Dav Pilkey’s bestselling Captain Underpants books have been pulled from the shelves and out of children’s hands for being ‘inappropriate’ and ‘anti-establishment’. Here’s why that’s so wrong
I guess I really shouldn’t be surprised that my Captain Underpants series continues to top banned books lists around the world. After all, my very first Captain Underpants stories were “banned” by my second grade teacher. She took things a step further by actually ripping my pencil-drawn comics to shreds, telling me that I couldn’t spend the rest of my life making silly books. Fortunately, I was not a very good listener.
The Captain Underpants books are similar in many ways to the stories I first created as a second grader, at my special desk in the hallway. (That’s where I often sat when the teacher found me a bit too “energetic” for the classroom.) They contain no sex, no profanity, no nudity, no drugs, and no graphic violence (well, nothing more violent than you’d see in a Tom and Jerry cartoon or a Three Stooges short.) In 2012 and 2013, the books earned the #1 spot on the American Library Association’s Top Ten Most Frequently Challenged Books List, beating out Fifty Shades of Grey. That was a surprise to me!
0 comments:
Post a Comment