among them was Walt Kelly. I grew up on Pogo, as my kids did on Calvin and Hobbes. Finally, here is volume I of something that should have been done a long time ago (all the Amazon reviews seem to say, correctly, “Finally!”) . My daughter gave it to me for Christmas and after all those decades away, I wasn’t sure it would hold up, but it does, even though I haven’t got to the Simple J. Malarkey episodes with which Kelly protected our national sanity while (for example) Al Capp pusillanimously sat out the bad times safely drawing shmoon.
Young readers, you can now fill in an important gap in your cultural capital.
Squee! Beautiful. And the Breslin Foreword …
Deck us all with Boston Charlie, fa la la la la… In the late 50′s my parents had several soft cover collections of Pogo. I found them more interesting than the daily strips. But I was 10 or 12. For a while Albert was a Sam Spade wanna-be. But I can’t recall his name, sigh…
Not “fa la la la la.” “Walla Walla Wash., and Kalamazoo.”
Boola, boola, pepsi-coola, hullabaloo!
Norah’s freezing on the trolley,
Waller daller cauliflower, allygaroo.
Good King Wenceslaus: Look out!
On your feets uneven.
I got lost in reading the Foreward, Introduction and zipping back and forth to the drawings. I love seeing the non-repro blue sketches behind the ink lines.
I think I need this book.
Strip cartoons and jazz are American gift to the world. I know there were predecessors in Europe, but the American definition of the four-panel strip both enforced a useful discipline on authors and allowed newspapers to create a cartoon section of known size and format, expanding the market. When print newspapers disappear, cartoons will no doubt survive, but the discipline will be lost.
An early Mad Magazine had a parody of Pogo, which ends with a mushroom cloud from an atomic bomb engulfing the scene. A survivor of the catastrophe is seen in a panel with a bunch of Walt Disney characters, and tells them that they had received advice from them to learn politics and join a party. Then Mickey Rodent says “Learn politics and join a party!? That is the kiss of death. We meant ‘Learn parlor tricks and join a party. It’s that Darnold Duck’s fault. No one can understand a word he says.”
Pogo rolled a doctorate’s degree in philosophy into a single sentence: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
I want to speak in defense of Al Capp (and Flanders and Swann, and Tom Lehrer, and Lenny Bruce). Kelly is wonderful, but there’s lots more treasure in the 50s and anybody rooting through the 50s pile at a used book store looking for Pogo who finds Capp should grab it and carry it home. Maybe he wasn’t a heroic defender of unchanging values, but he was funny and if you haven’t seen him he will enrich your life. Mort Sahl, there’s a name to conjure with!
I’ll speak briefly in defense of the Shmoo from a six-year-old’s perspective, when I had a glorious Shmoo Christmas (1948?). I got the book, a set of Matryoshka-like white plastic Shmoos in six descending sizes, and a blow-up Shmoo, weighted on the bottom (what did they call those things?), that was bigger than I was. I was in Shmoo heaven. My dad (an ADA card-carrying liberal college perfesser) was a big Al Capp fan.
This first volume is very early Pogo; Walt Kelly got much better as he went along.
The tabletalk of the bats at cards.
Grundoon.
The grit and private despair of Ms. Beaver
Porky’s simple decency
Wonderful cursing: “Rowrbazzle Fazzbazz Numph!”
The Okefenokee Glee and Perloo Union
Perloo
The ever-changing names on the flat-bottomed fishing skiffs
PT Bridgeport [ in circus paste-up fonts ]
Deacon Mushrat
Some years ago, Fantagraphics began publishing a series of inexpensive paperback reproductions of the daily strips, but as far as I can tell, publication ground to a halt about half way through the canon.
I’m delighted to see them start over in hardback, and to include the Sunday strips.
But I hope they persevere this time: the best stuff comes later.