Dog Man Lord of the Fleas

by Dav Pilkey

In Dav Pilkey’s Dog Man: Lord of the Fleas, Dog Man, Li’l Petey, and the robot 80-HD face a threat from Petey’s former associates: Piggy, Crunky, and Bub, the villains known as the FLEAS. Amid superhero action, visual jokes, and Flip-O-Rama sequences, Li’l Petey challenges Petey to consider whether his past has to determine the kind of person—and father—he becomes.

Big Idea

People can choose kindness and change, even when others expect them to remain the same. Graphic storytelling makes that idea engaging by balancing fast action and comedy with slower moments of conversation and reflection.

Discussion Questions

1.Why does Li’l Petey believe in Petey when Petey has trouble believing in himself? Which words, actions, or pictures support your thinking?
2.How do Dog Man, Li’l Petey, and 80-HD contribute different strengths to their team? What does their teamwork suggest about being a hero?
3.How do Petey’s experiences with Piggy, Crunky, and Bub help explain his behavior? How can understanding someone’s past differ from excusing their choices?
4.Choose a funny scene and a serious scene. How does Pilkey change the panels, dialogue, or page layout to make readers experience each scene differently?
5.Where does a character have an opportunity to choose between kindness and revenge? How might the story change if that character made a different choice?

Lesson Plan

⏱ 45 minutes📦 Copies of Dog Man: Lord of the Fleas, paper or six-panel comic templates, pencils, erasers, crayons or markers, sticky notes, and a timer; optional document camera.

Learning Goals

Use evidence from words and illustrations to explain how Li’l Petey influences Petey’s choices.
Describe how panel arrangement, dialogue, and visual details affect a graphic novel’s pace.
Create a coherent comic with a problem, a meaningful decision, and a resulting outcome.
Revise a comic after a partner read-aloud to strengthen clarity and pacing.

Activity Steps

1.Explore mentor scenes for 8 minutes: compare a FLEAS-related action sequence with a quieter exchange between Petey and Li’l Petey. Identify what makes each scene feel fast or slow.
2.Discuss character choices for 5 minutes: gather evidence of Li’l Petey’s belief in kindness and Petey’s struggle to change. Distinguish evidence from predictions.
3.Plan for 5 minutes: invent a new, clearly labeled fan-created situation in which the FLEAS cause trouble and Petey can either retaliate or help someone.
4.Draft for 12 minutes: create six panels—two establishing the trouble, one accelerating the action, one pausing for Petey’s decision, and two showing the response and outcome. Include one sound effect and one nearly wordless panel.
5.Partner-read for 8 minutes: readers point to panels as they read, marking where they sped up, paused, or became confused. Creators revise one pacing choice.
6.Reflect for 7 minutes: share selected comics and explain how a visual or verbal choice helped communicate the theme.

Standards Connections

ELA: CCSS.RL.3.3 — Describe characters and explain how their actions contribute to the sequence of events.
ELA: CCSS.RL.3.7 — Explain how specific aspects of illustrations contribute to a story’s meaning.
ELA: CCSS.W.3.3 — Develop narratives using an organized sequence, dialogue, descriptions, and closure.
ELA: CCSS.SL.3.1 — Participate in collaborative discussions, building on others’ ideas.
SEL: Social awareness and responsible decision-making — Consider others’ perspectives and examine the consequences of choices. The Grade 3 ELA standards are a suggested anchor; adapt expectations for the actual class.

Pace-Write-Read Study with Pace-Write It!

Dog Man: Lord of the Fleas offers a lively model for studying how writers and illustrators control a reader’s experience of time. Dog Man’s physical comedy, the FLEAS’ villainous schemes, and the Supa Buddies’ teamwork create opportunities to examine quick action, surprises, and visual punch lines. Students can trace how short speech balloons, action lines, sound effects, panel sequences, and page turns invite readers to move rapidly—or stop and look again. The book also shows why a story cannot remain at top speed throughout. Exchanges between Petey and Li’l Petey give readers time to consider trust, identity, and change. A scene may slow down even when it contains few words: a reaction, a silent beat, or a shift in expression can make an emotional decision feel important. Teach students to distinguish the speed of events from the time readers spend interpreting them. In a Pace-Write-Read workshop, students first notice a craft choice, then try it in a brief comic, and finally test it with a reader. Pilkey’s playful presentation makes experimentation accessible: simple drawings can communicate sophisticated choices. The goal is not to copy his artwork or reproduce his jokes, but to discover how words and pictures work together to make action exciting and kindness meaningful.

