing for r/HobbyDrama! Link to that here, full copied text below. (Note to self: pin this post if it ever starts spreading again)

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Finally done with my first Hobby Scuffle! It’s not a full Drama because I was involved, and it’s not History because it’s been happening on an off for five years now. A special thanks to u/nissincupramen, u/ailathan, and u/Dlight98 for showing interest and giving advice!

(Disclaimer: All profiles linked were public at the time of posting. Please don’t harass anyone involved, they probably don’t remember said involvement anyway.)

[Literature] Dog Man Comix: How a children’s book page fooled the Internet

Dav Pilkey has been making children’s books since 1987, and has earned nearly every award the career can offer (Caldecott, NYT Best Seller List, getting banned for trivial reasons). Captain Underpants, his biggest claim to fame, is informed by his experience of growing up with ADHD and dyslexia in a less-than-accommodating school system. (He’s been very open about this during school visits and interviews—here’s a transcript of one.)

His cheeky commentary on the issue has garnered a following of kids and adults with similar struggles. Sometimes pages from his books will circulate online, causing insightful discussion and laughs aplenty along the way.

And sometimes, they lead to Wil Wheaton (and many, many others) cheering for a kid that doesn’t exist.

But before I can tell you that story, I have to tell you this story…

Chapter 1: Background and Original Post

On March 22nd, 2017, DreamWorks dropped a trailer for Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie. Millennials worldwide exclaimed “Woah, I loved these books and I love how faithful this is to their tone and art style!” Then, “Woah, this series is even better than I remember!” and “Dav wrote 4 more CU books after I grew out of them, and their commentary on how American schooling fails neurodivergent kids is sharper than ever!”

I took part in this moment in history, and it was awesome. It was also the catalyst for the biggest mistake of my life.

20 days later, I saw some of Dav’s more recent outings in a bookstore and read them out of curiosity. One of them was Dog Man, a graphic novel spin-off penned by George and Harold, the young protagonists of Captain Underpants.

The first book (and only the first, for some reason) contains in-universe documents from the boys’ kindergarten days, when they first made comics together. My favorite of these was a refocus form Harold was punished with for copying said comics with a teacher’s printer.

“How will my behavior change in the future?: [sic] be more Quieter When making copies of Dog Man Comix in office.

I am ready to re-join the classroom.: No

Why?: Too busy making Dog Man comix”

I thought it was hilarious. So hilarious, in fact, that I had to share it with the growing CU community. So I took a photo and posted it to Tumblr.

Please note how I tagged the post with Captain Underpants, Dog Man, and Harold’s full name. Please note the 200,000+ likes and reblogs, as well.

(cont. in next reply)

Chapter 2: Initial Spread ft. Wil Wheaton

I don’t know how or when the post escaped the CU fandom. My best guess is that someone with way more followers reblogged it without the tags, and thus without the context. All I know is that one day in early May, my phone wouldn’t stop buzzing.

When I checked it, The Post was getting more notes at a faster rate than my blog had ever known before or since. I was delighted to finally be “Tumblr famous”… until I read the comments and tags. Turns out, people thought my photo was of a real form, written by a real kid.

Maybe if I’d edited The Post’s main body and added the context, its spread would’ve stopped then and there. Instead, I commented on it in a way people were guaranteed not to notice and left to do something else.

It hit 3k later that day. The next, it reached 7k. This is when the floodgates truly opened, and I learned the true magnitude of my mistake.

Day in and day out, people were asking where they could find these “Dog Man comix”. Others cheered Harold on for fighting the system, promising to support his future career. I got DM’d under the pretense that I was Harold’s mother.

And if you’re thinking “surely somebody here grew up with Dav’s books and recognized Harold,” you’re correct! Lots of these commenters either deduced Dav’s involvement or found out through Google. (More than one accused me of fooling everyone on purpose.) But for every one of those comments, there were ten more that were oblivious. Even better, some came close but fell just short (i.e. “isn’t this how Dav Pilkey started out lol”; “Someone needs to get this in front of Dav Pilkey stat”). These ones were so funny and frustrating all at once that they’re my favorites to this day.

So why did so many people think the form was real? I’ve had lots of time to ponder this, and I’ve boiled it down to these factors:

People who grew up with CU won’t necessarily know about Dog Man. The eighth and ninth CU books came out six years apart: more than enough time for young readers to grow out of the series or even forget its existence. I know I did before the Movie was announced. Even post-announcement, not everyone hyped for it was guaranteed to look up what Dav’s been up to.

The elements that mark this as something from CU are obscured just enough to pass detection. Harold Hutchins’ fictionality can be confirmed with a Google search, but his last name is initialized on the form. Every teacher in the series has a punny name, but Ms. Construde’s is misspelled here in a way that obscures this. (Not to mention she didn’t appear in the main series, and “misconstrued” isn’t a common word anyway.) Harold’s sketch of Dog Man himself is hard to make out under Construde’s notes.

The book’s pages were shiny, which should’ve been a dead giveaway (nobody laminates refocus forms, AFAIK). However, I took the photo in a dimly-lit bookstore at an angle that minimized the shine to the bottom-right corner.

Finally, refocus forms were kinda upsetting as a kid. Getting your drawings written over in angry red ink was scary, too. I got yelled at more than once for doodling on my notes, and a LOT of people commented with similar stories. Honestly, it’s easy to choose not to research something if its message hooks you in at first sight.

As for how everyone overlooked the red background or the improbability of a kindergartener using a printer… yeah, I got nothin’.

