First an anecdote. On Saturday, June 16, 2001, I happened to be in a McDonald's restaurant in Red Deer, Alberta. I hadn't been in one of these fast food places for a long time, probably three or four years. Anyhow, as I entered and passed through the restaurant to the counter I noticed the play area. It did not look the way I had remembered such play areas. I remember the colourful plastic scenery with small slides and hoops and such, alongside the enclosed pen of many-coloured hollow plastic balls in which kids burrowed and flopped. Apparently these mini-playgrounds are now a thing of memory, and in their place is a "Play Station," a central hub with a number of computer screens. I couldn't help reflect on the irony: we in North America are a culture of obesity and here in this mecca of calories and carbohydrates we have a space for a bit of physical effort on the part of kids replaced by a space for them to sit and gaze at the ubiquitous screen. Things have changed. Or have they? Baudrillard reflects on the city of New York as a "world completely rotten with wealth, power, senility, indifference, puritanism and mental hygiene, poverty and waste, technological futility and aimless violence." And yet, he says, he "cannot help but feel it has about it something of the dawning of the universe" (23). I feel something of what these words portend when I reflect on McDonald's and their "Play Station." And I reflect that what Baudrillard says describes things pretty much as they have always been. We have always felt ourselves on the threshold of a world evermore about to be. Oh brave new world that holds the old world in its arms.

Change and renewal: the more things change, the more they remain the same. Or do they? Have books for children changed these past so many years? Has the way we deliver stories to children changed? Do we really value reading or do we just think we do? Are we reconfiguring our notions of the child or does she play as usual? Who is this "we" anyway? Can we speak as a collective? Should we speak collectively? Does globalization manifest itself in children's books or does the "children's literature in different countries," as Maria Nikolajeva argues, have "little in common" (43)? Is homogenization of the child and child culture the danger Jack Zipes says it is? Has criticism of children's books changed along with the books produced for the young or does it remain the same, anchored in its concern for the child's moral and social well being? How far have we come, really?

That list of questions might well keep us going for several hours. We do not have several hours. And so let me try to focus. I'll turn the glass to Captain Underpants, superhero for 6 to 10 year old children, mostly boy children or so they say. This diaper-clad defender of the world, this waistband warrior appears in the series of books by Dav Pilkey, and I intend to ask whether the Captain Underpants books can help us approach answers to some of my questions. I'll use these books to address questions of change and renewal under the following headings: 1) audience and narrative voice, 2) the figure of the child, 3) multiculturalism, and 4) the question of socialization. These four headings ought to bring us into the vicinity of the questions I posed above. But before I begin to address each heading, I am going to slip in a prior comment on the books as examples of the only clear-cut change in children's literature these past ever-so-many years. I refer to their existence within a literary system that no longer exists soley of books.

A glance at the books will reveal that they are acutely aware of themselves both as products in an economic system and as products that inhabit a world in which dialogue between media is the condition of survival. Like a book such as The Stinky Cheeseman and Other Fairly Stupid Tales, the Captain Underpants books have covers that draw attention to the hawking of products. Like certain loud TV advertisements or magazine ads, these covers have blurbs highlighted in zagged balloons. These blurbs tell the reader that the books contain "Action," "Lots-o-Laffs," and "Flip-o-Rama." Back covers advertise other books in the series and underscore the inclusion of an interactive element in the books, the "Flip-o-Rama" feature "that lets you animate the action!" (back covers of each book). Readers can flip pages quickly to simulate movement in the illustrations; this is a time-honoured method of simulating movement in pictures dating back at least to the eighteenth century, but here the books present it as something novel, referring to it as "the latest in cheesy animation technology" (see for example, p. 80 of The Adventures of Captain Underpants 1997).

