Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie - The Saturday Song: George (Kevin Hart) and Harold (Thomas Middleditch) celebrate their friendship and their weeken. Find books like Captain Underpants and the Terrifying Return of Tippy Tinkletrousers (Captain Underpants, #9) from the world’s largest community of reade. Shelve The Adventures of Captain Underpants (Captain Underpants, #1) Rate it: Goodreads.

Chapter 17: THE AMAZON AFFILIATE LINK CHAPTER
WARNING:
The following post contains affiliate links that will let you purchase Captain Underpants books.
If you think these books are inappropriate for children because you read they were banned, consider the very good company they keep.

The Captain Underpants series first appeared on the American Library Association's list of banned and challenged books in 2002, when parents deemed it offensive and unsuitable for its age group. In 2004, it was deemed 'sexually explicit.' In 2005, it gained challenges for violence and anti-family content.

The series dropped off the list for 6 years, which is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the precise amount of time between Pilkey's eighth and ninth installments of the series. After the publication of Captain Underpants and the Terrifying Re-Turn of Tippy Tinkletrousers, the series topped both the 2012 and 2013 banned and challenged book lists.

Pilkey hasn't made the list again, but his books have continued to be a source of controversy, including at Arborwood Elementary School in Michigan, where Captain Underpants and the Sensational Saga of Sir Stinks-A-Lot, the twelfth and final installment of the series, was banned from the school book fair because on page 111, one of the characters grows up, marries a man, and raises a family.

Imagine you are were of the millions of fourth-graders who devoured the first eleven books, only to find your school won't let you buy the conclusion. I'm sure many enterprising students at Arborwood found a way to read the last book in spite of the ban. Kids are smart.

But that, like one of Pilkey's aptly-named lunch ladies, Mrs. DePoint.

Pilkey's Captain Underpants books are full of fake doggy doo-doo, zombie nerds, flatulence, and--gasp!--happy fulfilled old age for its prankster protagonists. But at their core, these books are about writing, a fact which makes their top position on banned books lists all the more poignant.

Here are three key writing lessons young readers can learn from Captain Underpants.

Lesson 1: Kids Can Be Authors

'I guess I really shouldn't be surprised that my Captain Underpants series continues to top banned books lists around the world,' wrote author Dav Pilkey in 2015. 'After all, my very first Captain Underpants stories were 'banned' by my second-grade teacher.'

Like their author, George and Harold are enthusiastic and imaginative young writers with their own burgeoning comic book business: George writes, Harold illustrates, often with a purple pen. Each installment includes at least one book-within-a-book, as the plots happening in real time are always influenced by the comics that Harold and George had penned earlier.

The comics are one of the most delightful parts of each story. The author-illustrator duo comes up with wonderfully creative villains (like the 'inedible hunk' that emerges from discarded cafeteria food in Book 1) and depicts them with ambitious if imperfect prose. That's the first key lesson Captain Underpants offers its readers: don't let spelling stop you from loving writing. George is not worried about whether his spelling of 'dispare' is correct or not. He just gets on with the story.

Lesson 2: Writing Can Be Hard AND Funny

Perhaps because their subject matter is so kid-friendly (full of exploding toilets and aliens and diaper-wearing villains), Pilkey's books are imagined to be too easy or silly for serious readers.

Those who criticize the books as low-quality writing probably haven't read them.

The second page of Book 1 introduces readers to George and Harold, who 'were usually responsible kids. Whenever anything bad happened, George and Harold were usually responsible.' That's Rufus T. Firefly-level banter in a book written for a second-grade reading level.

The books feature rhyme (like 'Invention Convention Detention Suspension Prevention'), alliteration ('The Deliriously Dangerous Death-Defying Dandelion of Doom'), and invented vocabulary (like the 'Photo-Atomic Trans-Somgobulating Yectofantriplutonic-zanziptomiser, which would be right at home in a Douglas Adams book).

The chapter transitions are endlessly creative. In Chapter 11 of Book 2, George and Harold have just been suspended from school. 'Oh well,' said Harold. 'I just hope things don't get any worse.' Chapter 12 is titled 'Things Get Worse.'

Although these are chapter books designed for kids who can read independently, they beg to be read out loud. Mrs. DePoint is accompanied by Miss Creant. The school secretary is named Miss Anthrope.

