DOG MAN: THE SCARLET SHEDDER

Dog Man gets sprayed by a skunk, gets dunked in tomato juice to fix it, and comes out the other side a permanent, humiliating shade of red — which is the kind of setup Dav Pilkey has been building this series on, and by book twelve it still works. This time the joke has a sharper edge: the town Dog Man protects turns on him because of how he looks, and he has to decide whether to keep saving people who won't have him back. Pitched at ages 6 to 10 and published by Graphix, it reads exactly as fast as every other Dog Man book, which for a kid still building reading stamina is the whole point.

There's a plain, kid-sized lesson under the tomato-juice slapstick about judging someone by how they look instead of what they do, and Pilkey delivers it without ever slowing the jokes down to explain itself. A side plot with Petey the cat getting pulled back toward his old troublemaking gives the book a little moral tension beyond the main gag, more than a lot of comics for this age bracket bother with. Pilkey's cartooning does the heavy lifting for readers who aren't confident yet — the story moves through pictures as much as words — so a reluctant reader gets a book that's funny on nearly every page, which is often exactly what it takes to keep them reading.