By the third book, Captain Underpants and the Invasion of the Incredibly Naughty Cafeteria Ladies from Outer Space (and the Subsequent Assault of the Equally Evil Lunchroom Zombie Nerds) (1999), the URL for Dav Pilkey's web site finds its way onto the back covers (www.pilkey.com). As early as the second book, Captain Underpants and the Attack of the Talking Toilets (1999), we see the merchandizing enterprise beginning to swing into action. The final leaf of the book contains information about the Captain Underpants Contest. The best stories or comics of no longer than 3 pages will win one of three prizes: a Captain Underpants t-shirt, a signed copy of Captain Underpants and the Attack of the Talking Toilets plus Captain Underpants toilet paper, or just some of the CU toilet paper. A parenthetical comment under the mention of this last prize, the toilet paper, points out that "your friends will be so jealous." And under the "Official Contest Rules," we read under number 3 that the winners consent "to the use of his/her name, age, entry, and/or likeness by sponsors for publicity purposes without further notice or compensation."

T-shirts and toilet paper indicate that the books are entering the arena of the spin-off. Books themselves can serve to sell other products as all the Pooh products and Wild Thing dolls and so on indicate. That books are intimately connected to the market and its products is not, in itself, something entirely new. John Newbery in the eighteenth century took advantage of his publications to hawk certain products, and I grew up reading comics which contained pages advertising a variety of things from Red Ryder BB guns to whoopee cushions to soap that makes you dirty. Incidentally, the first four Captain Underpants books now come packaged in a box-set that contains along with the books, a whoopee cushion. But more than just marketing is at work here. What these books communicate is that literacy involves more than the book. What is new is the book's connection--or what Margaret MacKay calls "dialogue"--with things outside the world of books. Products are only part of this dialogue. As soon as kids start entering contests, they enter into a dialogic relationship with the book and its author. The web site extends this dialogic relationship. Dav Pilkey's web site contains a variety of interactive pages: puzzles, lessons in how to draw, pictures for kids to download and colour, word games, and so on. But Pilkey's own page is only one of some 4,364 pages that turn up when one searches for Dav Pilkey with the Northern Lights search engine. One of these pages is Poopypants Name Changer where I learned that my real name is Loopy Bananafanny!!! Not very funny, I guess, but you will get my point: readers of the book are lead from the books to a variety of other products and interactive spaces. Books are fast becoming assimilated into the virtual universe.

Perhaps the best example is Cynthia Leitich Smith's novel Rain Is Not My Name (2001) which has a web site that extends the novel, shows maps of the character's room, house, home town, library and so on. The reader of the novel is not completely finished once she has closed the book since more information about the novel's characters and action are available on the web site. We have here an integration of the novel into cyberspace.

This assimilation of the book into dialogue with readers in virtual space is both a positive sign and a negative one. What is positive is that as long as the book maintains a dialogic connection with the emerging technology, we will have books and readers to explore the world the book can create. In other words, we have an opportunity to keep readers reading beyond the utilitarian scanning of forms and headlines and how-to manuals. The connection of literacy and literature continues in the kind of things we are seeing that forge dialogues between books and readers in virtual space. I realize that I'm overlooking here the role of the marketplace in this. But allow me to be positive for a moment. Not all aspects of the production of popular culture is bad. And so what is the negative sign I mentioned? What is negative in all this interdependence of the book and technology is precisely what has been negative in the world of the book from the beginning: some people are left out. Not all children have access to either books or technology. I say this knowing the excitement that these books (and one might also mention the Harry Potter books in this connection) have created because they apparently encourage non readers to read. Here's a passage from Beth Nissen's CNN article on the Captain Underpants books:

"The content IS sometimes vulgar, scatological, rude -- but so are 9-year-old boys," said Mary Jo Dickerson, whose son Ian reads the books out loud to her. "I say any book that encourages my son to read is worth its weight in gold."

Thousands of parents, teachers and school librarians agree. "Rarely do we encounter books that will make children beg for more," said Amy Daniels, a long-time children's librarian in Columbia, South Carolina. "Captain Underpants is my hero."

The series has engrossed thousands of kids who have never willingly read a book before -- kids like James Innocent, a 9-year-old from Stoughton, Massachusetts.

"At school, when they say I have to read, I feel like they're punishing me," he said. But he loves reading and re-reading "Captain Underpants." His mother, Jean, says they are the only books her son has ever read for pleasure, and with pleasure.

