Ep 215: Captain Underpants and Toilet Super villains

Sep 16

Listen to episode 215 here, or wherever you get your podcasts.

The end of September is our comic book episode because the end of September hails National Comic Book Day. We haven’t really talked about the history of National Comic Book Day. so before we dive into another, and frankly long overdue bathroom themed comic book villain or hero.

The trouble with National Comic Book Day, is it is a completely made up and honestly weird cultural observance. When you look up the history of National Comic Book Day, it turns out the official history is also that it is made up. The internet says it is a “mystery” which is online speak for, it is completely fabricated.

National Comic Book Day is also different from “free comic book day”. And in all my looking I only had one real lead on the matter. A blog post from the Somerset County Library System in New Jersey boasts that one of their collection developers named Linda Tripp is the person who came up with National Comic Book Day. However the blog post was published in 2024, and we’ve been talking about National Comic Book Day longer than that… so, it seems like she probably didn’t come up with the idea.

The National Day Calendar group’s official statement on the matter is that they continue to look for the source of the day. One thing that is offered as a distinction, National Comic Book Day exists more to recognize and celebrate comic book authors and artists, and less focused on getting comic books, although it does say that is one way to celebrate.

So, officially, it seems like the library system in New Jersey is maybe taking some credit for something they didn’t actually come up with here. It’s like if I, as this bathroom podcast host, just started to say and published online that I came up with the idea of taking a shower in the dark. I didn’t, but there isn’t a lot of data on it and as a result, it's hard to falsify. The origins of National Comic Book Day are an enigma. But I think they are rooted in the desire to highlight artists and authors.

And some of my son and I’s favorite comic book author and artists are, themselves, comic book characters.

The History of Captain Underpants

David Pilkey Jr was born in Cleveland Ohio to Reverend David Pilkey. Dav Pilkey attended elementary school, but having a diagnosis of ADHD and dyslexia, he got in trouble a lot as a kid. His trouble wound him up sitting in a desk in the school hallway. Pilkey wasn’t just killing time in the hallway. As he states, he created his own comic book character, Captain Underpants. Now, while I’m not arguing that kids should not be in the classroom learning, I do wonder if Pilkey would have come up with and created Captain Underpants if he had not had that time to do so in the hallway of his school.

However, while he came up with Captain Underpants while being removed from the classroom, his first book was published in 1987 at age 21 and was called World War Won. He was a student at the time, and it was an allegorical fable about a nuclear arms race between the US and the SU. It won an award, which is cool, but definitely a different pace than Captain Underpants. Years later, Pilkey found his stride writing kids book in a different style, pseudo comic book, featuring an original character, Captain Underpants.

What’s interesting is Pilkey never really shifted back to traditional literature at this point, he would go on to write a number of other Captain Underpants, and is still currently putting out Dog Man Comics, which got their start inside the Captain Underpants series.

For those who have not read Captain Underpants, I will summarize it for you. There are two boys, Harold and George, who are undoubtedly stand-ins for a childhood Pilkey as they get in trouble at school frequently in their schemes and endeavors. They have a principal who really does truly seem to be out to get them.

Harold and George, as a means of alleviating their constant trouble in school and to influence their principal, buy a device to hypnotize him and convince him that when he is triggered in his hypnotism, he becomes a super hero named Captain Underpants. Captain Underpants, in short, is a grown adult, heavy set man who has nothing on but tighty whities. It’s a tough thing to behold.

While Captain Underpants doesn’t have super powers in and of himself, he will drink extra strength super power juice and he gains all sorts of abilities. Super strength, flight, elasticity, body inflation, wedgie power,laser vision durability. That’s got to be some good juice. But one of the mainstays of the Captain Underpants franchise and why we are talking about it for national comic book day is the potty humor that the stories have to offer.

And as we will see, the potty humor is woven throughout as Pilkey takes on the role of Harold and George who write and draw the comic books about Captain Underpants (and dog man) in the story itself. It’s very meta. So, I want to look at some of the bathroom moments from Captain Underpants before we look at the benefit and strategy that these things employ.

Potty Humor in Captain Underpants

One of the most prominent villains in the captain underpants series is the Turbo Toilet 2000, a gigantic mutant talking toilet with robot limbs who leads the talking toilets. Interestingly, in movies, the TT2000 has been depicted as a “smart” toilet. Get it? By the end of the story, the Turbo Toilet 2000 is ejected to Uranus. Again, Turbo Toilet on Uranus, could have been any planet, just saying. Turbo Toilet 2000 pops back up across the franchise, usually by way of background info drops about what is going on on the surface of Uranus.

