| Title | : | Pogo: The Complete Syndicated Comic Strips, Vol. 1: Through the Wild Blue Wonder |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1560978694 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781560978695 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 290 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 2011 |
Pogo: The Complete Syndicated Comic Strips, Vol. 1: Through the Wild Blue Wonder Reviews
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After reading The Complete Calvin and Hobbes and Bone in recent years, I decided to give Walt Kelly's Pogo a shot after seeing Bill Watterson and Jeff Smith mention him as a prominent influence. Right out of the gate, I saw what they were talking about. I can see Calvin and the smaller Bone cousins in Pogo and both Hobbes and Smiley Bone have Albert the Alligator in their ancestry.
Kelly's art is far more detailed than a funny animal strip needed to be and the storylines are much more involved and flow from one to the next like so much swamp water. The stories have surprisingly dark moments too, like like Albert drinking the tadpole Pogo was babysitting and Albert going on trial for possibly eating a puppy.
Kelly spared no expense in coming up with characters. Pogo, Albert the Alligator, the Rackety-Coons, Howlan Owl, and Porky Pine just scratch the surface. The strip is written in an exaggerated southern dialect, which is a double edged sword. It gives Pogo's Okefenokee Swamp a sense of place but it also makes for some slower reading at times. Of course, Kelly probably didn't intend for the strip to be consumed the way I did, in huge eyefuls at a time.
While I can see why the strip was so influential, it hadn't hit its prime yet as of this volume. The stories are fairly pedestrian, lacking a lot of the political satire that is coming down the pipe in future volumes. I've got the second volume and plan to read it soon but I'm going to knock out some other things first.
Through the Wild Blue Wonder is an enjoyable look at one of the most influential newspaper strips in its embryonic form. Four out of five swallowed tadpoles. -
Absolute classic. The drawing style is gorgeous, Kelly worked at Disney and you can really feel the animation style/influence on his line-work (fluid, energetic, precise). Regarding technical proficiency, this has to be one of the all-time best drawn newspaper cartoon strips imo. The art is detailed but not asphyxiated by over-drawing, so it strikes a great balance.
The writing is also phenomenal, I was actually quite surprised to see how well a lot of the humor and writing hold up. Lots of fabulous gag humor and clever writing in this volume. Albert the Alligator is prob my favorite, he's so ridiculous in the best of ways.
Pogo April 27th, 1950
"A duller piece of information has not come my way since Christmas 1936." That line just kills me! (and the look of dumbstruck realization on Albert's face in panel 3 is hilarious too)
I was told that Walt Kelly was very influenced by George Herriman's classic Krazy Kat comic strip. And in turn, Kelly had a huge influence on a lot of big-time comic strip artists, notably Bill Watterson (and also if I recall correctly the guy who did Bone).
I plan on reading the 2nd volume released by Fantagraphics. I'm curious to see how the later political satire work holds up, imo political humor is very tricky and often times ages poorly (not to mention the political/historical context of the humor can be lost on modern readers). But we shall see! Plus, when I look at samples of the strip, I tend to prefer the earlier style of drawing vs how the later drawings look. Just my personal tastes.
Recommend for fans of comics, comic strips, humor, whimsy, etc. -
Kelly sure came out swinging right from the beginning. Though there are limitations and repetition here (Albert manages to swallow or seem to swallow quite a number of other creatures, for instance), the strip's greatness is evident pretty much from the jump. The art's expressive, complex, detailed, supple, you name it--but mainly, it's a joy to look at. It's frequently laugh out loud funny and always (well, usually) amusing. The strip's famous political satire is little in evidence here, though there are some subtle instances of attacks on McCarthyism; in these early days, though, it's more whimsical than pointed--the occasional barb from Porkypine notwithstanding. Some quibbles about the book itself could be made--the proto strips are at the end rather than the beginning, and the Sunday strips run in sequence between the two sets of dailies, for instance, but the notes go strictly chronologically, so tracking a note back to the relevant strip can be a pain. Overall, though, this one's a definite winner.
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This collection of the first two years (starting in the New York Star in 1948 and then as a syndicated strip in 1949 through the end of 1950) of Pogo’s publication as a newspaper comic strip shows why the antics of the animal inhabitants of the
Okefenokee Swamp became so popular so quickly and remained so until their creator’s death in 1973. Kelly’s lively draftsmanship and superb brush strokes combined with the careful composition of the panels are visual masterpieces of the cartoonist’s art. The dialog and storylines, filled with gentle humor delivered in an exaggerated rural southern accent, a plethora of malapropisms are all served up with keen wit, interspersed with broad slapstick gags and pointed political satire. -
I'm here because of Swamp Thing.