"There's a lot of talk these days about how 'Harry Potter' has gotten kids interested in reading again, but not in our house," said Janice Shepherd, the mother of a 9-year-old in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada. "My son wasn't at all interested in reading until he discovered Captain Underpants."

Despite such endorsements, I am concerned about those children who continue not to read and who may be economically disenfranchised. I ask that you remember these children even as we go on to discuss children and reading as if books were something every child enjoyed. For those who do read, what we are seeing is the creation of a dialogic space that bodes well for the future of reading and the book. My concern is that all have access to this imaginative space.

For those of us who do have this access, what do the Captain Underpants books tell us about the state of children's literature, about change and renewal? If we begin with audience, we can see that these books aggressively court young readers, especially young male readers. The two heroes are male, and females have little to do in the stories, although they are sometimes villains. The assumption is that boys require special reading fare, something akin to comics. And so George and Harold, the two heroes, create their own comic in each of the Captain Underpants books. Pilkey's art is also reminiscent of the comic book in its kinetic drawing. Movement from picture to picture picks up the kind of visual drama kids encounter in comic book art. A second assumption, of course, is that boys require something transgressive to keep their interest. Boys will be boys, after all, and so why not indulge them in their delight in the gross and shocking? Flatulence and bathroom humour, what the now defunct Barf-o-Rama books referred to as the five regrettable fluids, flush through these books. We can see evidence of such play with things grossening in books such as The Stinky Cheese Man and William Steig's Shrek (now a motion picture that takes such play farther than the book did). We are in a cultural moment that appears to find the whiff of flatulence fun. We might conclude that the bar of tolerance for the vulgar is lower now than it has been, but we might reflect on the nursery rhyme, child lore, and of course the great tradition of things bodily from the time of Chaucer and Rabelais through Swift and Sterne right up (or is it down?) to Bataille and perhaps even Raymond Briggs.

From the point of view of audience what we have here is possibly a return to the grotesque body and its appeal to both child and adult, or at least that adult who does not take prissy niceties too seriously. But the books have more definite signs of reaching for a dual audience. Obviously Harold and George's hijinks provide laughs for the little ones, as do the deflated pufferies of the teachers at Jerome Horwitz Elementary School where Harold and George perform their antics. However, the books offer something for adults too. Take for example, Pilkey's choice of names for various characters: we have adults with names such as Miss Creant, Mr. Fyde, Ms. Ribble, Mr. Meaner, and Miss Anthrope. Mr. Krupp probably successfully signifies to both adult and child, and Professor Pippy P. Poopypants is one for the kids. The pun with names has been a familiar aspect of books for the young since the beginning. What is more contemporary are the self-referential aspects of these books. Each book comes with the designation "epic novel," an irony most likely available to adult rather than child. Chapter titles such as "This Story," "The Flashback," "The Extremely Graphic Violence Chapter, Part 1 (in Flip-O-RamaTM)" (Captain Underpants and the Attack of the Talking Toilets), "The Chapter Before the Last Chapter," and "The Chapter After the Chapter Before the Last Chapter" (Captain Underpants and the Perilous Plot...) self-consciously draw attention to the fictionality of the books. One book has a chapter 6 and then a chapter 61/2. Other chapter titles, such as "Captain Underpants and the Pied Pooper of Piqua," "Honey, I Shrunk the School," and "Are You There, God? It's Us, Fluffy and Cheeseball" (Captain Underpants and the Perilous Plot...) are intertextual. Some of this intertextuality picks up popular film probably unavailable to young readers: for example, "Captain Underpants and the Attack of the Talking Toilets," "Captain Underpants and the Night of the Living Lunch Ladies," "Space Slaves," and "The Turbo Toilet 2000."

Nothing shows more blatantly this postmodern play with fiction and intertextuality than the pages that precede the Flip-O-Rama section in each book. The first of these pages will serve as example. This is the page that wryly warns the reader that what follows contains scenes of graphic violence. Here is the Notice from Chapter 20, "The Extremely Graphic Violence Chapter, Part 2" in Captain Underpants and the Attack of the Talking Toilets:

Notice:

The following chapter contains terribly naughty

scenes depicting a giant toilet getting its shiny hiney kicked.