Element	How to notice or teach it in the novel
Pacing	Compare a Dog Man action sequence with a conversation between Petey and Li’l Petey. Ask students how panel count, balloon length, and the amount of visual information change their reading speed.
Plot	Map the FLEAS’ threat alongside Petey’s struggle with his past. Notice how external trouble and internal choices give the story different kinds of forward movement.
Prosody	Read Petey’s and Li’l Petey’s speech balloons aloud with contrasting expression, then discuss which lettering and punctuation support those choices. For Dog Man’s nonverbal responses, use a pause or gesture rather than inventing dialogue.
Word	Examine short exclamations and sound-effect words in an action scene. Try replacing one with a longer phrase and discuss how the change affects speed, emphasis, and humor.
Concept	Identify the superhero-team concept behind Dog Man, Li’l Petey, and 80-HD’s Supa Buddies adventures. Discuss how that playful concept carries a more serious question about whether someone can change.
Voice & Worldview	Contrast the story’s exuberant, playful presentation with Li’l Petey’s persistent belief in goodness. Ask how the book can acknowledge harmful behavior without suggesting that a character is incapable of change.
Point of View	Separate what readers can see in the panels from what an individual character knows. Retell a short encounter from Petey’s perspective and then Li’l Petey’s, noticing how their interpretations differ.
Setting & Place	Look at how backgrounds establish the location before attention shifts to characters and action. Have students decide which setting details their own FLEAS encounter needs for readers to understand movement and danger.
Original Characters	Study how Dog Man’s doglike behavior, Li’l Petey’s optimism, and 80-HD’s robotic abilities make the team distinctive. Design a new supporting character whose specific strength would complement, rather than duplicate, theirs.
Dialogue	Compare Petey’s skeptical responses with Li’l Petey’s questions and hopeful statements. Notice how their exchanges reveal character while also delaying action long enough for an idea to matter.
Details	Choose a panel containing an important expression, gesture, or small visual joke. Explain what readers would lose if that detail disappeared.
Descriptions	Notice how pictures communicate appearance and action without lengthy prose descriptions. Convert one panel into prose, then decide which details are essential and which the image conveys more efficiently.
Firsts	Examine the first introduction of the FLEAS in this volume: what do readers learn immediately, and what remains uncertain? Students can use a first appearance to establish a new character’s attitude through one action.
Immediacy & Engagement	Identify a scene that makes readers feel close to Dog Man’s action through movement, expressive poses, or brief dialogue. Open a student comic with a visible problem rather than a long explanation.
Story Scenes, Summaries & Structures	Compare a fully dramatized exchange with passages that explain background or connect events. Discuss why Petey’s history needs explanation while a consequential choice benefits from being shown moment by moment.
Tension / Suspense / Surprise	Track a moment when the FLEAS create uncertainty about what will happen next. Distinguish suspense about the outcome from the surprise of an unexpected action or comic reversal.
Flashback, Flash-Forward, Cliffhanger	Use the account of Petey’s earlier connection with the FLEAS to examine how looking backward changes readers’ understanding of the present. Find a suspenseful stopping point, and treat flash-forward as an optional student experiment rather than assuming the book uses it.
Page Turns and Chapter Breaks	Inspect what information appears just before and after a page turn or chapter boundary. Ask whether the break delays an answer, reveals a joke, or shifts the story’s focus.
Pace & Creativity	Compare Pilkey’s ordinary panel sequences with a Flip-O-Rama section. Discuss how changing the reading format makes action feel different and gives students another way to imagine motion.
Play	Explore the playful villain names Piggy, Crunky, and Bub and the contrast between silly presentation and serious conflict. Invite students to create a harmless visual gag that does not erase the importance of Petey’s choice.
Performance	Perform a short Petey–Li’l Petey exchange while another student supplies gestures or sound effects. Compare a rushed performance with one that gives reactions time to register.
Personality	Find actions that communicate Dog Man’s enthusiasm, Petey’s defensiveness, or Li’l Petey’s compassion. Show a personality trait in a new panel without naming it in a caption.
Humor	Select a visual joke involving Dog Man and locate its setup and payoff. Test whether revealing the funny image too early weakens the joke.
Pause	Look for a reaction or conversational beat that gives readers time to consider Li’l Petey’s words. Students can insert a nearly wordless panel before Petey decides what to do.
Poetry / Poetic Devices	Listen for sound patterns in names, exclamations, and sound effects, and discuss the playful literary echo in the title Lord of the Fleas. Treat this as wordplay analysis, not as a claim that the book is written in verse.
Repetition	Trace repeated expressions, behaviors, or appeals to kindness across scenes. Ask when repetition creates a joke and when it strengthens the emotional importance of Li’l Petey’s beliefs.
Rhythm	Read a short sequence by tapping once for each panel and pausing at scene changes. Notice how action-and-reaction patterns create a rhythm different from a sustained conversation.
Punctuation	Study how question marks and exclamation points affect exchanges between Petey and Li’l Petey. Re-punctuate a student-created line and read both versions to hear the change.
Questions	Examine how Li’l Petey’s questions can challenge Petey’s assumptions and hold attention without physical action. Write a question that could make Petey reconsider a decision.
Compare-Contrast	Compare the Supa Buddies’ cooperation with the FLEAS’ approach to getting what they want. Use evidence from actions and dialogue rather than relying only on hero and villain labels.
Objects	Choose a prop or piece of technology visible in a FLEAS or Supa Buddies scene and trace its role in the action. Distinguish an object that changes events from one that mainly establishes the setting.
Threes	Compare the three Supa Buddies—Dog Man, Li’l Petey, and 80-HD—with the three FLEAS—Piggy, Crunky, and Bub. Use a three-beat sequence in a student comic to establish a pattern and then change it.
Lists	Build a brief list of the different strengths Dog Man, Li’l Petey, and 80-HD bring to their team. Turn that list into three action panels so each contribution advances the same rescue.
White Space & Negative Space	Examine the space around figures and speech balloons in a selected panel. Discuss how an uncluttered background can focus attention on a reaction, while gutters mark transitions whose timing readers infer.
Art & Graphics	Study how facial expressions, movement lines, lettering, and panel borders work together in a Dog Man action scene. Explain which information comes from the pictures rather than the words.
Interactives & Gamification	Try the book’s Flip-O-Rama feature and discuss how readers physically participate in the action. For a classroom game, let partners identify the pause, setup, and payoff in student comics.
Placement	Trace the intended reading order of panels and speech balloons on one page. Move a balloon in a draft and test whether the new placement reveals information too early or makes the sequence confusing.
Form	Discuss how the graphic-novel form lets a reader see action and hear dialogue together. Rewrite a brief Petey–Li’l Petey exchange as prose to compare what each form emphasizes.
Dummy	Explain that a dummy is a rough mock-up used to test a book’s layout. Fold paper into a small booklet and arrange a Supa Buddies scene so a page turn separates the problem from its reveal.
Passion	Ask which parts of the book suggest enthusiasm for drawing, jokes, superheroes, or stories about second chances. Students identify something they care about and make that interest visible in their own comic choices.

