Pogo Plug

As near as I can tell, the sixth volume of Pogo: The Complete Syndicated Comic Strips is now everywhere it's supposed to be except for stores that have sold out of their first delivery. If you live in my area and you order it via Amazon Prime in the next hour, they will deliver your copy today. Can't ask for much more available than that. (And of course, the Kindle edition will come to you via instant delivery but I think this is one of those books that's more wonderful in your hands than on your tablet.)

Over on its Amazon page, you can order or if you're not ready to do that, you can read a large sample of this edition. I think it's the best newspaper strip ever done. If you think that distinction belongs to Peanuts or Doonesbury or Krazy Kat or Ziggy…fine. We needn't mud-wrestle except maybe if you think Ziggy. But even that's fine…and a collection of the second-best strip or the third-best strip is still a wonderful thing to own. Own one soon. Better still, own all of them.

Now Arriving: Pogo

Volume 6 of Pogo: The Complete Syndicated Comic Strips has been out for about a month, slowly dribbling into comic book shops everywhere as copies — apparently delivered by Churchy the Turtle — made their way to retailers. I think Joe Ferrara's store in Santa Cruz got some in and sold out immediately a month ago today. But within two or three days, they should be to every dealer that ordered 'em.

Amazon got them in in dribs and drabs and has been quietly filling mail orders in an order I do not pretend to understand. But they're now promising that if you order right now, your copy will ship in 1-2 days. So order right now.

I almost never blow my own horn on this blog about my work but I'm just co-editor of these books. It's not my work that makes 'em wonderful. Long before I met his daughter, I was telling people that Walt Kelly was my favorite cartoonist and I was hardly alone in this choice of favorite cartoonists. On the walls of one room of my house, I have framed originals of Pogo, Peanuts and Krazy Kat. If I'd ever come across a good Sunday Popeye by Elzie Segar that I could afford, it would join them.

The strips in this volume cover the years 1959 and 1960 so, as I noted in an earlier plug, Mr. Kelly had plenty of world-changing topics in the newspaper to work with. Pogo and his merry mob addressed many of them but the strip was also delicious when Walt was just being silly for silly's sake.

This volume is subtitled Clean as a Weasel and it features a foreword by Jim "Garfield" Davis plus other extras. The titles come from a list we found in Kelly's own handwriting. Most are phrases he'd used in the strip at least once and he was intending to use them as titles for some sort of series of "Best of Pogo" reprints in small paperbacks…I think. The next of our volumes, Pockets Full of Pie, will be in stores well before the end of 2020.

Good News, Bad News and Pogo News

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…

Late-Breaking Pogo News

Amazon is still listing October 9 as the official release date for Volume 5 of Pogo – The Complete Syndicated Comic Strips by Walt Kelly but I'm hearing from folks who pre-ordered and received their copies today. So I guess it's out. You can order your copy right here and you'll probably receive it quickly. That is, unless Amazon runs out of their initial shipment and needs to wait for more.

It contains two prime years of what I think is the best newspaper strip ever…and even folks who disagree with me on that don't usually disagree by much. The volume also has historical info on Kelly and the strips in this volume plus a foreword by Pogo devotee Jake Tapper.

As most of you know, we had trouble getting these books out on their announced release dates. For the early volumes, it was difficult to locate good source material to scan and much of what we could locate had to undergo major surgery and restoration. Then one of the book's two editors died of cancer. Then the other of the book's two editors died of cancer. All of that is behind us now and I'll soon announce when Volume 6 will be published. I couldn't be happier that they will come out on schedule from now on.

Go Pogo

Volume 4 of Pogo: The Complete Syndicated Comic Strips has stopped being a pre-order at Amazon. In fact, they've been shipping copies for a few days now, plus I've heard from folks who got copies more than a week ago — i.e., last year — from other sources. I am so, so happy to have this out. I will be so, so happy to see Volume 5 emerge, maybe in time for Comic-Con International in July. It will have an introduction by Jake Tapper, taking a brief respite from his current profession of swatting down White House factotums.

I think Walt Kelly's Pogo is the greatest comic strip ever done…and I thought that long before I became (cough!) involved with Mr. Kelly's daughter. I even have the original art to a Pogo Sunday page framed and hanging in my kitchen, right next to a framed Peanuts Sunday page that Charles Schulz gave me. I don't recall where I got the Pogo page but I probably paid good money for it, long before I met Carolyn. I'm going to tell you a little story about it but first, we have to break for this brief commercial message…

Volume 4 of Pogo: The Complete Syndicated Comic Strips contains two whole years — 1955 and 1956 — of daily and Sunday Pogo comic strips…with the Sundays printed in color for the first time in any English language reprint collection. There's also historical material, a little tribute to my love Carolyn and a foreword by Neil Gaiman. This link will allow you to order one from Amazon — which at this moment has shipped out so many that they're temporarily out of stock. But order anyway. It won't be long.

