Crumpled Up Pages: Old Captain Underpants WIPs #5-9
🎵So they’re FINALLY HERE, performing for YOU🎵—
It’s been a while, huh? I won’t waste as much space above the readmore this time. All the ground rules from the first post still apply, so go read them again if you need to—I know I did!
Again, most of these WIPs deal with the twelfth and final book in some way. If you haven’t read it, this post won’t make a single lick of sense. Any summarizing I do will be very sparse, cus this thing’s already super long. Seriously, just go read it (and the rest of the series, too)!
——————————————————————————————————
So how about that Book 12, huh? In many ways, it’s a fitting finale for the whole series. It talks more explicitly about ADHD than ever, gives a glimpse of George and Harold’s future, segues into Dog Man, and doesn’t end with the usual “here we go again”. Not to mention, after years as just a running gag, the villain is the gym teacher.
Like, yeah, it’s pretty decidedly the final book. And it seems the general consensus is that it satisfies that role in all aspects… except for one.
George and Harold get a happy ending—two, in fact—but a certain superhero does not. In fact, he barely gets an ending at all.
Now, he was never truly the series’ main character, and the book gets very busy tackling a more serious subject. With those facts in mind, such an oversight is forgivable. Personally, I can forgive it. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt like hell to see.
The book just… declares him “dead” posthumously. It’s just... you know what, screw the formalities: I adore the Captain and I miss him and I wish he'd had a better sendoff.
I’d been warned, but reading Book 12 was still very bittersweet for me. In mid-to-late 2017, when I wanted to get at least one fanfic out, I wrote down some ideas to express that pain. Casual cruelty to neurodivergent kids was a daunting subject, so I mostly focused on the Captain’s “death”. I started thinking: how could I make his last moments more meaningful without contradicting canon, or downplaying what makes the rest of the book so important?
——————————————————————————————————
WIP #5: Sendoff (aka Chapter 33 1/2)
Soon they knew everything, from the chemical makeup of their arch-enemy to the events that lead to the destruction of Smart Earth... to the presence of one more consciousness among their combined particles. [Book!Verse, Book 12. CW: Major character death.]
This was by far the hardest WIP to summarize. I remember how it goes pretty well, but its concept is really tough to put into words… which, uh, might explain why I gave up on it 5 years ago. Welp, here goes nothing.
So after showing that snapping doesn’t affect Krupp anymore, the book offers two explanations: “Perhaps it was the electromagnetic pulse [when Sir Stinks-A-Lot blew up] that erased the hypnotic spell from Mr. Krupp's brain. Or maybe it happened during the Super-Power-Juice-ectomy.” This fic runs with the second option: basically when Sir Stinks-A-Lot absorbed Captain’s powers from Krupp’s body, he absorbed Captain himself as well.
After sending their distress signal, Old!George and Harold realize he’s there and talk with him telepathically. (I noted here that George should mostly use words, and Harold mostly pictures. Captain would’ve used both, crudely at first, but improving as the conversation went on.)
The following exchange of thoughts took place for only a millisecond. For its participants, however, it was as if time itself had stopped so they could speak once more.
[...] He knew they were adults, and yet they appeared in his mind’s eye as the children he’d come to know.
The dialogue would’ve opened with Captain feeling very conflicted. Since Stinks-A-Lot and the Old!Boys could access each other’s memories and intelligence while merged, it would stand to reason that Captain could, too.
You can probably see where I was going with this.
I imagined that learning the truth instantly, and in a way that he can’t possibly misunderstand or deny, would hit Captain hard. Unfortunately, I barely wrote any dialogue for this fic, and none of it was for this segment. This is the third time I’ve had to say “oops, 2017!me didn’t write this part,” but this is the one I’m kicking myself the hardest for.
So, while I can’t say what I had in mind back then, I can at least describe how I’d write it out today. I think… I think Captain would try to apologize for all the ways Krupp hurt the Boys as kids. Then the Boys would assure him that Krupp’s actions weren’t his, that they don’t hold them against him, and apologize for never telling him the truth. Captain would admit that he probably wouldn’t have believed them. After some more back-and-forth, he’d conclude that as much as it hurt to learn he isn’t “real”, he was grateful it had never kept him from making a real difference.