Now, I will admit to leading a few people on, hoping they’d look up the names and realize their error. (Not sure if that ever worked.) But for the most part, I explained things to anyone who asked to see more of Harold’s comix—sometimes in my own words, sometimes with just a photo of the book’s cover. I made a specific tag for these responses and related posts, which is how I’m able to cite so many old comments and accurately track The Post’s growth. (You can read it in chronological order here, if you dare.)

But by then, new comments were coming in so fast that I had no hope of replying to them all. At some point I resigned to simply changing my blog’s description whenever The Post flared up and hoping people would check it. I don’t remember what it said, but I have record of it working exactly once.

Anyway, Wil Wheaton reblogged The Post that September and commented, “Stay strong, Harold.” It had a sizable spike in activity right after, but I didn’t know it was due to him (or even who he was) until a friend alerted me.

By winter, I’d developed a routine. Check The Post. Pray it wouldn’t flare up again. Freak out whenever it did. Change my blog description, maybe pin an explanatory post. Reply to some angry and sad comments, reblog some funny ones. Wait for things to calm down and return to Step 1. The guilt was killing me. I had to come clean with what I’d done, and all the confusion and upset it had caused.

And when you’re dying to confess your sins, you might as well head to the very top.

(cont. in next reply)

Chapter 3: Coming Clean

Snail mail aside, there’s only one way to reach Dav Pilkey and reasonably expect a response: his Instagram. He’s on hiatus at the time of writing, but when the Movie came out, he liked and commented on nearly everything tagged as #captainunderpants. He even filled in minor details about his characters when asked, like their birthdays and middle names, as chronicled here.

No one knew how long this direct line to God would stay open. (He kept going for 3 years, but semantics.) And so, on Christmas Day, I explained myself to him in this admittedly badly formatted post.

He responded that same night. (Here’s me freaking out about it.)

“This is pretty amazing! Would it be okay if we reposted it?”

“@petey_haw_haw Absolutely! Thank you Mr. Pilkey!!”

Nothing ever came of that, AFAIK. Maybe he spoke before consulting his literary agent or something. No hard feelings, though—I’m still just glad he was so chill about it!

The holidays ended on a high note for me that year. Now that the man himself (and maybe his higher-ups at Scholastic) knew about The Post, I thought, maybe the relevant info will get bumped a little higher in Google, and less people will fall for it. Maybe it would even stop spreading altogether!

Chapter 4: To Make A Long Story Short

It didn’t.

Chapter 5: Further Spread

Before we get to The Post’s biggest break, let’s backtrack to a few months earlier. While I was watching the original Tumblr post like a hawk, the photo itself snuck away to infect more websites. First Facebook, then r/pics, Imgur, and…someone’s personal blog, I think? (Sorry for the tiny screencaps, I swear they were bigger when I took them five years ago. Also the ads for Dog Man books in the rightmost photo still kills me.)

Fun fact: I became a Redditor to comment on the photo whenever it got posted here. Besides r/pics (here), it’s popped up on r/me_irl (here), r/funny (here), and… a certain political sub that has since been quarantined and thus can’t be linked to. IIRC, I naively asked that last one to take it down because Scholastic might raise offense. In hindsight, I might’ve dodged a bullet there.

But the worst outbreak was still yet to come…

April 24th, 2021. I was at my day job. When my lunch break rolled around, I checked Twitter and saw that Dog Man was trending.

First I assumed it was about the Michigan cryptid. Then I hoped to God that Dav’s next book was just enjoying a stronger ad campaign than usual. Anything, anything but my photo.

Yeah, it was my photo. Cropped and straightened, but still unmistakably mine. This time it was posted by a family physician with military experience.

I tweeted at him offering to explain things and prove that I was the OP. He never replied. The Tweet itself lost steam less than a day later—possibly due to people’s kids setting the record straight—but not before amassing 18,000+ retweets, 3,500+ QRT’s, and 132,000+ likes. I was terrified the whole time.

This person declared it as “maybe the pinnacle of twitter,” though. I can boast that, at least.

Chapter 6: Conclusion and The Foreseeable Future

The Post hasn’t seen any major activity since April of last year, on Tumblr or elsewhere. Perhaps it’s finally fading into obscurity like it should have long ago.

Speaking of long ago, a recent Tumblr update has made tags and reblogs from 5+ years ago nigh-unviewable. As hard as it was to keep up with them at The Post’s peak, I’m glad I reblogged and screencapped so many when I could.

For all my complaining about The Post ruining my life, I do respect how the response it got exemplified what Dav’s works are about. Many of the people who shared their own school stories added that they were neurodivergent. I’m autistic myself, and school was a constant struggle all the way up to college. I waxed lyrical once that Dav’s jokes about school, “[…] albeit being exaggerated to the point of hilarity, [are] still hauntingly accurate and can strike a chord with readers even long after they’ve outgrown its age demographic”. Seeing that in action for five years straight felt like a curse most days, but if it made any of those commenters feel the slightest bit less alone, I’m willing to call it a blessing.

That being said, I’m still paranoid that said commenters might get wise and hunt me down for fooling them. Specifically in the next few years, because DreamWorks is working on a Dog Man movie. If this account ever goes dark, now you know why.

In the meantime, I shall continue to explain The Post wherever it pops up and contain the beast I unleashed… however in vain that may be.

TL;DR: Author writes school form from Kid’s POV. I post form without enough context. Hundreds of thousands get upset on Kid’s behalf.

#dav pilkey #dog man #dog man comix #captain underpants #too busy making dog man comix #me talking #cu #cu books #reddit #hobbydrama #r/hobbydrama #long #my writes #harold hutchins #harold

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