Dragon

About the Dragon series

Years before Captain Underpants, Dav Pilkey's Dragon was his first recurring character: a gentle, accident-prone blue dragon living alone in a small house, whose five early picture books each follow him through one ordinary mishap-turned-misadventure -- taking in a stray cat he has no idea how to care for, bungling his own chores, throwing a Halloween party that goes sideways, hosting Christmas.

Pilkey wrote and painted the series with watercolors bought from a local grocery store, and the resulting look -- soft, loose, faintly homemade -- matches Dragon's own gentle, unhurried temperament. Where Pilkey's later work leans into broad slapstick and gross-out gags, Dragon is quieter and kinder: its comedy comes from a well-meaning character muddling through small domestic disasters rather than from villains, monsters, or toilet humor.

Originally published by Orchard Books between 1991 and 1993, the series later became a 67-episode stop-motion animated TV show (2004-2007) and was reissued by Scholastic as part of its Acorn early-reader line starting in 2019, with three of the five original books bound together as Dragon Tales.

How to read this series

Each Dragon book is a fully standalone story, so there's no strict reading order to follow -- pick whichever premise sounds appealing. This entry lists the five books in their original 1991-1993 publication order as given by their most detailed available source; the exact month-by-month sequence of the three 1991 titles (Dragon Gets By, A Friend for Dragon, and Dragon's Merry Christmas) could not be independently confirmed beyond that source, so treat the ordering among those three specifically as approximate rather than verified.

Scholastic's 2019-2020 Acorn early-reader reissue presents the books in a different sequence (numbered 1-5 starting with A Friend for Dragon) aimed at new readers rather than reflecting original publication order; this entry tracks original publication, not the reissue's numbering.