Eventually the Hamsterdactyls appear on the horizon. George explains what’s about to happen, and Captain realizes what it means for him.
“Don’t worry. The explosion will send all the Zygo-Gogozizzle 24 back into space, but the elements that make up our original bodies should stay behind and reconstitute. At least, that’s what I’m gathering.”
His body had ran away screaming. What would happen to him when...?
This is where, I imagine, the three would’ve said their goodbyes.
Cheff Goal-d’ BLOOOM!
Sir Stinks-A-Lot explodes, and Captain’s mind ends up in the Super-Power-Juice-soaked Zygo-Gogozizzle 24 that gets launched into space. As it solidifies back into rock form, he finds himself watching the Earth grow smaller and smaller.
But the rock starts to crack from the force of the blast, and his vision flickers as it falls apart. He accepts that this is it and decides that, after fighting so hard to ensure the world could sleep peacefully, he’s ready to enjoy some sleep himself.
So he slept, as the remains of Smart Earth splintered into millions of glowing fragments, glittering stars to remain forever in the night sky.
This is the only WIP where I thought ahead and wrote the final sentence, and I’m honestly still proud of it. Because I loved quoting Superman and passing it off as hypotext, it’s a near word-for-word reference to the original radio show’s first episode. The original line is about Krypton exploding, which makes for a nice allusion to both Underpantyworld and Smart Earth. It also just felt poetic to pair Superman’s beginning with Captain’s end.
I cared a lot about adhering closely to canon, but I did notice a continuity error while skimming Book 12 for this post: on the same page as the Krupp-snapping thing, Old!George says he has “no idea how [it] happened.” Maybe I just ignored that at the time, but now I’m imagining him lying so their younger selves wouldn’t be too sad, and now I’m sad. Well, sadder than I already was from typing all this. Oh God, there's still 5 WIPs to go.
So some of these documents have a “Mood Reference” segment at the bottom, where I pasted links to songs with the tone or atmosphere I was aiming for. I often forgot to label those links. So you can imagine the whiplash I felt when I found one in this fic, clicked on it, and heard this. I vaguely remember hearing it for the first time in mid-2017, and thinking of it when I first read Book 12. Sir Stinks-A-Lot threatened to wipe out the concept of childhood itself; in a series about celebrating the adult-offending things that make childhood great, that basically is the end of the world. Him blowing up brought to mind the song's explosive bass drop. And the vocals breaking down until it flatlines… yeah. I never shook off the resulting mental correlation, and I later chose a cover of it to represent this book’s events in Usually Responsible.
Sendoff was always a placeholder title, and I had some better ones lined up: Whatever Happened to the Waistband Warrior?, O Captain, Our Captain, and Up, Up, and Away. If I had to pick one today, it’d be the last one: it's short, it relies the least on hypotext, and it foreshadows where Captain ends up going.
——————————————————————————————————
WIP #6: Untitled Rid-O-Kid One-shot
And together, the two friends wrote and drew and laughed all afternoon.
They didn’t notice how nauseous they were until dinnertime. [Book!Verse, post-Book 12. CW: discussion of overmedicating children.]
You know the part where the Boys’ parents say they like how they’re acting under Rid-O-Kid? The last four books all have their sad moments, but god, this one just hit different. They had no clue their sons were drugged, though, and I liked to think they’re genuinely good parents who would make up for it if they found out. Thus, this fic about them finding out.
This one never got further than a summary, some scattered notes, and a list of Ritalin withdrawal symptoms. I remember some details I never wrote down, too, so I’ll combine them all to paint a fuller picture.
This fic starts immediately after Book 12. The Boys go home for dinner, but realize they can't finish their food. Then they get bad headaches, and their parents get worried, give them the classic childhood check-up, and tuck them in early.