All toilet violence was carefully monitored by P.E.T.T. (People for the Ethical Treatment of Toilets).

No actual toilets were harmed during the making of this chapter.

The book's dialogue with film emerges here, something we see more fully in a book for young adults such as Walter Dean Myers's Monster (1999). The willingness to play with form as well as content is perhaps a feature of recent works for children, and this sign of renewal and manipulation of forms reflects how self-consciously children's literature takes its place in the general culture. Dual audience is a feature of this literature that has remained in tact since at least the nineteenth century and probably long before, as Knoepflmacher and others have argued. What we see here is what Sandra Beckett has termed "transcending boundaries."

Connected to this crossing of boundaries is the narrative voice in these books. We hear what we used to call a third person omniscient voice, the kind of adult narrator familiar in nineteenth-century books for the young. Another recent series, the books authored by Lemony Snicket, also draws upon this convention of the knowing adult narrator who self-consciously addresses children. In the nineteenth century, this convention is perhaps best exemplified by Lewis Carroll and George MacDonald. Carroll's narrator in the 'Alice' books (1865, 1871) shows a willingness to poke fun at the little girl whose story he tells, whereas MacDonald in a book such as At the Back of the North Wind (1871) gives us a narrator who "does not at all feel superior to this slightly addled little boy" (Knoepflmacher 232), Diamond, whose story he tells. Despite their differences, however, Carroll's and MacDonald's narrators share a sense of a dual audience. They speak to both child and adult.

Now for Dav Pilkey. Pilkey's narrator in the Captain Underpants books clearly speaks to both the adult and the child, especially early in each book when he explains in no uncertain terms that Harold and George, his 8 or 9 year-old cut-ups, are really good kids. He doesn't say it, but he wants us to know that these are what Leslie Fiedler called Tom Sawyer, examples of the "good bad boy," that boy whose high-energy mischief is a sign of imagination and budding entrepreneurship. He exasperates us, but at the same time he secretly pleases us. We know he will grow up to take his place as a successful member of the community. What marks Harold and George as different from Tom Sawyer is "certification." I mean by this that George and Harold are examples of specifically modern conditions; some of their teachers think they are "disruptive" and "behaviorally challenged" (Talking Toilets 14), Mr. Rected thinks they suffer from A.D.D. (attention deficit disorder), Miss Labler lives up to her name and diagnoses them with A.D.H.D., and their principal Mr. Krupp thinks they are "just plain old B.A.D." (Professor Poopypants 14). The narrator, however, straightens things out by reminding us in each book that these two kids are just bored at having to sit still seven hours a day at school. He says outright that these are "very clever and good-hearted boys" (Invasion 15). The narrator directs his reassurances both to young readers who will wish to identify with the misbehavior of the two protagonists and to adults who need reminding that creating mischief comes naturally to young boys, expecially to young boys who must cope with the stultifying boredom of school.

My mention of Leslie Fiedler and the good bad boy segues neatly to my second topic: the figure of the child. And here we have some changes as well as the continuity that the good bad boy and Tom Sawyer suggest. Ostensibly, the great change in how we depict children will have something to do with the postmodern fragmentation of the self. For many who write about the subject these days, none of us is a unified self; rather, we are many selves depending upon time and environment. This postmodern multiple-self is supposedly in direct opposition to the notion of a unified self held by writers and others in time now receded into history. The liberal humanist tradition, perhaps nowhere more intensely felt than in the writers of the Romantic period throughout Europe, including the redoubtable Rousseau himself, championed the strong individual who was capable of an individuated self. However, Mitzi Myers cautions us when she points out that the "so-called death of the unified subject" is something that children's literature "has always produced as a possibility" (70). I suspect we could locate many examples of early fiction for children in which the subjects-in-the-making (i.e. the child characters) manifest more than one individuated self, and perhaps boys books such as those by Mark Twain may serve as examples here. Boys books often involve boys working together and two or more boys reflect this notion of a faceted personality.

