I came to Walt Kelly and Pogo late in Kelly's career, when even his strongest admirers would admit he was well past his most creative years, and when the characters had been running for decades and the strips assumed a knowledge of their past adventures not evident from the later tales. Like devoted fans before me, I was captivated by the humor of a funny sketch between a couple of foolish characters, or some over-the-top word play, or Kelly's unique manner of penciling in words in the background or margins of frames: familiar signs, topical quotes, brand-names, mangled literary allusions or sayings. Although I had the impression Kelly began more as a journalist/writer than cartoonist, I knew little about him, and never had the benefit of the long history of Pogo before I became an occasional reader.
Imagine then my pleasure, when Henry at Crooked Timber found a lengthy review/appreciation of a major part of the opus of Walt Kelley that's currently available in a series of eleven volumes of Pogo (1948-60). The essay is by John Crowley in the Boston Review. Of topical interest this political season, Crowley doesn't neglect Kelly as social and political satirist. He gives a flavor of how the McCarthy era, in particular, played out in the characters and storylines of Pogo.
Crowley's primary purpose, however, is to bring to life why Pogo was a literary/visual production certainly unique for its time. From Crowley's remarks he seems to think that Pogo should find a new appreciative audience among generations more accustomed than Kelly's generation to the delights of integrating printed words and images.
For those who haven't had the treat of Pogo, here are a few passages from Crowley's much more lengthy essay.
This one describes how distinctive Kelly's mix of words and images were compared to what people normally thought of as "comic strips." The art of the comic strip is a mixed one, combining words and pictures in what ought to be a perfect creative balance. Narrative is a common feature, but an optional one; there are many comic strips that never progress in time but merely run variations on an eternal unchanging situation (Peanuts and Krazy Kat). Only a few extend the idea of narrative so far as to have characters age (Joe Palooka, Gasoline Alley). Pogo was one that told continuous stories, some of them months long, most of them ultimately unresolved or metamorphosing into others; new stories tended to begin either with the introduction of a new character or with an older character’s sudden adoption of a new idea, often a get-rich-quick scheme or a sudden burst of paranoia, as when Albert Alligator grows alarmed at the plans to populate the moon and sets out to defend it, or when Howland Owl conceives it the duty of the swamp to develop its own atomic weapons (“These here nuclear physics is neither new nor clear”). Comic strips such as Pogo proceed, as movies do, by action and words combined, and which has the dominant role can change. Kelly was a master of slapstick, but his complex frames of action are made much funnier by the unique baroque tongue-twisting language at which Kelly excelled; in many stories, panel after panel can go by with characters at rest, heads on a comfortable log, talking and talking, with only their mobile features and the expansive and expressive lettering in action.And another about how the word play required the expressive drawing talents Kelly brought to his characters.
I can’t argue that the elaborate and continuous verbal play is really distinctly Irish, or even Irish-American, though it was a constant feature of my own household, and seems to me clearly related not only to innate (or at least highly regarded and rewarded) verbal facility but also to a compulsion to put signifiers in doubt where the signified (sex, say, or money, or religion) is hard to approach directly. Hilarity then substitutes for perspicuity, as on almost every Pogo page. It’s a tribute to Kelly’s pictorial art that some of the loveliest exchanges don’t translate well onto the page denuded both of their calligraphy and the characters’ expressions. I’ll try one and you’ll see. Churchy, Mouse, and Bun Rab the obsessive drummer boy are getting ready to practice Christmas carols:The dialogue may "lie rather flatly on the page," but it's enough to wet my whistle, as a denizen of the Pogokenofee Swamp might say.CHURCHY: Now, if we clear our throats with ASCAP, we’ll be all set.Not only does this lie rather flatly on the page, where its inventiveness seems a little operose, but it is bound to annoy those who are unamused by puns or purely verbal humor, or worse, who suspect the punner of mockery or scheming for advantage. What interested me when I first encountered this strip, though I only became conscious of it later, is the way in which this verbal byplay, though sometimes brought out by rage or confusion, is just as often deliberate on a character’s part—you can see it in the self-satisfied smile and upcast eyes of the mouse on that last line about making a bolt for the door, and in a similar expression on others’ faces.
MOUSE: (Checks sheet music.) Hold it! “Silent Night” is effective played fortissimo on a steam calliope.
CHURCHY: Our steam calliope was traded to Cleveland for a second baseman an’ a pitchpipe.
MOUSE: Then I’ll carry the tenor (providin’ he has a light rein)
BUN RAB: Here’s the key . . . . (Plays:) bloo bloo
CHURCHY: Bloo? What kind of a key is that?
BUN RAB: Bloo? Old bloo is a Yale key . . . Want to make somethin’ of it?
MOUSE: Yes . . . We could make a lovely bolt for the door.
In most modern strips—and I don’t know if it is because the work seems too hard to modern draughtspeople, or because blank-faced affectlessness is the mode, or because the knack has been lost—the characters have little variety of emotional expression. Dilbert and Doonesbury are witty and poignant, but the faces are relatively unchanging; in fact, that’s part of the humor. Pogo people express a range of emotions as clearly as silent-movie actors, from steely resolve to mind-blown amazement to indignant rage to subtle shame to abashed confusion. Kelly’s pen is marvelously swift in the capturing of expression, and fine effects are achieved by a clash between words and face; transfigured storytellers are nicely captured but so are the bored or doubtful listeners behind.