The parents call each other and make plans to ask other parents if a bug's going around. One of them sees the Rid-O-Kid ad on TV (the local network was slow to take them down idk). Meanwhile, the Boys whisper through Walkie Talkies and realize how blurry their memories are of yesterday—specifically after seeing Mr. Meaner in his office.
The next morning, the parents learn the truth from their friend circles and the local news: every kid at Jerome Horwitz is going through withdrawal after getting dosed with an untested drug. Along with them dealing with that bombshell, this segment would have expanded on the incident's aftermath: Mr. Meaner is in jail again, Mr. Krupp has fired him (possibly just to avoid bad press), and the school is closed until its whole student body recovers.
One of the families they call is the Sneedlys. Melvin's parents mention that he's shaken from being used as a guinea pig by a teacher after sucking up to them so much. They also suggest that the withdrawal might hit neurodivergent kids the hardest. This prompts Mr. Beard to dig up the ADHD book he'd read to the Boys years ago.
The Boys themselves wake up very late and very groggy. After breakfast, one family invites the other over for a meeting. There, the parents share what they’ve learned, apologize to their sons for not noticing, and ask what being on Rid-O-Kid had felt like.
The Boys admit that they’d felt a drive to compensate for all the little ways they’d disappointed their parents before, like forgetting chores and wandering off when they talk. Voicing it makes them cry, and hearing it breaks their parents’ hearts. They comfort their sons, assuring them that they’d rather keep those little disappointments than force something like Rid-O-Kid on them.
All three parents call in sick to their jobs, hit the store for bubblegum and cooking supplies, and spend the afternoon baking chocolate chip cookies with their kids. :)
Nothing else to say about this one, except that I mentioned its basic plot in this post.
——————————————————————————————————
WIP #7: Coda
In which George and Harold realize they forgot to say ‘thank you’. [Book!Verse, post-Book 12.]
This one takes place a little bit after Untitled Rid-O-Kid Oneshot. The Yesterday!Boys have recovered enough to keep working on their Dog Man reboot. They discuss their fuzzy memories again, and wonder if their doubles and pets vanishing might be connected.
They make a safe bet that their doubles had gotten Captain to help fix things, and make a note to ask him what happened (and also thank him) when school reopens. One of them suggests going to Krupp’s house and asking him now, and the other says to remind him after they work a little more.
Cut to Monday afternoon. The first full school day since the events of Book 12 has just ended, and the Boys are selling Dog Man #1 on the playground. It’s an instant hit, but a few kids ask about their Captain Underpants series; the last issue ended on a cliffhanger, and they want to know if their hero made it out okay. *wink wink*
The Boys realize they’d hyperfixated so hard that they’d forgotten to see Captain, so they close up shop and run to the principal’s office. They find Krupp reading some resumes and snap their fingers.
I never wrote the dialogue here, but the Boys give a long spiel that’s all “sorry for not checking in with you sooner” and “thank you for saving the day without us” and “have you seen Tony, Orlando, and Dawn?”
They don’t notice Krupp trying to butt in and clutching his head until he suddenly screams at them to shut up. It’s so loud even for him that Ms. Anthrope comes in to see what’s going on.
The Boys snap again, but he just gets angrier; he’s had a constant headache for days now, and their snapping and nonsense talk are making it worse. Any other day he’d gladly trap them here for a stern talking-to, but now he begs them to leave and let him get back to finding a new gym teacher.
The shock of hearing him beg gives the Boys pause. They look him over—no goofy smile, no puffed-out chest—but they still don’t quite believe what they see. Harold breaks the silence with a whisper:
“Captain…?”
But that whisper pounds at Krupp’s skull, and he orders Ms. Anthrope to get them out of his office. They snap even more as she drags them away, but he covers his ears until they’re gone.
Outside, the Boys' denial finally runs out. They tear up at the thought that whatever Captain had done to save the day, he had laid down his life to do so. They salute to him at the office door before walking out of the school. Some kids ask them what’s wrong on the way out; they keep walking, suddenly hyper-aware that they have no one to confide their grief to but each other.
After enjoying the peace and quiet for a while, Krupp thinks about the name Harold called him. The fic ends with him opening his drawer to stare at the Captain Underpants comics inside.