Pace-Write It!

20-minute task: Slow Down the Heroic Choice. In this original fan-created scene, Piggy, Crunky, and Bub cause trouble, and Petey notices that someone needs help. Students use Li’l Petey’s belief in kindness to shape what happens next; they label the scene as their own invention, not an event from the book. Minutes 0–3: Briefly revisit one fast action sequence and one quieter Petey–Li’l Petey exchange. Name one technique that accelerates reading and one that encourages a pause. Minutes 3–5: Plan a four-panel comic: the FLEAS create a problem; Petey reacts; Li’l Petey asks a question that prompts a pause; Petey makes a choice with a visible consequence. Minutes 5–13: Draw and write. Use a short sound effect or action line in the opening, a nearly wordless reaction in panel three, and clear visual evidence of Petey’s choice in panel four. Simple sketches are sufficient. Minutes 13–17: Partner-read while pointing to the panels. The reader identifies the fastest moment and the longest pause; the creator revises one balloon, expression, or layout choice if the intended pacing was unclear. Minutes 17–20: Share and complete this reflection: 'I slowed the reader at ___ by using ___, because I wanted Petey’s choice to feel ___.’ Assess whether the sequence is understandable, the pause is deliberate, and the ending shows a consequence rather than merely naming a theme.

Classroom Activities

Supa Buddies: A Choice That Changes the Pace

Students create an original six-panel comic featuring Dog Man, Li’l Petey, 80-HD, and Petey. A fast-moving problem leads to a quiet moment in which Petey must make a choice, followed by an ending that shows its consequences. Students use panel size, dialogue, sound effects, and a deliberate pause to explore both pacing and the book’s theme of choosing kindness.

Supa Buddies: A Choice That Changes the Pace

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