Lesson 3: Rules Are Made To Be Broken

Pilkey's books are often banned or challenged because George and Harold are flagrant rule-breakers with a distaste for authority figures. But those criticisms ignore much bigger lessons about how rules allow or constrain creativity. In order to appreciate Pilkey's storytelling, you need to understand the common tropes of sci-fi and horror.

For example, as Chapter 17 of Book 1 closes, Pilkey sets the scene for our heroes' unlikely escape. The Laser-Matic 2000 threatens to explode, taking the warehouse and our characters with it. 'Oh, NO! cried Harold. 'WE'RE DOOMED!' Chapter 18, titled 'To Make a Long Story Short,' is just three words long: 'They got away.' It's funny precisely because readers understand that normally, the next chapter would be filled with a breathless account of a daring escape.

Pilkey's books provide a wonderful launching-off point for kids' own stories. Instead of answering What happened? they answer What else could have happened? What a great lesson for young writers beginning to tell their own stories.

One of the most consistent and easily corrected mistakes I see with book covers that are designed by authors is weak or inappropriate typography. Given that a book cover usually has very few words on it, and those words (title, subtitle, author’s name) have a huge influence on buying decisions, this can be a major problem.

For instance, if you’re writing about a topic considered masculine and aimed at a male audience, does it help you to have an overly-embellished or feminine typeface that’s barely readable on your book cover? No, I don’t think so either. Or for a historical romance, you wouldn’t want a modern clean sans serif typeface like Helvetica for your cover. It would simply look dangerously out of place.

How Inappropriate Typefaces Happen

The reasons some authors end up with this kind of typography on their book covers include:

• A lack of design training
• Only judging what is seen on the screen and being unable to visualize the effect on a printed cover
• Using the typefaces that came with the computer

This last reason is probably the most common. After all, when you look down that long list of fonts, it seems that there should be something there that’s usable, right? But that’s not always the case.

Display fonts are different from text fonts. Their weights, spacing, set widths and many other tiny details differ. It’s difficult to impossible to make a text typeface look really good on a book cover. I’m not saying you’ll never see this done well, but it’s much more likely that the cover you’re looking at with that gorgeous Garamond on it was done by a professional designer with years of experience and a lot of graphic tricks up her sleeve.

No, it’s far better for amateurs to use display typefaces when it comes to their book covers. To help out, here are 5 typefaces, some of them free, that you can experiment with on your book covers.

5 Great Fonts for Your Book Cover

To get you started, I’ve collected 5 great fonts for book cover design. Even better, three of them are free, and you can download them at fontsquirrel.com, so start experimenting with these for your book cover.
1. Chunk Five (free from fontsquirrel.com): This meaty and emphatic slab serif font is ideal for book titles in numerous genres. Try this font for action-oriented or political stories. Here’s a cover I did for an around-the-world sailing story:

1. League Gothic (free from fontsquirrel.com): This sans serif font is very vertical, which is ideal for book titles. League Gothic would be a great choice for thrillers or business books, and it can be useful if you have a very long title, too. Here’s a sample on Joanna Penn’s terrific thriller.

1. Trajan (available from Adobe): You might recognize Trajan, and that’s because it’s been used for more movie posters than any other font. It works quite well on books, too. This classic font is appropriate for histories, novels, and historical fiction, among others. Check out the French film poster using Trajan.

1. Franchise (free from Font Pro): Another tall and meaty sans serif, just ideal for the right book cover treatment. Franchise would be a great pick for a historical epic, for mysteries, or for thrillers. Here’s a sample of a novel in a gritty urban setting.

1. Baskerville (many versions available): Sometimes you need to have a straight roman typeface for your title, and in that case I like to use one of the variations of Baskerville, a highly readable typeface. You might find Baskerville perfect for a memoir, a business book, or a historical romance. Here’s a sample, and a cover from Vintage Books that shows how effective it can be.

The best way to see the effect these fonts will have on your book is by trying them out. Since most of them are free, there’s no reason not to. Just looking at these fonts and imagining them on a book cover helps give you a sense of how the fonts you choose influence the look and tone of your book.

Captain Underpants For Free

What are your favorite fonts for book covers?

Captain Underpants Comprehension Questions

Captain Underpants Logo

Ed: This article was originally featured in a slightly different form on CreateSpace.com under the title 5 Great Typefaces for Your Book Cover.