The Mood Ref section for this one contains two songs: Separation Anxiety from the movie, and… this. Like, wow, 2017!me was going through it. (If it helps at all, I just imagined Mr. Meaner in Scar’s place and chuckled. …Yeah, that probably doesn’t help.)
——————————————————————————————————
WIP #8: Letter Column
20 years later, George and Harold still deny everything… even if it hurts. [Book!Verse, pre- or post-Book 12.]
This one was gonna be a Log Fic, made of mock-up screenshots from various sources. The setup is that Old!George and Old!Harold have an official website like Dav’s, including a page dedicated to fanmail. Kids send in questions (with their parents’ permission), and the Old!Boys post their answers for all to see.
The fic would’ve opened with a screenshot of this page, with two Q&A’s visible to show how it works. The next screenshot would be of a third question waiting in the Boys’ inbox:
So I notised this one guy shows up in crowds a lot. I checked every Dog Man book I own and hes in every single one! Whats up with that?
– Curie Yuss, age 10
Attached to the email are close-up photos of different Dog Man pages (drawn anime-style like the one shown in Book 12). Each page has a crowd shot, and a bald man in underwear and a red cape can be seen in each crowd.
Cut to a series of texts between the Old!Boys. Harold opens with a screencap of the email.
H: oh man
H: i REALLY shuldve seen this coming
G: Its okay dude
H: u were right one in each book was too many
G: Calm down its okay! I can take this one solo if you want, Ill draft it tonight
G: [a few hours later] Done! If you like it go ahead and press publish
H: its up now. thx dude
G: 👍🏾 I get why youre worried but hey, its not like we have to lie
George’s response is then shown on the site:
Dear Curie,
I see you’ve spotted Captain Underpants! Harold and I came up with him when we were your age. He thought it would be funny to sneak him into every Dog Man book, and so did I!
Thanks for writing in!
– George Beard
And that's the end of it… until it isn’t. A few weeks later, six new emails sit in the inbox, all asking the Boys if they’ll ever make a Captain Underpants novel.
Now they’re both worried. If they say no and don’t give a reason why, more kids might write in to ask. If they say “maybe someday,” they’d be setting up false expectations. On top of that, they’re upset at themselves for getting worked up over kids asking an innocent question.
G: We probably shouldve put a ToS on the page before we launched it
G: Like “we reserve the right to leave your fanmail unanswered for any reason”
H: yeah we probably shuldve
G: Its too late to add one now right?
H: oh for sure. some kid will def notice. i know we wuld
Then a new email comes in from one Perry Graff and his mom, Artie. She’d gone to Jerome Horwitz with the Boys, and seeing Curie’s Q&A had jogged her memory. She’d dug her old CU comics out of her attic to share with her son, and strangely, one of them had seemingly been signed by the Captain himself. Artie admits to remembering having met a very real Captain Underpants, and asks the Boys how on earth they’d pulled that off.
Attached is a photo of the signature. The cursive lettering is too thin to have been stamped on, and too neat to have been forged by a kid.
If the Boys felt cornered before, now they’re mortified.
H: u know what
G: Trying to think
G: Oh god Lisa just asked what im looking angry at my phone for
H: maybe we shuldve ignored Curie
G: ??And just leave her hanging?
H: better 1 kid than 7
H: also we never heard back from weird Al and we came out just fine
G: We checked the mailbox for like a month!
H: yeah but we moved on. we figured it got lost in the mail or he was too busy or smthn. and then we forgot about it
H: …..why cant we move on from him george
G: Al??
G: Oh
H: why is this still so hard
G: I dont know man. I just dont know
…And that’s as far as I got. I couldn’t come up with an ending—or at least, one that didn’t leave me mad at the Boys—which might be why I scrapped it. Well, besides the whole “designing a fake website” thing. I never started the designing part, but I did leave screenshots of Pilkey.com in the doc for inspo (specifically from the mid-2000’s cus that was the site’s golden age, don’t @ me).
