All 14 Dog Man Books, Ranked from Worst to Best

My son and I did not choose Dog Man. Dog Man chose us.

A fellow parent handed me the first Dog Man book as a birthday present for my son, telling us this was a book that kids can read by themselves. As an exhausted parent who was losing the battle to get any time to myself, I was elated.

But then we read the first book together.

What followed was an unexpectedly joyful reading experience as parent and child: a complete, full‑body, cross‑eyed, toilet‑humour‑fueled buy‑in. We’ve now read all 14 and have been hoarding copies from Te Matapihi, Wellington Central Library.

Here’s the thing about Dog Man that no one told me before we started: it’s built for restless, fast‑moving brains. The chaotic energy, the spontaneity, the visual feast of sound effects and, of course, flip‑o‑rama: the lo‑fi animation trick where readers are invited to rapidly flip two pages back and forth so characters appear to move, crash and explode, turning reading into something you do with your body.

Dog Man offers storytelling for kids and adults who hate being bored. It’s not an accident that one of the main robot characters is literally called 80‑HD, or that the books are packed with visual gags and sudden emotional gear‑shifts. Dav Pilkey has spoken openly about being diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia as a child, and about how being sent out of the classroom led him to draw comics instead of sitting still; those hallway comics eventually became Dog Man, now a wildly successful global series.

As someone who researches ADHD and media, I wish there were more books like Dog Man; it’s a masterwork of knowing its audience, and a series this good absolutely deserves its own ranking.

Here are all 14 books, ranked from worst to best. (There’s a fifteenth, Sprinkle of Time, arriving in November, which I fully expect to ruin this carefully considered list).

In the interest of full editorial transparency, my criteria are: how often my son and I laughed together out loud; memorability, and whether the story hit us in the feelz: those moments where Pilkey hides something genuinely moving inside the silliness and it lands without warning.

The Fleas (or "Friendly Friends" as they rebrand themselves) have their moment here, and it goes on quite a long time. There are singalongs. Multiple singalongs. If you are the parent doing the voices, I urge you to pace yourself. The main villain - Piggy also shouts his way through roughly half this book, which, as an enthusiastic read-alouder, genuinely hurt my voice. We also read this one after the first book, which was the equivalent of watching Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker right after A New Hope — technically possible, but your confusion will be deep and your satisfaction shallow.

The baddie in this one is called The Fair Fairy, who is, objectively, quite clever. But she doesn't connect to the larger story arc and her randomness feels like a detour. We raced through this one and I struggle to recall a single standout moment — which, given that the ADHD brain tends to remember things by emotional or comedic charge, tells you something. Not bad. Just forgettable.

By book seven I was ordering Dog Man volumes by the handful. On the drive home from the bookshop, my son quipped that I liked Dog Man more than he did. He was not wrong. Dog Man undergoes behavioural therapy in this instalment and develops a fear of balls, which tells you a lot about this series. Feels slightly like a wheel-spinning episode in a TV series: enjoyable but not essential.

Introduces Piggy and the Fleas, the recurring antagonists who will continue to feature and, for this reader, continue to challenge the vocal cords. Piggy is intensely loud on the page and carries few redeeming qualities, which is perhaps the point — he's a villain you can straightforwardly dislike. Does serve an important structural function by setting up Big Jim as another heroic figure: Commander Cupcake.

Perhaps a controversial selection. The first full-length Dog Man story — and it shows. It still feels like Pilkey is transitioning from the short, punchy mini-stories of Book 1 to something more sustained. Paper Petey is a genuinely great addition and the ongoing Paper-Scissors-Rock joke lands well. But the plotting is still finding its feet, and compared to the confident, character-rich books that follow, this feels like a necessary step rather than a destination.

Shifts focus to hero Big Jim, which gives the series some welcome new energy. The physical comedy through Pilkey's signature flip-o-rama pages reaches a kind of peak here, with Grampa — the series' most horrible villain — repeatedly thwarted in his attempts to escape cat jail. A solid, funny entry that benefits from momentum built across earlier books.