If the Captain Underpants books appeal mostly to boys, then we have a gender-specific series of books that reminds us how gender-specific books for children used to be and sometimes still are. Here in Pilkey's series, we have two boys who fit into the tradition Fiedler identified in American literature. These kids are clever, resourceful, naughty, imaginative, and independent. They get themselves into and then out of scrapes. But if George and Harold deserve special consideration, this implies that a number of other kids do not. Most of the other kids in Jerome Horowitz School are "normal." In The Invasion of the Incredibly Naughty Cafeteria Ladies, the normal kids are transformed into "zombie nerds," suggesting that normalcy (whatever that is) is not such a bad thing. The only kind of kid one might not want to be is a zombie nerd or a "school brainiac," like Melvin Sneedly in Talking Toilets (27). I suppose the only thing worse than a Melvin Sneedly would be a Sid Sawyer, that progenitor of such insufferable prigs as Eustace Scrubbs or Dudley Dursley.

This talk of nerds and normacly and brainiacs and "criminally mischievous" boys (Talking Toilets 14) may be reminiscent of Fiedler's categories "bad bad boy," "good bad boy," and "good good boy," but the important point is that however books for children categorise their child characters, they do so in several ways. To put the point bluntly: no single figure of the child, just as no single figure of the adult, is possible. People of whatever age come in a variety of personalities and with a variety of interests, capabilities, and thoughts. Now we might chastise the Captain Underpants books for doing what much popular fiction has always done--that is, present characters in rather simplified or stylized ways. But the fact that George and Harold create comic books and that they use their school principal, Mr. Krupp, as a model for their superhero, the waistband warrior known as Captain Underpants, and then manage to find a way to transform the actual Mr. Krupp into the actual Captain Underpants suggests that Pilkey understands the performative nature of human subjectivity. Just as the comics and their characters are a construction, just as Harold and George are a construction, just as Captain Underpants is a construction, so too is Dav Pilkey. What constructs these characters both fictional and non-fictional are the cultural assumptions about characters, authors, kids, and school teachers. The term "role model" carries significance beyond its loose sense of someone whom we might wish to emulate. If indeed we have role models, then these models are themselves just that--"models" of something other than whatever they might be--and we ourselves set out to fashion ourselves by performing that which we discern in others. We model ourselves after models thereby becoming ourselves models. The authentic self may be an elusive ideal. All the world's a stage, as someone once said, and all the men, women, young adults, and children merely players who strut and fret their time.

Allow me to put this another way so that I can, in the words of John Stephens, "deploy a fashionable new word without having to absorb a new concept" (14): we are all intertextual creatures. As Stephens points out, "Intertextuality offers insights into the representation of subjectivity" (19). Each of us as subjects is a bundle of subjectivities. A book such as Walter Dean Myers's Monster, which I referred to earlier, illustrates this postmodern sense of the subject as plural. Sixteen-year old Steve Harmon is on trial for murder. The narrative takes the form of a screenplay written by Steven. The screenplay itself suggests the multiple perspectives of the cinema, and we see Steve as criminal, victim, son, youth, writer, and "monster." He performs all these roles. He is all of these roles and none of them. And certainly not one of these roles defines his subjectivity as stable.

I think we can see this conception of the plural nature of subjectivity in other contemporary books for children, and even in the Captain Underpants series. Take Mr. Krupp, for example. He is the stereotypical adult authority figure to the point of meanness. He is also easily duped because his sense of self importance blinkers him to the subtlety of others, especially his young charges George and Harold. But Mr. Krupp is also Captain Underpants. The growly and unpleasant school principal has within him the childish silly superhero who fights for "truth, justise (sic), and all that is pre-shrunk and cottony" (Adventures 11). If Mr. Krupp was the crusty corporatist and nothing else, then the boys could not hypnotise him into thinking he is Captain Underpants. As for Harold and George, we know they are not just the unruly clones of Bart Simpson. Each book in the series begins with a reminder that these two are "nice," "good" (Adventures 3), "smart and sweet, and very good-hearted" (Talking Toilets 15), "very bright, good-natured" (Poopypants 15), "very clever" boys (Invasion 15). And so we have good-natured sweet boys who arrange to have their teachers and fellow students hit with a barrage of eggs and butterscotch pudding, and in the process they sabotage their school Invention Convention (in effect, a Science Fair). In other words, George and Harold are not one dimensional--not really--they just appear so to the Mr. Krupps of this world.