Saga of the Swamp Thing: Book Two contains a story written by Alan Moore called "Pog" that originally appeared in Saga of the Swamp Thing #32 and is an obvious tribute to Walt Kelly, who is a legend in both comics and animation. In the Swamp Thing story, analogs for the cast of Pogo come from outer space, looking for a safe place to settle. In a tip of the cap to Pogo's environmentalist overtones the Earth is a more dangerous place than it looks. Moore's tribute to Albert Alligator is eaten by a real alligator and the Swamp Thing points out to "Pog" how humanity has encroached on the natural world. Pog and his colleagues, not finding what they are looking for, get out of dodge.
However, I didn't have any of this in mind when I read Swamp Thing #32, because while I was aware of Kelly's reputation as a legend in comics, I had never actually read Pogo. There are reasons for this...while I have managed to rip through 15 volumes of Charles Schulz's Complete Peanuts, Peanuts was something I was familiar with from a childhood of reading newspapers--while Pogo made it's debut in The New York Star a few years before we met Charlie Brown and gang, by the time I became a comics connoisseur, I was mostly into superheroes and apart from Peanuts, the only comics I read religiously were Funky Winkerbean (I had the privilege of meeting Tom Batiuk in the fourth grade, since he's from my part of the world--turns out my grandfather was chummy with Tom's dad as well) and Bloom County which always seemed to appeal to my more leftist ideology, although I was unaware that there was a name for my ideology at the time. By the time that I fell in love with comics, Walt Kelly had been dead for over a decade and Pogo didn't appear in my local paper.
The one great thing about any sort of art is that usually it contains the inspirations of the artists that came before. Would there be a Beatles if there wasn't a Buddy Holly or Carl Perkins? Would Bob Dylan be as revered if Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger had never existed? So it is with the comics--there is no John Byrne if there is no Jack Kirby and I'm pretty a lot of newspaper strips wouldn't have existed without Walt Kelly. Again, Bloom County is immediately the strip that comes to mind for me when I read Pogo. While the denizens of Bloom County don't live in a swamp, the meadows of Berke Breathed's eponymous world hearken back to Pogo. Walt Kelly is the one who blazed the trail for artists like Breathed...whereas Walt tried to be a little more subtle with his political commentaries in his first year on Pogo (and it is explained that this was necessary so that Kelly was not seen as biting the hand that fed him) those commentaries are still there (including attacks on Joe McCarthy and the HUAC--thankfully there are annotations at the end of the collection that connect the dots.) By engaging in such commentaries, Kelly makes it possible for Breathed (and to some extent Gary Treadeau) to be much more oblique about their commentaries later.
This sort of dual existence is really the sign of a great artist, and reading Pogo there is no doubt one of the greats, just based on the effort he put into his craft. The reason that it took so long to release the Pogo syndicated strips is that because unlike The Complete Peanuts, much of the source material had to be tracked down from newspaper sources as the originals were long since gone. This is a shame, especially with the Sunday strips, as it is explained by Mark Evanier in a note before the Sunday section (which also explains why the Sunday strips have their own section) that Kelly had exacting standards as to how he wanted the Sunday strips to be colored--something that the printer couldn't always oblige. I'm sure if Kelly was still around to curate this collection, he'd demand his original intent.
Fortunately, the strips do survive in some format that makes this collection possible. Kelly is legendary not just for his art, but for his writing as well. Sometimes, the jokes in Pogo are quite subtle, or take weeks to get to the actual punchline. But what makes Kelly legendary, in my opinion is that the setups are so beautifully rendered and the world of Pogo so rich with its characters (the swamp itself can be considered one--hence why I think Moore found it appropriate for an issue of Swamp Thing) that the punchlines end up being worth the wait. -
“It’s interesting to know that the confidence of ignorance has not died out!”
It is difficult to convey the importance, for those of you not from the U.S. or who know little of the nation’s history of the 1950s-60s, of what the comic strip Pogo represented in American life. Back then the comics pages were as integral to a daily read of the newspaper as the headlines or opinion pages. Ostensibly, they were an escape. In reality, they were a mirror. Had they been in the op-ed pages, they might have been uncomfortable. But since they were in the “funny pages,” there was a buffer, there was a deniability some used to deny it’s essential observations about American society.
On the surface, Pogo Possum was one of many characters from the Okefenokee Swamp, along with Albert Alligator, Porky Pine, Churchy La Femme, Deacon Mushrat, Rakety Coon, plus assorted Catterpiggles, Pup Dogs, and butterflies. Their strong Southern accents hid a profound understanding of the world; much like the best of Mark Twain, a literal reading had little to do with the intent and truth. These strips reflected America as it was…and is.
For example, is there anything more timeless than Albert Alligator’s comment when he was not considered by his peers to be a member of a jury?: “My Gakes! Does you mean to cast doubt on my impartial bias?” What would Americans be without “impartial bias?”
