It’s a bit gloomy and doomy in comics (and most places) these days, but Dog Man is still standing tall. According to Publishers Weekly’s Top Ten Overall Bestsellers list this week, Dog Man: The Scarlet Shedder: A Graphic Novel (Dog Man #12): From the Creator of Captain Underpants was the #1 book overall this week, with 52,310 copies sold according to Circana BookScan. Released five weeks ago, it has already sold 584,531 copies, so you rock, Dav Pilkey.
Coming in at #6 it’s Jujutsu Kaisen, Vol. 22 by Gege Akutami, with 23,954 copies sold. It’s also the #1 trade paperback overall for the week.
As long as we’re talking about Pilkey, it’s somewhat ironic that the Dog Man series is contractually titled as being from the creator of Captain Underpants, since you could argue that Dog Man is even more successful than Captain Underpants, although it IS a spinoff. According to Wikipedia, Captain Underpants has sold over 50 million copies in the United States, while the Dog Man series has sold more than 60 million. I guess figuring out which mega best selling series you’re best known for is a good problem to have.
Captain Underpants didn’t start out as comics – the first volume is called “the first epic novel” and the insides mix heavily illustrated prose with pages of comics. The series wasn’t really marketed as a graphic novel series until it turned out kids liked comics and they sold well.
Now, they call it a series of graphic novels.
The fact that Dav Pilkey consistently produces the best-selling books in the U.S. says to me that most other comics creators target the wrong audience with the wrong material. Dav makes it look so easy.