If we accept that subjectivity is plural, then we are perhaps ready to accept that plurality--or better yet "variety"--is the spice of life. I speak here about the change from a cultural purism to a dance of multicultural joy. One definite change in the literature for children is the depiction and the inclusion of so-called "minority" peoples in this literature. We all know something of the history of race in children's literature from the colonialist depictions of the "other" in nineteenth and even twentieth century literature until quite recently, and dare I say it, even in some contemporary works. The past twenty years or so have seen a stronger presence of a multicultural vision in books for the young, and this is a change that is on the whole positive.

In Canada, for instance, we have a number of books for quite young children that qualify as "Canadian content" (a term that has legislative force in bills that ensure a certain amount of "Canadian content" on our TVs and in our published magazines and books), but that have settings in the Carribean and elsewhere. Here is a sample. Most of the picture books written by Tolowa Mollel, a Tanzanian-born Canadian, are set in eastern and southern Africa. Richard Keens-Douglas and Annouchka Galouchko's The Nutmeg Princesss (1992) tells a story from Grenada; Althea Trotman's How the East Pond Got Its Flowers (1991) is a story from Antigua; Ramabai Espinet's Ninja's Carnival (1993)takes place in Trinidad and Tobago; and Michèle Marineau's The Road to Chlifa (1992; Engish translation by Susan Ouriou 1995) follows the adventures of a Lebanese boy, Karim, as he travels away from war in his homeland to a new home in Montreal, Canada. None of these books except the last mentions Canada. Another book that is interesting from this point of view is Shenaaz Nanji's Teeny Weey Penny (1993; illus. by Rossitza Skortcheva Penney). This book tells the simple story of Shaira who finds a penny. A number of people want her to give them the penny; these include her friend Frederico Berrutti and her older brother Hussein. Nothing in the illustrations or the verbal descriptions places this story in a particular country; only the names suggest a multicultural society, possibly but not necessarily Canada. However, the front cover illustration clearly depicts a place of rain forest colour and exotic birds and animals, and the back cover provides short notes on the author and illustrator that inform us the author was born in Kenya and that the illustrator "works with publishers and designers throughout Canada and Europe."

What I am trying to suggest here is that to some extent we have passed beyond a time when it was necessary to highlight the multicultural nature of our society in books for children. A recent article by Holland Cotter in the New York Times, "Beyond Multiculturalism, Freedom?" (July 29, 2001) suggests that we have passed beyond multiculturalism to a state of things that terms such as "postethnicity" and "postblackness" describe best. My guess is that such postethnicity remains a gleam in some peoples' eyes rather than a reality. A book such as Vinita Srivastava's A Giant Named Azalea (1991; illus. by Kyo Maclear) does not mention a country or city but it openly discusses matters of cultural exchange and racism. The same direct confrontation of racial intolerance is apparent in Himani Bannerji's Coloured Pictures (1990) which does specify its setting as Toronto, Canada. We might debate which approach to multiculturalism with its attendant problems of racism and zenophobia is best in books for the young--whether to refuse to draw attention to such problems or to confront them, but let's look back at Captain Underpants and see how the multicultural theme plays out in these books.

Nothing in the writing of these books draws direct attention to race or to multicultural themes or at least nothing I notice. However, the illustrations deliver something noteworthy with respect to such matters. Harold and George are friends who clearly come from different racial backgrounds: Harold is white and George is black. So far so good. We have friends for whom race is not an issue. Not only that, but George is often the quicker of the two boys at coming up with ideas and solutions, although they pretty much share in this. But let's look at how they are drawn by Pilkey. Here is their first appearance in the first book of the series, The Adventures of Captain Underpants (1997). The text for this picture introduces the two kids: "Meet George Beard and Harold Hutchins. George is the kid on the left with tie and the flat-top. Harold is the one on the right with the T-shirt and the bad haircut. Remember that now" (1). Chapter one of each of the books begins with these same words. When we look at the picture, we can see from the shading that George is black and Harold is white. Their hair styles also reflect their racial and perhaps cultural background. George has hardly any hair and Harold is trying to look like Jerry Lee Lewis. I suspect their hair styles type them in some significant way. But why, I wonder, does Pilkey dress them the way he does. Harold in t-shirt and shorts looks pretty much like any kid these days, but what kid in fourth grade outside a private school wears a shirt and tie? This outfit constitutes curious dress for an elementary school black kid. I'm not sure why Pilkey draws attention to George in this way, but I suspect his reason may have something to do with the position of the black person in the world these books depict.