This volume has the initial nationally syndicated cartoon daily and Sunday strips plus the prior ones from The New York Star that ran in early 1949. I’m so looking forward to the remaining 5 volumes on my shelf. -
Before anyone blasts me for heresy here, here's my poop on Pogo. It's ultimately groundbreaking in style and substance; Walt Kelly's artwork is detailed and frequently not only
whimsical, but beautiful when neither overly busy nor mere talking heads simplistic. His characters and plotting often indulge in sharp satire of figures ranging from red-baiter Joe McCarthy to LBJ, and Kelly is rightfully lionized in
wikipedia and
elsewhere. From the mid-60's to about 1971 or 1972, Kelly was at the top of his form, as witness
this,
this,
this,
this, and especially
this. Without Pogo, there can be no Bone. Without Kelly, artists like Bill Watterson ("Calvin and Hobbes") and Frank Cho ("Liberty Meadows") would have found their respective trails much less blazed.
So, yeah, I like, admire, and respect Pogo (and all these links would be embedded images, BTW, but for the fact that I can't make them fit here without rendering them illegible). If there's a problem here, it's that this book is not a collection from Pogo's heyday, but rather of the first year of his syndication, and at that time Kelly had yet to differentiate his characters, hone his artistic language, or tighten his gags. There are still gems here. For example,
this is typical, though it may be of later vintage. Pork' Pine's introduction as a misanthrope willing to stick himself ("Don't like NOBODY.") is great, as is that of the genius missing-crittur-finder Hound Dog ("Who lost?" "Me."), but in the main these comics feature rambling, inter-nesting stories with many a repeat gag (for example, Albert the alligator is constantly swallowing other creatures by accident without ever digesting them; without the variations on a theme that could make this work as a running gag, this quickly grows tiresome). The characters all speak with the same Foghorn Leghorn drawl-dialect (even the Deacon, whose word balloons are lettered in Gothic), and could easily exchange roles in most panels without harm to the finished product.
Notwithstanding that I didn't find it to be a compelling read, Wild Blue Wonder is an important and painstakingly compiled work. By all appearances, Fantagraphics and its editors (including Walt's daughter) have been exhaustive in exhuming and restoring Kelly's output. This is intended as the first of a multi-volume set that will ultimately render everything that Kelly produced. This volume also includes (albeit as backmatter) Pogo's big head start in the New York Star, some of which would be reused and redrawn upon Pogo's acceptance for syndication, and it's interesting to flip back and forth between the two to better understand Kelly's choices (assuming these were at all deliberate... the editors noted that the author tended not to save his originals, so in some cases I guess differences may possibly have been more an accidental consequence of working from memory than deliberate rethinking of the subject matter).
All in all, I think this volume makes an excellent book for researchers, completists, and die-hard fans. For those wondering what all the hubbub was about, see if you can dig up a copy of
Prehysterical Pogo... or just wait to see if the editors catch up to include Kelly's best. -
I was eager to compare this recently published first volume of the complete collected Pogo strips with the original
Pogo collection published in 1951. I wanted to know if anything was left out of the older publication, and I got my answer: lots. Mostly smaller little episodes, within larger narratives, for example when Pogo and the gang decide to run a newspaper, we get this little interlude with two birds, which didn't appear in the original book:
So much for my plan to read through Walt Kelly's oeuvre via my family's collection of vintage paperbacks. I'll have to read through these collections as they are published, which hopefully they will continue to be, although I feel uneasy on that score. This first one is oversize and heavy, reproduces the Sunday strips in color, and was probably hugely expensive to print. It only covers the first two years. I can only hope the small publisher that produced it will have the stamina (and funds) to persevere. -
If you just want an introduction to Walt Kelly's Pogo, you're probably best off with
Ten Ever-Lovin' Blue-Eyed Years With Pogo, but as a fan of many years' standing, I must say I was drawn into reading (mostly rereading) the strip from day one, May 16, 1949, a lot more easily than I expected. I learned from the introduction that the Simon & Schuster collections I had supposed to contain the complete daily strips, plus some connecting panels added by Kelly for the sake of continuity, had in fact presented the daily strips with a fair amount of material removed by Kelly for the sake of continuity. So in this volume I read for the first time every strip from the first two years of Pogo's syndication. That's entertainment.
All praise as well for the manner of presentation and the hard work that went into gathering this material for publication. Not only the dailies but the full-color Sunday pages are here, reproduced in all their slightly blotchy glory from the four-color newsprint, and the few weeks of Pogo in the New York Star, 1948-1949, which served as partly as a rough draft for the syndicated version, are appended in the back of the book. -
I read this slowly at first trying to fit it in in between other books but the addiction of Kelly’s patois and absurd plotting is just too strong to keep me at the leisurely pace and I read the second half of this first volume in a week, every morning with coffee—and I see no reason not to keep it up, so onward ho! To volume two.
