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Pogo Re-Runs: Some Reflections on Elections
Selected from Three Pogo I Go Pogo; The Pogo Party; Pogo Extra, with commentaries by Bill Vaughan.
381 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1974
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About the author
Walt Kelly
395 books53 followersAmerican animator and cartoonist best known for the classic funny animal comic strip, Pogo. He won the National Cartoonists Society's Reuben Award in 1951 for Cartoonist of the Year, and their Silver T-Square Award in 1972, given to persons having "demonstrated outstanding dedication or service to the Society or the profession."
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
December 30, 2016
Collecting three runs from Walt Kelly's Pogo comic strip from the summers of 1952, 1956, and 1960; each book ends with the denizens of the swamp failing to get to the convention (which convention? any and all) to nominate their man, or rather possum. Pogo is the most reluctant of candidates, as befits the still-center-of-the-spinning-world which being the good and decent title character in a knockabout satire of venality, ignorance, pomposity, and appetite requires.
Kelly's political satire is at once the most instantly-dated thing about Pogo and, for US history nerds, the most wonderful playground of referentiality, misdirection, and generalized wisdom (and sometimes bunkum). Since this is from the first decade of the strip's run, none of the really tiresome geopolitical analogues that turn much of the later 60s into a slog for the uninitiated show up, and Kelly weaves his shaggy-dog sociopolitical satire — Communist cowbirds infiltrate a Boy Scout troop made up of hobo-bats gone straight-ish; a rabbit living in a grandfather clock goes on strike against himself; a boy insect who never says anything but "Jes' Fine" is interviewed by self-serious reporters as a candidate for the presidency — into the usual vaudevillian hum and throb of swamplife before getting everyone together for a failed convention-road trip setpiece. You can read current events into it if you want (the boy bug is a shrewd summation of the substance-free, family-assisted Jack Kennedy), but you can also just enjoy it as silliness at a very high level, one damn thing after another that more often than not is still pretty humorous.
When I was a young man reading Pogo collections from the public library, it used to bother me that Kelly's stories never went anywhere, that they were all just shaggy-dog stringalongs resetting like a sitcom with no one having learned a thing. If he'd wanted to, he could have been a very fine storyteller, shaping excellent narratives with his knack for rhythm and composition, not to mention some of the most extensive verbal dexterity ever seen in comics. But he chose to be a columnist rather than a (graphic) novelist, a newspaperman, kidding everything including newspapers, to the end. It's the kind of messy, sprawling life's work that resists tidy summation or deft anthologization, but the world is much richer in line and joke for having had Walt Kelly in it.
Kelly's political satire is at once the most instantly-dated thing about Pogo and, for US history nerds, the most wonderful playground of referentiality, misdirection, and generalized wisdom (and sometimes bunkum). Since this is from the first decade of the strip's run, none of the really tiresome geopolitical analogues that turn much of the later 60s into a slog for the uninitiated show up, and Kelly weaves his shaggy-dog sociopolitical satire — Communist cowbirds infiltrate a Boy Scout troop made up of hobo-bats gone straight-ish; a rabbit living in a grandfather clock goes on strike against himself; a boy insect who never says anything but "Jes' Fine" is interviewed by self-serious reporters as a candidate for the presidency — into the usual vaudevillian hum and throb of swamplife before getting everyone together for a failed convention-road trip setpiece. You can read current events into it if you want (the boy bug is a shrewd summation of the substance-free, family-assisted Jack Kennedy), but you can also just enjoy it as silliness at a very high level, one damn thing after another that more often than not is still pretty humorous.
When I was a young man reading Pogo collections from the public library, it used to bother me that Kelly's stories never went anywhere, that they were all just shaggy-dog stringalongs resetting like a sitcom with no one having learned a thing. If he'd wanted to, he could have been a very fine storyteller, shaping excellent narratives with his knack for rhythm and composition, not to mention some of the most extensive verbal dexterity ever seen in comics. But he chose to be a columnist rather than a (graphic) novelist, a newspaperman, kidding everything including newspapers, to the end. It's the kind of messy, sprawling life's work that resists tidy summation or deft anthologization, but the world is much richer in line and joke for having had Walt Kelly in it.