I love George and Harold so much, but I also think they should feel bad for, you know, making an entire person and hiding his existence. Yes, they were 9, and no, I didn’t quite expect Dav to touch on it. Still, it’s interesting to imagine the guilt they might deal with when they grow up and think back on it all.
Trivia time! The Log Fic format stems from an event I almost did at @treehouseblogsinc. The plan was for some space-time shenanigans to change the blog into the Old!Boys’ modern-day site for a little while. It never happened cus I was scared of changing the HTML too much, and its days were numbered at that point anyway.
The main conflict draws from something Dav said happened early in his career. He would draw Captain at school visits, and kids would often ask him to make a full book about him (“Becoming a writer”, fourth paragraph).
Finally, Artie Graff is meant to be that one girl from that one song. I thought it’d be fun to show she got that autograph after all and use it for drama lol.
——————————————————————————————————
WIP #9: Recall
One moment, Mr. Krupp finally had those two delinquents cornered. The next, he was having the strangest dream. [Either Verse, but borrows imagery from the Movie.]
Tired of all this talk about Captain’s “death”? Me too! Let’s dial it back and talk about his “birth” instead!
This fic was a first-person look at what went on in Krupp's head when he got hypnotized. It played out in four acts—the start of the trance, Chicken, Monkey, and Superhero—with the last one having the most Story Meat. (You'll see why I didn't just name it Captain in a bit.)
I remember researching how hypnosis works and what it feels like before starting on this. Most of the real-life “rules” don’t apply here, of course, but I took note of aspects that made sense anyway. For example, trance can help loosen up even the strictest, most habitual thought patterns, which is why it's used to stop smoking; maybe all the years of bitter adult-ing and principal-ing melted away, allowing Krupp to look further inside himself than he had in ages. And maybe he just welcomed an excuse to take a nap during a workday lmao
That research also inspired me to experiment with this fic’s “voice”. Nearly every sentence in here is short, simple, and has a whole paragraph space to itself, as if that’s all the thought Krupp can muster at a time. The sentences get longer near the end, but take on a strange, lilting flow and break into new paragraphs where commas should be.
But enough explaining, let’s get to the actual text already. Act 1 was fleshed out a surprising amount, but given the format, that's not saying much.
I can’t move.
Correction: I can move if I want to. I just… don’t.
I can think of some good reasons to move.
My office’s linoleum flooring is nipping at my back, for instance.
I’m pretty sure my toupee’s fallen off again, too.
But everything is so heavy, and deciding which need to address makes me realize something.
My mind is so… quiet. I forgot it could be this quiet.
I can think… I think. I still have a few thoughts. They're just not pouring in constantly and bouncing off the walls of my skull anymore.
It’s like those walls are lined with cotton. It’s… weird, but not uncomfortable.
… I could get used to this, actually.
Not right now, though. I’ve got paperwork to sort, kids to keep in line.
For ten straight hours… for the next five days.
…A few more minutes here couldn’t hurt.
Captain is associated with cotton, so its mention here was probably intentional. Anyway, this segment ends with two bullet points that just say “SNAP Chicken” and “SNAP Monkey”. Those two Acts never got written (Library of Alexandria-scale loss, I know), but here’s a bit about them from what I think was an early summary:
The night after he gives the tape to Mr. Meaner, Krupp has a very strange dream. First he's a chicken in a coop, plucking at an oddly-shaped pile of grain. Then he's a monkey, swinging on branches that glow and throwing strange white leaves.
Then, all of a sudden, he's a child again.
Surprise—we're in Kernel Theory territory.
Krupp is about 10, lying on a red towel, looking up at some trees and an overcast sky. Something flat lies on his chest; he holds it up and sees that it's a comic book. The cover is blurry, like a half-forgotten impression. All he remembers is that he desperately wants to keep it.
There’s a note here to leave it unclear if this is a memory or just a dream. Either way, Krupp’s thoughts on it might be my favorite excerpt out of all 10 documents:
I squeeze it to my chest and the paper crinkles in my ears.
I don't want to lose it.
I don't want to lose this.
I’m going to lose this.
I won't even remember what it is I've lost.