Grampa arrives in his full, terrible glory here. By gawd, he is insufferable, which is entirely the point. The emotional climax is genuinely touching: Lil Petey teaching his father that love can prevail over fighting, rendered in stick-figure comic form. The image of kids drawing on a giant paper lunch bag has a sweetness that sneaks up on you. Pilkey hides a lot of real emotional intelligence under the toilet humour, and this book is a good example.

Arguably contains the coolest action sequence in the entire series: Dog Man, Lil Petey, 80-HD and Molly all get new superhero monikers and are unleashed simultaneously. The tension around Petey being forced back into villainy is well-handled and leads to a thrilling climax. Loses points for a relatively unmemorable villain in Dr. Scum — but Pilkey turns that into a recurring joke where nobody can remember who Dr. Scum is. Opens with Chief and Nurse Lady getting married, which is a lovely payoff for the romantic subplot.

The most recent book (at time of writing) and one of the most emotionally ambitious. It's a story about the power of imagination, which, as any parent of an ADHD child knows, is both that child's greatest asset and the thing most likely to get them sent to the principal's office. There are genuinely heartbreaking passages here about imagination as a tool for processing trauma. Bonus points for super cute aliens as creative villains. Dav Pilkey has publicly described his own ADHD as "Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Delightfulness," and this book embodies that philosophy.

The relationship between Lil Petey and his father Petey really sings in this one. Other than Chief and Dog Man, their bond is the emotional core of the series. Pilkey has a talent for capturing random juvenile humour: Lil Petey’s repetitive diarrhea joke had my son in sustained, gasping hysterics. The climactic fight scene uses claymation, an actual visual shift in medium, which I found to be inventive storytelling. This is also the book where Lil Petey uses Petey’s own argument about trying new things to justify joining the good guys. It’s a memorable and wholesome power move.

The book that properly introduces Molly, the psychokinetic tadpole, and gives her a full partnership with Lil Petey. Their scenes terrorising Petey while he is being interviewed are magnificent, including a fart‑obsessed anthem to the tune of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star that we still sing to this day (“stinkle stinkle little fart, blasted my underwear apart…”). Another highlight is the “Smooch‑A‑Rama” — a visual device that instructs the reader to go cross‑eyed and bring the book very close to their face to experience a romantic scene between Chief and Nurse Lady. Of course, my son now thinks going cross‑eyed and kissing go hand in hand.

Introduces Lil Petey, the "why's-guy" — a small, relentless questioner who represents every curious child who won't stop asking why until the adult loses their mind. Critically, Lil Petey's incessant curiosity is not framed as a problem. It's the thing that defeats the villain — Flippy, a psychotic fish — by simply asking him questions until he is disarmed. The talking buildings that chant "Gooba Gabba, Gooba Gabba, One of Us" are a deranged bonus. Is it better than Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities? In our house, absolutely.

The original, and the first book we read. And how far we’ve come. I was initially offended by Pilkey’s deliberately lo‑fi opening stories — the misspellings, the crass humour, the cheerful disregard for narrative convention. For a few pages I honestly thought I was reading the work of actual children and wondering how it had slipped past an editor. Then I realised Harold and George, the fictional in‑universe child authors of Dog Man, were characters — that these were stories supposedly written by kids, not a publishing oversight. I was sold.

The “Weenie Revolution” mini‑story, featuring hot dogs brought to life by Living Spray who are simultaneously menacing and adorable before being cheerfully chomped by Dog Man, is still one of my favourite sequences in the series.

This is the one. The meta-fictional framing is a story about a Dog Man movie within the Dog Man books, is playful and self-aware without losing any of the anarchic energy that makes the series work. The supporting characters are among the series' funniest: Yolay Caprese is a delight, and Ding-Dong Magoo still makes us laugh. There is a line that my son still repeats at random intervals, apropos of nothing: "Me go poo poo in my pee."

But underneath the toilet humour is something affecting: a story about free will versus obedience, and 80-HD's most heroic moment in the entire series. It is the book that best captures what Pilkey has always been doing — using chaos and laughter as the delivery mechanism for real questions about how to be good in the world.

This story kicks arse.