You can also order a lovely boxed-set of Volume 3 and 4 via this link or order the boxed set of Volumes 1 and 2 at this link for about the price of one volume. If you care about great comic art, these books are must-haves. And now, back to you, Mark…

Thank you, me. As you may know, Carolyn was my "companion" (sounds classier than "lady friend") for about twenty years. Ah, I remember our first real date…

I took her to a great Japanese restaurant that was so great, it went out of business a week later. Then we went back to my house where a quick tour has been known to scare off other women. Of course, I showed her the framed Sunday page by her father. We were standing in front of it when the following occurred…

She had noticed some books I have about magic and she asked me if I did any tricks. I told her I don't perform often but, yes, I have a few feats I can do with a deck of cards. They do not cause Copperfield to sweat the competition but they can astound the easily-astounded. She insisted I do one for her so I grabbed up a deck.

(Before I forget: Don't read this story if you're viewing this site on a cell phone. You're going to need a big computer monitor to get the punchline.)

Magicians aren't supposed to reveal how a trick is done but I think it's okay to reveal this one if I don't tell you what the trick is. It involves the Queen of Diamonds. I write "Queen of Diamonds" on a slip of paper, fold it up and hand it to (in this case) Carolyn to hold without looking at it. She has no idea what I've written. Then I shuffle the cards and do some fancy moves which I don't think I can do any more…then I have Carolyn pick a card, seemingly at random. I say "seemingly" because while she may think she has a free choice of any card, I have tricked her into selecting the Queen of Diamonds.

Then, as usually performed, there's some mumbo-jumbo and stalling and drawing it out but I finally say to her, "All right. You could have picked any card [a lie] and you picked the Queen of Diamonds! Now, open that slip of paper I handed you and tell me what it says!" She opens the paper, sees that it says "Queen of Diamonds" and she is amazed and impressed. At least, that's the way it usually works. This particular time, it went like this…

I said, "Now, I'm going to have you pick a card —" and before I could shuffle the deck and force the Queen of Diamonds on her, she just blurted out, "Queen of Diamonds!" This happens to every magician once in a while. Every so often, your audience inadvertently does your trick for you and doesn't realize it. I immediately told Carolyn to open the folded paper and see what I'd written on it, which she did. Upon finding the name of the card she'd thought of ten seconds before, she shrieked and ran out of the room in a panic.

I started to run after her but then my eyes fell for some reason on the Pogo strip on the wall — which was right behind her as I'd performed the trick. I laughed, went and got her and showed her what happened on that Pogo page. Life doesn't always imitate art but it nearly always can replicate a good comic strip.

Box o' Pogo

Why is Albert Alligator so happy? Because the second volume of Walt Kelly's Pogo reprints is coming out and so is this lovely slipcase in which folks can house their copies of Volume 1 and Volume 2. The case was designed by Carolyn Kelly, co-editor of the series and daughter of her father. You'd be happy too if there were a slipcase for two lovely hardcover books of a great newspaper strip that you were in. (Trust me. You would.)

Now, this of course has you asking yourself, "How do I get one of those lovely slipcases?" And you may also be thinking you have to buy Volume 1 and Volume 2 together even though you already have a copy of Volume 1. Well, it wouldn't be the stupidest thing you could do to order the two books and give your copy of Volume 1 to an as-yet unenlightened friend. Here is a link to pre-order Volume 1 and Volume 2 in the slipcase from its publisher, Fantagraphics Books. In the not-too-distant future, we'll probably have an Amazon link that will give you this at a slightly lower price but you don't want to wait for that.

Or if you have Volume 1 and don't want another copy but do want the slipcase, order Volume 2 direct from Fantagraphics and for a limited time only (they say), your Volume 2 will come with the slipcase into which you can insert the copy of Volume 1 you already lovingly possess. If you don't want the slipcase, you can save a little cash by placing your pre-order for Volume 2 through this Amazon link.

So then: You may be wondering when Volume 2 will be available at all. Albert certainly would like to know. The publisher informs me that copies should be reaching distributor warehouses by Halloween…so they'll show up at comic shops and mail-orders will be shipping around the third week of November. This is ahead of schedule…so after the long delays on Volume 1, Pogo is now early! Even if it were late though, it's well worth waiting for. This is some of the best material ever to appear in newspaper strip format…or anything resembling comic art for that matter. Try it and see if you don't dance like Albert, probably even wearing a similar outfit!