After a long moment, he loosens his grip on the comic… only for a sudden gust to send it flying. He grabs his towel and gives chase, down a hill and past his childhood home. When he catches it, he feels the wind still tugging at it.
He looks up and sees the source of the wind: a wormhole floating at his height a few feet in front of him. Its rim “glows a searing red [...] swirling endlessly into the deep blue void within.”
Somehow, Kid!Krupp knows where it leads. Somehow, he knows he’s been “stuck” here for decades, and that this wormhole will set him free.
Somehow, he knows it won’t be open for long.
When it closes… I’ll be stuck here again.
All the everything will rush back in and bury me, like nothing happened.
Not this time.
Not while I still have this.
Benny holds his comic up to the wormhole. Its pages fly out one-by-one and form a barrier around the wormhole’s rim, as if holding it open for him.
He looks back at his home, as if for the last time. Then he ties the towel around his neck and charges into the wormhole.
It closes behind him, and the pages start swirling around his floating form. He feels himself change both physically and mentally; he realizes he can choose what to “take with him,” and decides that the “this” he’s reclaimed is all he wants for now. A powerful sense of valiance sweeps away everything else, leaving him unburdened and unbelievably happy.
The void starts to dissolve, beams of sunlight pouring through. He recalls a song about letting the sun shine in, facing it with a grin.
Smilers never lose and frowners never win.
But frowners still want to win
even long after they forget how
and now that I remember
I’ll protect smilers from frowners
until the frowners remember too
and the world is safe and happy.
The outline ends just as he perceives a floor beneath his feet and a battle cry in his throat.
How happy they’ll all be
to know they're being protected
by the greatest superhero of all time.
Man.
There’s a crossed-out bullet point down here about why Kid!Krupp feels “stuck” and is so eager to leave the dream-memory. I won’t go into what it says exactly, and I think leaving it ambiguous instead was a good call. I remember other creatives at the time positing that his Krupp-iness might stem from... well, let’s just say it’s a topic I don’t trust myself to explore at length, even now. This way it can be whatever the reader’s most comfortable with attributing it to.
In the same vein, I hoped to find a note here explaining what his precious “this” was, but there isn’t any. I dunno if I deleted it or just never wrote it down, but maybe not spelling it out is better. If I had to guess, though, I think I was drawing from the Great “woah, I used to love these books!” Movement earlier that year. Sorry to bring it up again, but I can’t overstate how it helped me regain my personal “this”; something nameless that I’d lost growing up, but was drifting aimlessly without.
Recall’s Mood Ref section also has two songs: the first was Interlude by Dunderpatrullen. Words fail me here too, but I put it on SIDE A: The Warden to mark the playlist’s shift from Krupp’s life before Captain to after.
The second song was this. Hardee har har, 2017!me.
——————————————————————————————————
So what’s this WIP based on Book 1 doing among all this talk of Book 12? Well, I tried to expand on the Baby Benny idea with my next and final WIP...
...which I’ll go into in its own post. I know, I know, listen—I’ve been writing all this up in a Google Doc, and WIP #10 alone takes up one-third of it. I REALLY don’t wanna put it off, especially cus it’s nearly finished, but this is already the longest post I’ve probably ever written and I’m scared of invoking this hellsite’s glitchy wrath.
Now, WIP #10 isn’t taking longer because it’s finished or anything—it’s probably the least finished out of all 10, actually—so please curb your enthusiasm there. I just have a lot more to say about it because, unlike the others, it wasn’t a fanfic. It was meant to be something a little...bigger. I’ll leave its description here so you can guess what that means. See you in Part 3!
They created the greatest superhero in the history of their elementary school… but that was all in the past future!
Time travelers George and Harold make a pit stop in 1950-something, a peculiar time when strangers filled your gas tank for you and every band sounded like The Beach Boys. They don’t plan on staying very long, but that changes when they meet a kid who’s familiar and different all at once. Can they safely leave the past without preventing the future? And how will their new friend change how they view their greatest enemy...?
Have you read your UNDERPANTS today? [Book!Verse, post-Book 12.]