After they write their own Captain Underpants comic in which he takes on Talking Toilets (with teeth and a nasty disposition), they put it on the Patsy 2000, and lo and behold, many such toilets emerge, attacking the faculty and swallowing them whole, and creating general havoc! What can save them?!?!?!?! Krupp, has announced that the winner of this year’s Convention will get to be Principal for a day! Nonetheless, they befriend Sneedly, the school genius, who has managed to modify a photocopier into a 3-D photocopier, the PATSY 2000. Trouble is, the curmudgeonly Principal, Mr.

Well, now, our mischievous fourth graders Harold and George have been banned from this year’s Invention Convention because of how they managed to totally trash the entries in last year’s event. This is the second volume, titled, “Captain Underpants and the Attack of the Talking Toilets” (I do believe that it is not coincidental that this is, if you will, “#2” in the series…). Happy Banned Books Week! So in addition to another selection (“The Chocolate War” for this year), I have vowed to read at least one Captain Underpants book every year. Yes, it’s primarily third-grade boy humor, like making the talking toilets throw up by stuffing them with creamed chipped beef from the school cafeteria, but it’s also quite fun. However, I found the text to have some challenging vocabulary (when reading with my Reading Buddy, Bradley, we looked up “defiantly” and “gullible” in the dictionary, and I defined “toupee”), some important concepts (we talked about the difference between one dimensional, two dimensional, and three dimensional), and even irony. The books have lots of drawings, including a few pages of George and Harold’s actual comic book, as well a “flip pages” where the action is entirely in pictures. Due to some accident that occurs in the first Captain Underpants book, their principal is occasionally hypnotized to believe he is Captain Underpants, during which time he sheds his clothes and his toupee and runs around the school in his tightie-whities with a curtain tied around his neck. George and Harold are two bright yet… precocious young men who write their own comic books about a character they call Captain Underpants. Not to the point that I feel like I need to read another one, but certainly more than I expected.

You know, I almost don’t want to admit it, but I enjoyed Captain Underpants.

4th captain underpants book