And so what is the position of the black person in the world these books depict? The answer: pretty much in the background. Until the fourth book in the series, Professor Poopypants, no adult of colour appears. All the teachers and the staff who appear in the books are white. In illustrations which show a number of school kids, Pilkey includes one or two black faces. But the books pretty much present an all white picture of school life. As I say, not until the fourth book, published in 2000, do we see black teachers in Jerome Horowitz School. The assumption must be that the world these books depict, which is the world their readers supposedly inhabit, is a white world. The kind of racial vision we have, I think, is what Ghassan Hage calls the "'White Nation' fantasy" (18), the continuing belief, despite what Mark Kingwell calls "casual multiculturalism" (1), in a nation governed by standards of "whiteness."

And what about other minorities? As far as I can see, no other cultural or racial group appears in these books besides the black and white people. However, the books do contain what I'll term a casual zenophobia. In two of the books, "foreigners" appear in Jerome Horwitz School, the space aliens who replace the disgruntled kitchen staff in Invasion and Professor Poopypants himself in his book. In Invasion, three space monsters called Zorx, Klax, and Jennifer come to earth to take over the planet; in the other book, Professor Poopy Pants comes from "a small country just southeast of Greenland" (17) known as New Swissland. The people here all have silly names. The smartest person in this country is Professor Poopypants who "graduated at the head of his class at Chunky Q. Boogernose University" (19). He is now a great scientist. The persons from away, as so often in popular fiction and film, are dangerous, a threat to the nation's, or in this case to the school's, stability. Obviously, the books are meant to be seen as silly, the stuff of comical cartoons, and they are such stuff. However, they also perpetuate the fantasy of a child power based upon adherence to values communicated by a patriarchal capitalist society, largely, if not entirely, run by white people who are perhaps a tad paranoid about foreigners in their midst.

Mention of patriarchy and capitalism brings me to my final subject in relation to these books: socialization. If books really do socialize young readers, then how are readers of the Captain Underpants books socialized and does this reflect change or business as usual? Jack Zipes has argued that books for children participate in the global market practices that socialize children to become compliant consumers. Since the beginning of publishing as a modern market practice in the eighteenth century, children's books have participated to a greater or lesser extent in preparing children to take part in the economic system as future citizens and wage-earners. Writers of the so-called Moral Tale in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries urged children to be good and industrious, for to do so would prepare them to reap the rewards of industry: wealth and security as adults. As Mitzi Myers has shown, the writing of the Moral School is not quite as simple as this; we can see that a story such as Maria Edgeworth's "The Purple Jar" (1796) takes pains to warn the child reader of the temptations of the market. The purple jar of the title is a simulacrum only, pretty but worthless and not even purple.

Zoom ahead two hundred years and check out the Captain Underpants books. These books occupy a place in a market that has mushroomed greatly since purple jars caught the eyes of children. Now attracting young eyes are action heroes and other dolls, machines, clothes, a myriad of toys, sports equipment, books, cards, cds and CDRoms, electronic games, pens and coloured pencils and markers, poop pellet gum and other sugar treats, trinkets, tricycles, plastic in the shape of just about anything you can imagine, and on ad infinitum. The market glitters with goods for the wandering gaze of our children, and books must find a way to catch these young eyes.

