The sixth volume of The Complete Syndicated Pogo has been printed and somewhere below, you'll see a photo of another famous cartoonist paging through a copy and enjoying the brilliant work of Mr. Walt Kelly. That's the good news.
The bad news is that many retailers — including probably Amazon — will not have their copies until around this time next month. How could this be? Well, you may not believe this but I'm blaming it on Donald J. Trump. Allow me to explain…
Many of the books that are coming out these days about comic books and strips are printed in China. If you can connect with the right printer over there, you can get great quality at a low, low price…or you could before Mr. Trump began imposing and escalating tariffs on imports from China. I'm not clear on what these fees are supposed to accomplish nor am I clear on how well they're accomplishing that. All I know is that it has thrown sections of the Chinese printing industry into chaos.
That creates chaos for the American publishers who use those printers and you can expect price increases on many of their books shortly. A number of announced books will be coming out late and some may not come out at all…or at least until things stabilize in this marketplace. If we still had Tom Spurgeon covering the comics industry, he would have done an in-depth report on this by now. You should hear more about this in the fan press after the December 15 announcement about how the tariffs will be modified or extended or whatever that guy in the White House is going to do.
Volume 6 of The Complete Syndicated Pogo — subtitled Clean as a Weasel — was originally going to be printed in China and the materials got to the printer over there in plenty of time. At some point, it became necessary to pull the book from that printer and it was moved to a printer in Korea — the one that handled earlier volumes in the series. They've printed it but when you print over there, most copies get over here via the cheapest/slowest freight. A few retailers have copies and a few more will have them in the next week or two but everyone won't have them until around the second week in January. You have no idea how sorry (and frustrated) we are about this.
But it'll be worth whatever you have to wait. This volume reprints the entirety of the Pogo newspaper strip for 1959 and 1960 — two years where so much was happening in America that Walt Kelly had too much to work with. The book also contains a foreword by Jim Davis of Garfield fame, R.C. Harvey's fine annotations, Maggie Thompson's pull quotes feature, an article on the late Don Morgan (who worked with Kelly on the later strips) by Jim Korkis and — what? You want more than that?
And here's some happy news: Volume 7, which will be subtitled Pockets Full of Pie, will be out sooner than you might expect. We actually have all the strips for that book in hand and we're going to send everything to press way before the release date. I'll announce that date here shortly. Nothing will stop us unless Trump slaps a 500% tariff on books about possums who dress like basketball referees — which, come to think of it…