Pogo

The Complete Pogo, at last!

Walt Kelly started his career at age 13 in Connecticut as a cartoonist and reporter for the Bridgeport Post. In 1935, he moved to Los Angeles and joined the Walt Disney Studio, where he worked on classic animated films, including Pinocchio, Dumbo, and Fantasia. Rather than take sides in a bitter labor strike, he moved back east in 1941 and began drawing comic books.

It was during this time that Kelly created Pogo Possum. The character first appeared in Animal Comics as a secondary player in the "Albert the Alligator" feature. It didn't take long until "Pogo" became the comic's leading character. After the WWII, Kelly became artistic director at the New York Star, where he turned Pogo into a daily strip. By late 1949, Pogo appeared in hundreds of newspapers. Until his death in 1973, Kelly produced a feature that has become widely cherished among casual readers and aficionados alike.

Kelly blended nonsense language, poetry, and political and social satire to make Pogo an essential contribution to American "intellectual" comics. As the strip progressed, it became a hilarious platform for Kelly's scathing political views in which he skewered national boogeymen like J.Edgar Hoover, Joseph McCarthy, George Wallace, and Richard Nixon.

Walt Kelly started Pogo when newspaper strips shied away from politics—Pogo was ahead of its time and ahead of later strips (such as Doonesbury and The Boondocks) that tackled political issues. Our first volume reprints approximately the first two years of Pogo—Sundays and dailies. The earliest strips embrace a kind of broad farce that reflected Kelly's interest in vaudeville, slapstick humor, and the kind of mistaken identity plotlines that were a staple of screwball comedies of the '30s and '40s. But by the second year of the strip—halfway through our first volume—Kelly dips his toes gently into the satirical waters that Pogo would become famous for in a sequence in which Howland Owl researches atomic power. By June of 1950, Kelly is tackling the red-baiting junior Senator from Wisconsin, Joe McCarthy, in a mock trial of Albert, who is accused of devouring a puppy who just arrived in the Okefenokee Swamp—and Kelly is on his way to becoming the first great satirical political cartoonist of the second half of the 20th century. This first volume also introduces such enduring supporting characters as Porkypine, Churchy LaFemme, Houn'dog, Seminole Sam, Mr. Truant Officer, and many others. And for Christmas, 1949, Kelly started his tradition of regaling his readers with his infamously and gloriously mangled Christmas carols.