A glance at the covers of Dav Pilkey's books will give some indication of how these books set about catching young eyes. They are colourful and the figures are simply drawn. The main figure on each cover is a rotund baby-faced caped hero in underpants and bare feet. Since the first book in the series, the covers have included not only the real heroes of the books, George and Harold, but also one or more monsters. Readers also see those bursts of yellow with positive comments on the books, like the advertisements for films, especially those 1950s schlock horror films, that shout "Action," "Lot-o-Laffs" and so on. And of course the titles are meant to grab the attention of the young with words such as "underpants," "zombie nerds," "toilets," "poopypants, "and "wedgie" (this last will appear on the cover of the soon-to-be-released Captain Underpants and the Wrath of the Wicked Wedgie Woman).

Inside the books, readers meet two young kids who obviously come from comfortable middle class homes. George has a tree house in his back yard furnished with "two big old fluffy chairs, a table, a cupboard crammed with junk food, and a padlocked crate filled with pencils, pens, and stacks and stacks of paper" (Adventures 5). Here they create their comic books which recount the adventures of "dozens of their own superheroes" (6); they sell these comics at school for 50 cents each. We have here two budding entrepreneurs. They use their money to buy a 3-D Hypno Ring, and thus begins the epic story of how they transform their principal into Captain Underpants. When they do this, they also find a drawer full of things Mr. Krupp has taken from them "over the years" including "sling-shots, whoopee cushions, skateboards, fake doggy doo-doo" (51). With the fake doggy doo-doo, the two boys save the world from the evil Dr. Diaper because when they place it strategically beneath his feet, he responds in what we might conclude is a typically self-conscious adult way: he is embarrassed and trots off to the bathroom to change himself. While he's gone, Harold and George defeat Dr. Diaper's robots and sabotage his Laser-Matic 2000 machine, thus saving the world.

The books reinforce the child's view of the world as a place with simple-minded adults. Readers of these books can believe the world is a place that can be ordered with a bit of ingenuity. So what might we conclude about these books' socializing of young readers? Of course, some might simply reject the books all together as vulgar pandering to young boys' lowest instincts. They appear to value disobedience and misbehaviour, even to the point of cruelty. Others might see these books as the completion of the implied message in Struwwelpeter or Max and Moritz, and as such decry their encouragement of anti-social behaviour. Their socialization is, in effect, anti-socialization. Still others might decry the implicit message in these books that consumerism is what matters. As long as young kids like Harold and George buy into the system (comic books, consumer goods, the importance of ingenuity and entrepreneurship), then we will continue to be homogenized as a society; individuals will lose their special qualities and become one-dimensional. And still others will see these books as championing the imagination, the arts as opposed to the sciences. George and Harold are imaginative and consequently they are good role models for readers.

I'm not sure I fit anywhere in this list of possible responses. Rather, I suspect that the Captain Underpants series works pretty much as books for children have always worked--both conservatively and subversively. Everything depends upon what we might be on the look for when we read them. For some, the Tom Sawyerish antics of George and Harold will work to reinforce complacency and the ego-oriented aggression of boys that turn a Tom Sawyer into a successful lawyer. For others, the uppishness and anti-authoritarianism of the two boys is truly carnivalesque in that it punctures the pretensions of adult prudishness and desire for power. As for those who find the books simply offensive, perhaps the less said the better. I think that we can see through the example of Captain Underpants that change has taken place in the publishing world of children's books, but that change itself--whether we find this good or bad--cannot take place without renewal of things past. The trick will be to renew ourselves as readers who bear in mind that literature carries visions of human possibility, and we might better look for the lessons of inclusiveness in the literature we give to our children than of exclusiveness. For me, the Captain Underpants books offer a vision of exclusion.

And yet, when Harold and George's comic book character comes alive in the person of Captain Underpants, even despite the undignified costume and regression this character involves, we can sense the inclusion of parody and parody loves what it makes fun of. In this sense, these books are inclusive. But now I've created a dilemma. Are these books worthwhile? Do they suggest the condition of children's literature these days is in a state of degeneration? Or do they remind us of the freedom of childhood and the imagination that children's literature has traditionally depicted? Of course I cannot answer these questions--at least I cannot answer them for you. This task is yours and to accept the task is to participate in an ongoing dialogue that just might make us all free. Captain Underpants is only heroic if he contributes to dialogue and thought and questioning. May our heroes always be thought-provoking.