"Alright, smart guy— you better stop goofing off! Because you can't spend the rest of your life making silly books!"
— Dav Pilkey's teacher, who Dav is currently spiting with his very successful career making silly books.
In second grade, Dav Pilkey created a comic book about a superhero named Captain Underpants. His teacher ripped it up and told him he couldn't spend the rest of his life making silly books.
Fortunately, Dav was not a very good listener.
David Murray Pilkey Jr. (born March 4, 1966) is an American children's author and cartoonist known for creating the Captain Underpants series. Before that, he was known for The Dumb Bunnies and The Dragon Series, as well as individual picture books. The three abovementioned works have also received Animated Adaptations, the first by Dreamworks Animation and the latter two by Canadian studios, the Toronto-based Nelvana and the Quebec-based Cité-Amérique respectively.
His works include:
- The Dragon Series
- Captain Underpants
- Dog Man
- The Adventures of Ook and Gluk: Kung-Fu Cavemen from the Future
- The Dumb Bunnies
- Ricky Ricotta's Mighty Robot
This author and his work provide examples of:
- Better than a Bare Bulb: Especially in Captain Underpants, where tropes are lampshaded to hell and back, sometimes even in narration.
- Good Behavior Points: He once
recounted a story from his childhood involving his teacher hanging a board with nails in it - one per student - on the classroom wall, adding bread bag clips to a nail whenever the corresponding kid performed well on schoolwork or did a good deed. As expected, this resulted in the students going out of their way to acquire more clips - particularly one classmate who was already an Insufferable Genius, that he referred to as "Michael".note Dav felt this was "too aggressive for [his] tastes" and eventually brought the system to an end by covertly tipping over the board, causing it to fall and leaving it impossible to count the bread clips properly. - Killer Rabbit: A common joke in his books is turning hamsters into absolute violence machines, to the point that he wrote a song called "When Hamsters Attack".
- My Nayme Is: His strange spelling of his first name originated from his teen years while working as a waiter at Pizza Hut where "e" in his name was accidentally omitted from his name tag. Thus, the oddly spelled nickname "Dav" stuck ever since.
- Stylistic Suck: His books following Captain Underpants are all done under the conceit that George and Harold were making them with as much skill and grace as you'd expect from two fourth graders.