Pogo Party

This coming Saturday would have been the 94th birthday of Walt Kelly, one of the true greats of cartooning and the creator of Pogo Possum and his merry band of swampland goombahs. Would you like to know more about this extraordinary man? Well, this Friday, his extraordinary daughter Carolyn Kelly — also, a fine cartoonist — will be interviewed on Time Travel, a pop culture radio show hosted by Dan Hollis and Jeff O'Boyle and heard on WNRJ, 1510 AM on your dial in Hackettstown, New Jersey. Carolyn will be on the air live with them from 4 PM to 5 PM Eastern Time talking about her father and his work and her work and maybe even the forthcoming reprinting of The Complete Pogo from Fantagraphics Books.

Just on the slight chance that you are not within listening range of Hackettstown, you can hear the show over on the WNRJ website. And if you miss it there, all episodes of Time Travel are archived soon after on this page. There are many fine conversations there to be heard, including one with Yours Truly. But you can hear me all the time, especially on Stu Shostak's station. It will be a rare treat to hear Carolyn interviewed.

Pogo Plea

I am posting the following in my capacity as an advisor of some kind to the project in question and also as a devout, long-time fan of the newspaper strip in question…

CALLING ALL POGO FANS & COLLECTORS

We are requesting the help of Pogo collectors who may have original art or high quality reproductions of Walt Kelly's Pogo strip.

We are currently assembling Walt Kelly's POGO: The Complete Daily & Sunday Strips. We are looking for the best possible black-and-white reproduction of both Sundays and dailies — especially the Sundays. If you have original art or proofs that you would be willing to let us scan, we would be grateful if you'd contact us. You may e-mail me directly at groth@fantagraphics.com (Please put POGO in the header). Thank you.

Gary Groth
Fantagraphics Books

If you can help, please do. If you can't help, just order the books. They're gonna be great.

Pogo Plentiful

If in a room of comic strip historians, you proclaimed that Walt Kelly's Pogo was the best newspaper comic of all time, no one would call the sanitarium to come cart you away. Not everyone would agree, of course. Some would argue that Pogo was the second best or the third…but few would place it outside the Top Ten and no one would think you'd lost your taste or marbles. Mr. Kelly was a genius not only at drawing wonderful, mesmerizing critters but at putting them in fascinating situations and filling their word balloons with plain, old-fashioned brilliance. The "We have met the enemy…" line is his most quoted but he was that good, that sharp almost every week…for around 9,687 strips, daily and Sunday.

(Don't take those numbers as exact. For one thing, I did the math and mine is always a bit questionable. For another, I used the dates that the original Pogo strip ran and Kelly didn't do the last few years, owing to his having passed away.)

If you want a precise count, here's what you'll have to do. Fantagraphics Books, the folks who bring you those superb Peanuts reprints, are soon to bring you Pogo with the same loving care and format. Buy the books — there'll be twelve (or so) volumes in hardcover in the coming years — and when they get to the end, count up the strips. It'll be somewhere over 9,000 and they'll all be jes' wonderful with the presentation they deserve. Walt's daughter Carolyn is keeping an eye on everything and protecting the family jewels.

Here's the official announcement. Above is the not-final cover for the first one, expertly art-directed by Jeff "Bone" Smith. We are all quite happy about this.

Pogo Plug

Drop by The Oh-Fishul Pogo Possum Website today for a special Veteran's Day Pogo strip from the past. And while you're visiting, there's still time to enjoy The Pogo Election Special, a whole buncha strips that Pogomaster Walt Kelly writ 'n' drew in election years past. It's amazing how many of the things he said in that strip, beyond the inevitable "We have met the enemy" quote are timeless and eminently relevant today. Amazing and sad, in some cases…but amazing, nonetheless. And keep your eye on that Pogo site for more of Mr. Kelly's timeless wit, wisdom and peachy brushwork. He was really ahead of our time, to say nothing of his time.

Joyous Pogo Day!

Fifty-five years ago today, the world of comic strips changed for the better. The event was the quiet debut of a new one in the pages of The New York Star, a short-lived Manhattan newspaper. The strip was about a mild-mannered little possum with a striped shirt and a penchant for saying clever, incisive things. The possum and the strip were both named Pogo, the creation of one Walt Kelly, a former artist for Disney Studios who had turned to drawing Dell comic books. Some of those comics had featured a kid named Bumbazine who was squeezed out of his own strip by the boisterous Albert the Alligator. Poetically, Albert got a taste of his own medicine: The possum, a supporting player, assumed the star role and Albert was demoted to comedy relief.

The comic books were wonderful but Kelly was destined for a wider, older audience. While also working as the Star's Art Director and Political Cartoonist, he took the opportunity to star his swamp critters in a daily strip. It was a historic moment for the funny pages but the world took little notice: No one was buying the Star, and four months later, it was both forgotten and gone. Pogo, however, would not be either. Kelly hooked up with what was then called the Hall Syndicate and soon, his creation was available coast-to-coast. Acceptance came slowly and even some people who got it never really got it. But by the end of the fifties, the Okefenokee denizens were appearing in nearly 600 newspapers and a few dozen best-selling paperbacks, forever ensconced as one of the all-time great comics. People who loved Pogo really love Pogo…and still love Pogo. And will always love Pogo. Happy birthday.