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Great collection, lovely art. More charming than laugh-out-loud funny - it’s actually rather interesting how these strips rarely follow contemporary three-panel punchline structures - but still very enjoyable.
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I learned two things about Pogo from this book. First, it's way better when it's doing political satire rather than generically inoffensive newspaper comic fare. Second, the newspaper it debuted in is the spiritual successor to the socialist magazine after which my mother was named.
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Despite the years and number of strips I read, Walt Kelly's Pogo gets better and better!
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Caterpiggle! Pogo was a classic newspaper comic strip, well before my time. My first exposure to Pogo was in the University of Florida student newspaper during the 1990s (the football stadium is called 'The Swamp' and the characters in Pogo live in a swamp; the UF mascot is Albert the alligator and one of the main characters in Pogo is an alligator named Albert). These are wonderful comics that touch on a range of social, political, and environmental themes (of the 1950s and 1960s) but the main strengths of Pogo are the characters (all animals), their quirks, and Walt Kelly's witty way with words. This first volume covers 1949-50 so presumably about 10 more volumes are in the works. Highly recommended.
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My dad was a huge fan of "Pogo". During the holidays, he would always be singing a Pogo-ized carol, like "Deck us all with Tom and Charlie...". Pogo was before my time, so I had never read it. I have been on a comic-strip tear for a while now, reading treasuries of "Pearls Before Swine", "FoxTrot" and most recently "Krazy Kat". When I saw that Fantagraphics was putting out compilations of "Pogo," I thought I'd try it. And I enjoyed this volume.
Since the comic strip (or at least the ones in this volume) were from 1949 and 1950, I didn't get all of the references (I will admit, though, that I got a lot more than I thought I would). Fortunately, there is a section in the back that explains them.
I've already got volume 2, and I'm sure I'll be reading it at some point. -
The swampdweller dialect charms my pants off. I love reading it. My favorite character is Porkypine. The sagas never have a grim ending which is not what I expect so the story constantly surprises me. The bold illustration attracts your eyes.
The whole strip is entertaining! I like the imperfect, hand-drawn panels and the word balloons that bleed across panels. I wish there were more wordless strips. The puns are always terrible and great. Pup dog is my second-favorite character because while the others are talking he is usually doing something else and you can miss that.
Kelly inserts smart references and excels in lyric-mashing. -
Fantagraphics' first volume of the complete Pogo is finally here! It's gorgeous. (And unless my memory is fooling me - which it could be - I'm pretty sure I was still at Century when I first preordered it, which means I actually ordered it at least 5 and a half years ago. Amazon usually cancels preorders when something is indefinitely delayed. Why they kept this order alive for over 4-1/2 years I don't know, but I saved some extra money - it was cheaper when I ordered it so I got it for less than half the final price! -
Picked this up via word of mouth. It's been getting non-stop praise. That said, it is a humour strip so I was a little leery of it since I suspected 50 year old topical humour probably wouldn't translate well. I was wrong, this book was a delight in every way. Gorgeous art on both the dailies and the colour Sunday strips, it's also laugh out loud funny. My only complaint is it's hard not to talk like a critter from the swamps after reading. Fantagraphics continues to do no wrong in their classic reprints. I look forward to more volumes.
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Pogo is one of those truly classic comic strips and this book is an amazing collection containing all the swamp critters a person can imagine. This book contains not only the black and white dailies but a complete collection of the Sunday funnies as they originally appeared. There is even a ton of information on the artist Walt Kelly and how he went about developing this amazing comic. This book is almost like a time capsule that captures an era when comics were actually an art form that was used to entertain people.
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This book is a compilation of the Walt Kelly POGO comic strip from 1949 and 1950. If you remember POGO then you already love him and Churchy and Albert and Beauregard and (my favorite, the lovely Mam'selle Hepzibah (introduced 10/1950) and all the wonderful characters from the Okefenokee Swamp. Taken as satire, it is spot on, taken as fun they make us laugh. Walt Kelly was an original and so are his beloved characters from the Swamp. And if you've never read them, you are in for a delightful read!
Recommended by Suzi -
I don't even know what to rate! The material is (of course) the earliest and, while terrifically enjoyable, nowhere near his strongest as he begins to feel out the medium. I suppose I'd give it 4 stars on its own. The production side of this, however, is simply amazing - a labor of love which cuts no corners and even provides a modicum of both commentary and context (what's there is great, but folks like myself would welcome even more). Inclusion of the pre-syndication dailies was an unexpected fantastic touch, absolutely fascinating to see the artwork evolve, and so rapidly.
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I've always loved Pogo. They're now publishing all of them in book form. This volume covers the first 2 years.
I had to space out reading this. A lot of the plots are very repetitious and Albert's greed gets tiresome.
I do like that there's often more than one thing going on at once, with small characters having their own discussion or interaction completely oblivious to the main storyline.
I can't wait for more to be published.
