Pogo: Prisoner of Love

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Pogo: Prisoner of Love (Simon & Schuster, 1969).


I've always liked the fact that a comic strip as beautiful as Pogo existed more than I liked reading it. Take a look at the funny pages today. Not one of them is as well-drawn as Pogo. Nobody is able to match Walt Kelly's beautiful linework. Even if newspaper designers were giving strips the space today that they did fifty years ago, you wouldn't see such gorgeous art.

We found a first printing of this 1969 collection for a quarter recently. You haven't bought anything this good for a quarter since you were five years old. I think that it reprints a nearly complete set of daily strips from late January through August, 1968. A few panels were truncated for space reasons, and the Sundays, which I believe told a different continuity, are not included. Fantagraphics has been releasing nice annual hardback archives of the strip, each of which compile about two years of story. So I guess that in 2021 or so, we'll be able to compare the two and see how much was excised.

Having said that, I've honestly never before enjoyed Pogo as much as I did reading this. No matter how much I love Kelly's art, and no matter how much the wordplay and the puns make me chuckle, every time I've tried to read some of this stuff, I've been put off by the characters. I just can't tell any of them apart. There seems to be about fifteen innocent, kindhearted good guys who get a little confused over the modern world's complexities, and about fifteen mischievous ne'er-do-wells who take advantage of them. None are distinctive enough for me to embrace; the alligator and the hound dog could have swapped places in the story and I wouldn't have noticed.

The rambling storyline hangs together on gossamer-thin lines, but it's so darn cute, and punctuated by so much sweet silliness, that I smiled all the way through it. Some of the swamp's residents decide that the Okeefenokee should secede from the country, or at least suppose in innocent agreement to other characters' more rascally suggestions that it's an idea worth considering. The mole, the bobcat, and the muskrat engineer some of this before getting distracted on a search for hidden treasure, leaving the other characters to debate positions in their new government and the tone of a new national anthem. Pogo is propped up as the least objectionable president - and, by the baddies, the easiest to manipulate - which leaves the swamp's ladyfolk in a lengthy tussle as to who will become the First Lady. In the end, the lovely and innocent flirting between Pogo and the skunk, Ma'm'selle Hepzibah, has an incredibly sweet little hands-holding payoff. If you can read it without a big, dumb grin, then something is downright wrong with you.

Despite my own stumbles and bellyaching, Pogo was a terrific strip, and whenever you find one of these books, you should snatch it up. I probably should start getting those Fantagraphics collections of the 1950s stuff, shouldn't I? The one with the Joe McCarthy character is coming out in August. Recommended.

Gone Pogo

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Gone Pogo (Simon & Schuster, 1961)



Now that Fantagraphics has finally announced the release of the first in their series of Pogo collections - would you believe it's said to be out next month? - I think my fellow hobbyists are about to have an autumn full of tributes to Walt Kelly's old strip. I'm curious to read it from the beginning, and get to know the characters better. I imagine that in 1961, when this collection was published, they were a bit more well-known among the public. To be honest - and I know that sounding wishy-washy about Kelly doesn't get you much agreement - not knowing who the heck these characters are helped to make Gone Pogo a surprising chore to read.

The price of these classic editions varies pretty wildly. I've always wanted to read Pogo, but I've turned down $20 and $40 copies of this collection. Clicking the image above takes you to Stuart Ng Books, whom I recommend very highly, and they have two copies priced at $30 and $60. I found this copy in terrific shape for only $13 at Bookman Bookwoman in Nashville. I'm honestly, however, more impressed by the find and the uniqueness of the book than its contents.

On the one hand, it's a fascinating look at how comic strip collections used to be handled. Kelly apparently is quite notorious for the way he would juggle strips and rearrange panels when these books were compiled. A strip, for example, would often be four panels wide in newspapers, but only three in the book, with the fourth moved down to a second tier, followed by a spot illustration and then the first panel of the next four. I was really distracted by it. You know when you go to a show and spot somebody taping it, you're taken out of the moment and can't concentrate on the performance because you're curious how it will look on their bootleg? It was like that; the production was so curious that I found myself not reading the comic, but grouping panels and questioning the production. At one point, I came out of a trance and realized I had no idea what I had been reading for the last ten minutes.

Rereading it, I was oddly disappointed because I didn't know who any of the characters were. Most of them, I can't name. I'm sure that Kelly's legion of fans can tell you the cast in their sleep, just like my kids know everybody who made a one-panel cameo in Fox Trot. A huge number of characters make their way through this narrative, most amusingly a pair of bickering communist crows, but I didn't get to know any of them, and I'm pretty sure this bespectacled owl is never named in the book. Can you imagine reading an old Fawcett Crest Peanuts paperback from the decade and wondering what that bossy dark-haired girl is called? It's that weird.