Pogo's Papa

Ninety years ago today, a family in Philadelphia named Kelly gave birth to a kid named Walter Crawford Kelly, Jr. They probably didn't suspect that he would grow up (to the extent cartoonists ever grow up) to become one of the most honored and loved comic strip creators of all time. It was many years after that that Walt Kelly, in turn, gave birth to Pogo Possum, Albert Alligator, Howland Owl, Churchy LaFemme, and other denizens of the Okefenokee Swamp…and what a swamp it was, teeming with personalities of every stripe and persuasion. Even on the days Pogo was black-and-white, its language and style made it more colorful than anything else that graced the Sunday Funnies. Walt put more personality into a drawing than any practitioner of the anthropomorphic arts, before or since, but it didn't stop there.

Their speech was vibrant, their wit unparalleled, their situations irresistible. Kelly is often remembered for his political content — and to be sure, it was unique and bold and the reason that so many adults felt they had to scan the comics page. But he was also just plain funny, which was maybe the best reason to cruise the Okefenokee. Even when I was too young to have a clue what those silly animals were talking about, I just knew it was something very special.

So Happy Walt Kelly Day, people. A lot of cartoonists can do slapstick. A lot of them can say pithy, on-target things. Some of them can even create characters that you just plain want to hang around. But darn few can put it all under one roof and in one strip.

Go Go Pogo

If any opinion in the comic strip world approaches unanimity, it's that Walt Kelly was a great cartoonist and that Pogo was a great comic strip.  Those who know it love it.  Those who don't know would love it if only they knew it.  Even as a small kid, too unseasoned to understand every word of its unique dialect, I could tell it was funny.  You just look at it and you can see it's full of funny characters with funny expressions and funny postures, so I just assumed that if I could ever understand everything those funny characters were saying, it too would be funny.  Well, it was.  It was also profound and insightful and even, at times, poetic.  Walter Crawford Kelly was not only a cartoonist, he was a poet.  And a song writer.  And even a singer of his own silly songs.

He proved this with a 1956 book and record album, Songs of the Pogo, both filled with wonderful tunes, some of which he sings.  Want to hear a sample?  If you have Windows Media Player installed, click here and you'll hear Mr. Kelly himself vocalizing "Go-Go Pogo" in its two-minute entirety.  Then click here and go to the website of Parasol Records, where you can purchase — for a paltry twelve bucks — the new CD reissue of Songs of the Pogo, complete with previously-unreleased Pogo tracks, including rehearsal sessions, and some of Kelly's other records that weren't included on the album.

I've played my copy of the LP record over and over and over.  Now, I get to play the CD over and over and over.  You will, too.

Pogo Figgers

Speaking of statuary from Dark Horse Comics — as I was, a few days ago — they've been issuing this wonderful set called Classic Comic Characters.  They're wonderful little figurines of your favorites from the funny pages, including (so far) Nancy, Sluggo, Krazy Kat, Ignatz, Popeye, Prince Valiant, The Phantom, Olive Oyl, Felix the Cat, Fearless Fosdick, Terry (of "…The Pirates" fame), The Dragon Lady, Flash Gordon, Little Orphan Annie, Beetle Bailey, Sarge, Li'l Abner, Daisy Mae, Mandrake, Blondie, Dagwood, Smokey Stover, Bluto, Wimpy, Alley Oop and (coming soon) The Yellow Kid, Little Nemo and many more.

They've also issued a figure of Albert the Alligator (from Walt Kelly's brilliant newspaper strip, Pogo) and in June, the above Pogo replica will join the ever-widening throng.  Well, actually, Pogo will look even better than he does above.  These are pics of prototypes.  The design of the Albert statue — which you can purchase right now from places like Bud Plant Comic Art — was improved a bit after the catalogue photo was taken and Pogo is still being even further refined.

The statues are being sculpted by folks at Yoe! Studios, supervised by demon cartoonist Craig Yoe, with these two under the intense scrutiny of my best friend in the whole world, Carolyn Kelly.  She is uniquely qualified to supervise Pogo stuff because not only is she a fine artist but she also sometimes sat on her father's lap as he drew the strip.  The possum is in good hands.

Today's Video Link

My pal Kliph Nesteroff (whose latest book we highly recommend) sent me this video. It's an hour show but the player is configured to show you just the last five minutes. The program is a Canadian version of the American TV show Hit Parade which each week would perform the current top-selling tunes, often in cute little sketches with interesting staging. This week, they decided to perform "See You Later, Alligator" with the characters from Walt Kelly's newspaper strip, Pogo.

The end credits of this show from the late fifties show that it was directed by Stan Harris and written by John Aylesworth — two men who later would become very big on American variety shows…