January 22, 2025
It's really clear how this influenced Calvin and Hobbes and Bone and to some extent you have to love your favorite band's favorite band.
I started reading this as something light to read on a "parent of a newborn" schedule when my son was born and then I stopped halfway through to finish something else and then to read war and peace and now I'm done war and peace so I finished this and now my son is old enough that if I am reading and he wants me to pay attention to him he can say "book away" and take the book and hide it in another room.
Ultimately Walt Kelly is one of the best to ever do it and it's not quite my cup of tea.
EDIT Also, wait, there's something else that I want to get off my chest: This book is published 6 frames to a page, but the comics were originally printed as 4 frame newspaper comics but sometimes there's like an extra two frames because maybe it's a sunday strip or they needed a filler frame to fill out the page or I don't know why and it is jarring because they really do read best not as a whole story but as four frame set up and punch line but this book seems to be hiding visual signposts that support that rhythm. It really bugged me.
I started reading this as something light to read on a "parent of a newborn" schedule when my son was born and then I stopped halfway through to finish something else and then to read war and peace and now I'm done war and peace so I finished this and now my son is old enough that if I am reading and he wants me to pay attention to him he can say "book away" and take the book and hide it in another room.
Ultimately Walt Kelly is one of the best to ever do it and it's not quite my cup of tea.
EDIT Also, wait, there's something else that I want to get off my chest: This book is published 6 frames to a page, but the comics were originally printed as 4 frame newspaper comics but sometimes there's like an extra two frames because maybe it's a sunday strip or they needed a filler frame to fill out the page or I don't know why and it is jarring because they really do read best not as a whole story but as four frame set up and punch line but this book seems to be hiding visual signposts that support that rhythm. It really bugged me.
June 9, 2020
Kelly was at his best when he was lampooning politics, and thankfully here’s three storylines where he mocks the bid for the presidency. It’s easy to get lost in the comedic chaos of this strip, but I still find myself enjoying the hell out of it.
June 5, 2020
1974 paperback collecting strips relating to the 1952, '56, and 1960 elections. I skipped the middle section, because I'd already just read it in it's original edition, "the Pogo Party."
"I Go Pogo" features Wiley Kat, Sarcophagus MacAbre, and Seminole Sam searching for Churchy in order to include him in some stew. Deacon Mushrat and the bats get into the mix. And along come the cowbirds. P.T. Bridgeport and the Tammany Tiger get involved, and there's a plot involving I Go Pogo buttons. (Product Placement?)
"The Pogo Extra" concerns itself with Fremont the bug boy, and his aspirations towards the presidency, on the platform of "jet' fine!" Congersman Frog guest stars, as well as a skunk pollster, and members of the press. Kelly spreads his satire wider in this one. Swamp critter hiking galore, beautifully brushed, inimitably inked.
"I Go Pogo" features Wiley Kat, Sarcophagus MacAbre, and Seminole Sam searching for Churchy in order to include him in some stew. Deacon Mushrat and the bats get into the mix. And along come the cowbirds. P.T. Bridgeport and the Tammany Tiger get involved, and there's a plot involving I Go Pogo buttons. (Product Placement?)
"The Pogo Extra" concerns itself with Fremont the bug boy, and his aspirations towards the presidency, on the platform of "jet' fine!" Congersman Frog guest stars, as well as a skunk pollster, and members of the press. Kelly spreads his satire wider in this one. Swamp critter hiking galore, beautifully brushed, inimitably inked.
February 22, 2015
Any Pogo book is a good book. Some are even great books. Any cartoon strip that is/was in the comics section of your daily newspaper only get their audience by building on a continuing story of characters who display the same characters daily strip after daily strip. Pogo, a possum, is the main character in a swamp full of animal characters who speak about topics of the day. Though real names are not used the characters speak of the upcoming conventions and election for president of the USA. Walt Kelly, the creator of Pogo has a sharp eye and a forked tongue as he presents the election process as bumbling as Garry Trudeau portrayed the U.S. in all of its folly in politics, education and war.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews