Do we like Dav Pilkey?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Decent and on the right side, with one real stain: a 2010 book he withdrew after an apology and a donation pledge.
Dav Pilkey is the bloke behind Captain Underpants and Dog Man, and his own childhood is the origin story. He grew up in Ohio as a kid teachers kept sending into the hallway for being disruptive. He used that time to draw and invent the first comics that became his famous characters.
That outsider streak shows up in how he talks about it. He has said teachers didn't quite know what to do with him, and that he grew up knowing what it was like not to fit in. It goes a long way to explaining why his books are so firmly on the side of the kid in the corridor.
The one real blot is from 2021. A Korean American father started a petition about the depiction of Asian characters in The Adventures of Ook and Gluk (2010), and Scholastic pulled the book, saying it perpetuated “passive racism”. Pilkey rang the family and apologised publicly, saying the book was wrong and harmful to Asian readers. He then pledged the advance and royalties to groups working on children's art access, diversity in publishing and stopping anti-Asian hate.
That's how you handle it: the apology came with the book pulled and money pledged, not a bare sorry. It still counts as a mark, hence the asterisk on the harm test. Beyond it, we found nothing hostile to LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the planet in what he has said or done.
On the LGBTQ+ front the record leans friendly. In Captain Underpants book 12 he showed an adult Harold with a husband and twins, and the book mentions it without fanfare. Fans and reviewers noticed, and no one has turned up evidence that he backed away from it.
The good stuff is practical. In April 2026 he funded 100 custom Little Free Libraries and the books to stock them, aimed at book deserts, saying every child deserves access to books. He has a Caldecott Honor for The Paperboy and the 2026 British Book Award for Best Illustrator, and his books have sold in the tens of millions.