- Title Pages
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
-
1 “This Is a Well-Loved Book”: Weighing (in on) Jeff Smith’s Bone -
2 “What Is China but a People and Their (Visual) Stories?” The Synthetic in Narratives of Contest in Gene Luen Yang’s Boxers & Saints -
3 Comics, Adolescents, and the Language of Mental Illness: David Heatley’s “Overpeck” and Nate Powell’s Swallow Me Whole -
4 Not Haunted, Just Empty: Figurative Representation in Sarah Oleksyk’s Ivy -
5 “Are You an Artist like Me?!” Do-It-Yourself Diary Books, Critical Reading, and Reader Interaction within the Worlds of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Dork Diaries Series -
6 Parodic Potty Humor and Superheroic Potentiality in Dav Pilkey’s The Adventures of Captain Underpants -
7 Multimodality Is Magic: My Little Pony and Transmedia Strategies in Children’s Comics -
8 Framing Agency: Comics Adaptations of Coraline and City of Ember -
9 From Who-ville to Hereville: Integrating Graphic Novels into an Undergraduate Children’s Literature Course -
10 Looking beyond the Scenes: Spatial Storytelling and Masking in Shaun Tan’s The Arrival -
11 When Young Writers Draw Their Voices: Creating Hybrid Comic Memoirs with The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian -
12 Unbalanced on the Brink: Adolescent Girls and the Discovery of the Self in Skim and This One Summer by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki -
13 The Drama of Coming Out: Censorship and Drama by Raina Telgemeier -
14 “What the Junk?” Defeating the Velociraptor in the Outhouse with the Lumberjanes -
15 Engendering Friendship: Exploring Jewish and Vampiric Boyhood in Joann Sfar’s Little Vampire -
16 Gothic Excess and the Body in Vera Brosgol’s Anya’s Ghost -
17 Graphically/Ubiquitously Separate: The Sanctified Littering of Jack T. Chick’s Fundy-Queer Comics -
18 Waiting for Spider-Man: Representations of Urban School “Reform” in Marvel Comics’ Miles Morales Series -
19 “Walk Together, Children”: The Function and Interplay of Comics, History, and Memory in Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story and John Lewis’s March: Book One -
20 Sita’s Ramayana’s Negotiation with an Indian Epic Picture Storytelling Tradition -
Coda Whether We Want Them or Not: Building an Aesthetic of Children’s Digital Comics - Contributors
- Index
Parodic Potty Humor and Superheroic Potentiality in Dav Pilkey’s The Adventures of Captain Underpants
Parodic Potty Humor and Superheroic Potentiality in Dav Pilkey’s The Adventures of Captain Underpants
- Chapter:
- (p.93) 6 Parodic Potty Humor and Superheroic Potentiality in Dav Pilkey’s The Adventures of Captain Underpants
- Source:
- Graphic Novels for Children and Young Adults
- Author(s):
Joseph Michael Sommers
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
This chapter examines the first volume in Dav Pilkey's series, The Adventures of Captain Underpants. It argues that its success with contemporary children arises from a constellation of phenomena that connects comics, a child's perceived subjugation in their childhood, and the construction of a cross-generational heroism overlapping the late 1960s culture of Pilkey's childhood and the present historical moment's fascination with that era's superheroes. Viewing The Adventures of Captain Underpants through M. M. Bakhtin's theory of the carnivalesque, it can be seen that the book acts as a “prose allegorization,”, a visual, autobiographical narrative “whose eccentricities make the nature of all our inner lives more visible”, of childhood from a child's perspective.
Keywords: Dav Pilkey, The Adventures of Captain Underpants, superheroes, comics, heroism, M. M. Bakhtin, carnivalesque, prose allegorization
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- Title Pages
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
-
1 “This Is a Well-Loved Book”: Weighing (in on) Jeff Smith’s Bone -
2 “What Is China but a People and Their (Visual) Stories?” The Synthetic in Narratives of Contest in Gene Luen Yang’s Boxers & Saints -
3 Comics, Adolescents, and the Language of Mental Illness: David Heatley’s “Overpeck” and Nate Powell’s Swallow Me Whole -
4 Not Haunted, Just Empty: Figurative Representation in Sarah Oleksyk’s Ivy -
5 “Are You an Artist like Me?!” Do-It-Yourself Diary Books, Critical Reading, and Reader Interaction within the Worlds of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Dork Diaries Series -
6 Parodic Potty Humor and Superheroic Potentiality in Dav Pilkey’s The Adventures of Captain Underpants -
7 Multimodality Is Magic: My Little Pony and Transmedia Strategies in Children’s Comics -
8 Framing Agency: Comics Adaptations of Coraline and City of Ember -
9 From Who-ville to Hereville: Integrating Graphic Novels into an Undergraduate Children’s Literature Course -
10 Looking beyond the Scenes: Spatial Storytelling and Masking in Shaun Tan’s The Arrival -
11 When Young Writers Draw Their Voices: Creating Hybrid Comic Memoirs with The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian -
12 Unbalanced on the Brink: Adolescent Girls and the Discovery of the Self in Skim and This One Summer by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki -
13 The Drama of Coming Out: Censorship and Drama by Raina Telgemeier -
14 “What the Junk?” Defeating the Velociraptor in the Outhouse with the Lumberjanes -
15 Engendering Friendship: Exploring Jewish and Vampiric Boyhood in Joann Sfar’s Little Vampire -
16 Gothic Excess and the Body in Vera Brosgol’s Anya’s Ghost -
17 Graphically/Ubiquitously Separate: The Sanctified Littering of Jack T. Chick’s Fundy-Queer Comics -
18 Waiting for Spider-Man: Representations of Urban School “Reform” in Marvel Comics’ Miles Morales Series -
19 “Walk Together, Children”: The Function and Interplay of Comics, History, and Memory in Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story and John Lewis’s March: Book One -
20 Sita’s Ramayana’s Negotiation with an Indian Epic Picture Storytelling Tradition -
Coda Whether We Want Them or Not: Building an Aesthetic of Children’s Digital Comics - Contributors
- Index