In addition to the truncated and rearranged strips, there's plenty of additional material that makes this a very fun curiosity, and I can see how these books will remain in demand even once the complete archive becomes available. There's music and lyrics for a song called "Deck us All with Boston Charlie" and a long-form ten-page strip called "A Visit from St. Nicholas (to the Moon)" along with an illustrated text story called "Way Out in the Land of the Calabash." Each chapter - there are 21 - is preceded by its own little verse and the back cover's amusingly clever as well, using old-fashioned traveling showman-styled script to announce the book's content.

It's definitely a book that Kelly aficionados will enjoy more than newcomers. Honestly, I think that I will get more out of Fantagraphics' treatment of the property than Kelly's own efforts. I certainly wasn't expecting to have my enjoyment of the art obscured by the production, but I imagine that in 1961, this would have been a much-beloved gift for families, and that kids familiar with the characters would have left most copies of this book beat up and in tatters, much the way my kids' Fox Trot collections have been read to death. Reckon it was worth $13 to find a good condition survivor.

Solar Wind and Pogo

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death. Today: reviews of The Bumper Book of Solar Wind vol. 2 (Omnivistascope/Lulu, 2008) and Phi Beta Pogo (Fireside/Simon & Schuster, 1989).



I told you about the first collection of Solar Wind last month, and happily the second bumper book is almost as good as the first one. If you're just breezing through, however, this is a small press tribute to old British newspaper comics, with work from a who's who of the scene's regulars - Paul Scott, Al Ewing, Leigh Shepherd, PJ Holden, Mike Molcher, even old pro Gordon Rennie gets his licks in with a delightful story called El-Alamein Anderson.

So the second book starts with the final three issues of Solar Wind. The first one is another fake merger issue, this time with Sporto: The Comic About Sports, and it's fantastic. Unfortunately, it leads with by far the best strip, the riotous Murderdrome by Ewing and Simon Penter - "the only way to score a goal is with the severed head of an opposing player!" - and the other, wonderful strips just can't keep up with those four pages.

The last two Solar Winds admittedly see a malaise creeping in. Issue 7's celebration of the photo strips that the 1980s Eagle popularized is cute for a time, but it does feel a little long-winded, and the final issue has gags a-plenty, but doesn't seem sure where it should end. Next up is Big War Comic, which skewers Battle Picture Weekly, Warlord, Commando and just nails everything in 32 delicious parody-filled pages, ending with Lord Charley's War by Wyatt and Chris Askham (the team behind the brilliant Zoe Biddle, Wheelchair Ballerina), which, mercifully, Pat Mills was said to have a sense of humor about.

Then there's the two issues of Sunny for Girls, with more ballerinas, and horses, and spunky young public schoolgirls, and the time-travelling Enid Foulbroom, Puritan Hunter by Paul Glasswell and PJ Holden. This is great stuff - when are we seeing those "Best of Misty" volumes, Titan?! At any rate, despite some evident overwork and exasperation on the part of Paul Scott in assembling these contributor-packed tomes, there are still buckets of fantastic gags, and, as I mentioned before, they're very highly recommended, especially at less than eleven bucks! So click the link and get your copy from Lulu!

Read more about the Omnivistascope small press world, from which Solar Wind emerged, at their web site!



Fantagraphics has the rights to Walt Kelly's Pogo and has been promising new editions, but apparent problems in securing complete, best-quality images of the earliest strips has meant they've held off on soliciting the new series, and so people who'd like to read old Pogo have to make do with old, scattershot editions.

Case in point: this is a very odd little collection I found a couple of months ago at the Great Escape in Louisville. It was apparently assembled by the people behind the fanzine Okeefenokee Star, and its principal draw is a complete set of 1953 Pogo dailies. There's some great stuff here, and I laughed out loud several times watching our heroes dealing with interloping ne'er-do-wells like Simple J. Malarkey and Mole MacCarony inflicting the insanity of the outside world on them. Whether involving themselves in schemes to sell dirt - you can't get good results from cleaning powder without dirt, after all - or starting colleges with faculty and sports teams but no students, each storyline is absolutely wonderful, full of puns, wordplay and an enormous cast of engaging, lovable characters. And while Sarcophagus MacAbre isn't exactly lovable, he has the best name ever.

But more than the '53 strips, this includes a massive pile of supplemental material, including an essay by Bill Watterson and interviews about Kelly with his peers Milt Canniff and Ward Kimball. There's a brief look into the three years of Pogo strips produced after Kelly's death, and a festival held down in Waycross. I don't know that the presentation of all this background material is really essential, but it's enlightening, and it will certainly make do until Fantagraphics gets around to the period in their volumes.

This book's long out of print, but I found a copy for cover price at Mile High Comics. Click the link in the cover image and give it a shot!

(Originally posted June 17, 2008 at hipsterdad's LJ.)