In the TV show for Captain Underpants, there is a bad guy named TP Mummy. TP Mummy is a evil villain alter ego of Mrs. Yewh. That’s about the information that is offered on it. It’s funny because the superhero name is literally what she is. It is a toilet paper mummy lady.

One of my favorite villains is Professor Typpy Tinkletrousers whose former name is Professor Pippy PeePee Diarrheastein Poopypants Esquire. He is an ongoing bad guy. He is an actual scientist in the story, and seems very capable. He takes a job at George and Harold’s elementary school teaching them science. And when they find out that their teacher’s name is Professor Poopypants, well they make fun of him so hard that he decides to lean fully into the mad scientist side of things and goes off. He invents all sorts of crazy things and is arrested by story end. The principal hired Professor Poopypants to work with George and Harold, maybe on him. Poopypants pops back up throughout the books with his robotic trousers featuring prominently.

In the TV show there is a group of heroes called the toiletastics. Toiletastics are a team of kind of like avengers of the bathroom heroes, including captain underpants, plungeria, sergeant boxers, colonel urinal, fartquake, and the flusher. There is almost no real info to share about any of these heroes, they are all alter egos of characters around George and Harold or are Goerge and Harold themselves. This is an avengers action squad we need. All bathroom themed, it’s very good.

They fight bathroom themed villains called the perpetrators. The poopetrators are made up of Poopacabra, TP Mummy, who we’ve already discussed, cologneta, smartsy fartsy, and camoflush. Poopacabra is also known as ratrick and is just a mutated mouse. Smartsy fartsy is just a sentient fart cloud.

These are just the characters, there is also plenty of potty humor listed throughout the book. This brings us to our final perspective on Captain Underpants.

Bathroom Controversy and the Captain

Captain Underpants has drummed up plenty of controversy. While it is clearly a children’s book, there have been campaigns and calls for the books to be removed from children sections. In fact, the American Library Association, or the ALA listed Captain Underpants as the most challenged book series in 2012 and 2013. The chief reason in all these is their use of potty humor, bathroom talk, or mentioning the obscene. That’s stupid. I’ve done and discussed way more obscene things on this show and no one is trying to cancel me. Actually they have, but you just keep going.

Dav Pilkey’s response to this dumb outburst is great. He defends his choice to include potty humor, which respect. It hearkens back to his days as a kid, jotting down notes about an underwear super hero he would one day make. He says that while it does include bathroom humor, it does not have much violence or obscenity or language, it’s potty humor. He also noted that it is to make reading accessible to young readers who may not be as hot on the idea of reading.

Having these jokes, bathroom jokes, helps people connect to the story, helps young readers, especially boys, engage with it in a way that it is fun and not usually how a young boy would interact with reading. That’s the beauty of a good bathroom gag or fart joke, it’s funny. Everyone does it, so somebody ought to make something out of it.

In fact, Pilkey has said in interviews that he remembers back to when he was a kid and the things that got people howling more so than anything else was a fart joke or potty humor. If 2nd grade Dav Pilkey enjoyed it, so would countless other kids. To that end, Pilkey takes on a pseudonym within the story, playing that role of his grade school self by having characters George and Harold write the Captain Underpants comics. Doing so, it causes kids to feel not only like the stories are written for them, but that they are to an extent written by them.

Pilkey has said in interviews that he feels like there is a bunch of bathroom talk with little kids up to the point that they learn how to use the toilet, and then they just try to make it taboo. I’m not saying kids should run around with constant fart jokes and burping at the table, but bathroom life is a super normal thing, and a lot of what goes on in there is funny, especially when it is emphasized in an unexpected context.

In fact, the taboo nature of bathroom talk is kind of what makes it funny. If you tell kids over and over that farting around other people and farting in public is bad and gross and you shouldn’t do it and if you do it should be quiet or you should excuse yourself, and then the kids drop the nastiest, thickest, grimiest, most stank filled taco bell ridden, pants shaking, chair busting ripper heard by the masses, it’s funny.

And so, there is a huge value in the captain underpants books. And I would argue, the value is not despite the potty humor, it is actually due to the potty humor. Because while there are a lot of young readers showing up for the potty humor and crass jokes, what they find in captain underpants and dog man are actually some thoughtful stories about creativity and kindness.

This National comic book day, while they are not traditional comic books, the spirit of the comic book is captured in Captain Underpants, who is one of the chief bathroom related super heroes.