A wolf, a shark, a snake and a piranha decide to stop being villains. They are extremely bad at it. Aaron Blabey's series is half comic, half chapter book, and it is the one that most reliably converts a child who says they hate reading.

The short answer

Start with the first book and read by number. Unlike most illustrated series, this one really does build.

Does the order matter?

Yes, more than the format suggests. The Bad Guys runs a continuing story with cliffhangers, a growing cast and a villain arc that escalates across the whole series. Books picked at random will still raise laughs, but a reader who starts at book twelve will be missing most of the plot.

The good news is they are short. A motivated seven- or eight-year-old can clear several in a weekend, so catching up is not the chore it would be with longer books.

The Bad Guys books in order

  1. The Bad Guys
  2. Mission Unpluckable
  3. The Furball Strikes Back
  4. Attack of the Zittens
  5. Intergalactic Gas
  6. Alien vs Bad Guys
  7. Do-You-Think-He-Saurus?!: Special Edition
  8. Superbad
  9. The Big Bad Wolf
  10. the Baddest Day Ever
  11. Dawn of the Underlord
  12. The One?!
  13. Cut to the Chase
  14. They're Bee-Hind You!
  15. Open Wide and Say Arrrgh!
  16. the Others?!
  17. Let the Games Begin!
  18. Look Who's Talking
  19. the Serpent and the Beast
  20. One Last Thing

Reading level

Large type, heavy illustration, short chapters and a lot of white space. It reads far below its page count, which is exactly the point — finishing a 140-page book feels like an achievement when most of those pages are pictures.

Best fit is roughly six to ten. Older readers still enjoy them, but they will go through the lot quickly.

A note for parents

The humor is broad and occasionally gross, and the characters are, by design, not well behaved. Underneath it the series is about whether people can change when everyone has decided what they are — which lands more often than you would expect from a book with a fart joke on page three.

Keep browsing

Every book above has a page in our catalog. For more in this shape, see our Dog Man reading order, graphic novels for tweens, or books for reluctant readers.