And now for something completely different…

After the onset of my eye affliction (macular degeneration) a few months ago, I decided to attempt to read everything I really, really want to read, in case the efficacy of the treatments declines, and leaves me unable to read anything at all.

My first and most important goal was to reread the rest of Jack Vance’s books. That task has been accomplished, so I have now moved on to the second one, which is to reread all the Pogo books, or at least the first eight or nine years, before the strip stopped being particularly funny.

Readers who only know Pogo from the days after it became famous — the “We have met the enemy and he is us” period in the late 1960s — may not realize that in its early days Pogo was one of the funniest things ever printed, in comic strips or otherwise. During the Golden Age of Pogo — from 1949 to 1957, roughly — there was nothing funnier you could read, and there has been nothing funnier since. At least not in English — if you can call the language used by Walt Kelly “English”. He referred to it as “swamp-speak”, the peculiar and mutable dialect he created for the dwellers of Okefenokee Swamp.

Much of the humor in the strip may be lost on everyone except Americans. Non-native speakers of English will have trouble making sense of the puns and other word play, and deciphering the fractured grammar and vocabulary may be impossible. Brits and Australians will have an easier time, but Pogo is thoroughly embedded in American culture, and Americans — especially those of a certain age, who have knowledge of the last century or so of our history, politics, and popular culture — will get the most out of these panels.

Walt Kelly has been compared with Charles Dodgson, a.k.a. Lewis Carroll, for his creative genius with the English language. But unlike Carroll, Kelly delivered his linguistic delights in the newspaper every day for about eight years. No one since William Shakespeare has torqued the English language into such fantastical new shapes.

I’ll present a series of four-panel daily strips in each post of this project, as scanned from my ancient and damaged copies of the books and lovingly repaired by digital means. These do not necessarily comprise “the best of Pogo”, but simply the funniest selections that are more or less complete in a single day’s strip. Some of the most hilarious episodes ran for ten or twelve days, and don’t make as much sense in isolated pieces. The Sunday strips are another matter: they are simply too big to reproduce in a blog format.

I’ll have more to say about Walt Kelly and Pogo, but first here’s a strip from the second book, I Go Pogo, which collected material from 1951 and 1952. The characters are Bun Rabbit, Howland Owl, and Churchy La Femme (the turtle). The context is Bun Rab’s mission to celebrate as many holidays as possible at the same time:

I won’t try to explain any of the humor, because I’d just end up waving my hands and gesticulating. I will say, however, that the referenced date is September 25, 1513, and “Mr. Balboa” is Vasco Núñez de Balboa, who first glimpsed the Pacific from the top of a hill on that day.

The dialect of the characters is obviously loosely based on that of Southern blacks. When Walt Kelly first created Pogo — in comic books, before the newspaper strips — the possum was a sidekick of a little black boy named Bumbazine, who lived at the edge of Okefenokee swamp in Georgia.

Kelly later realized that he could do far more with animal characters than humans, so he dropped Bumbazine and let the sidekicks proliferate and populate the swamp.

The first Pogo newspaper strips appeared in 1948, but the earliest ones collected in the books were from 1949. During the ensuing classic years the humor was a mixture of word games, puns, topical jokes, and antic slapstick. As you will see in later strips, Kelly’s references reached all the way back through the 20th century into the 19th to draw on politics and popular culture. I first learned what a “Bull Mooser” was by reading Pogo books as a kid.

Ten or fifteen years after the earliest panels appeared, contemporary politics began to dominate the strip, and Pogo became much less funny as a result. You’ll find ample political references in the early books, but politics was always subordinate to the humor. Politicians and their antics were simply fodder for the jokes.

My father was a Pogo fan from the earliest days, and bought these books when they first came out, starting before I was born. Not only did he and I both read them over and over again, but my friends — and eventually the future Baron — went through them, too. Their backs broke and the pages began to come loose more than forty years ago. When I was a teenager I patched them up with Scotch tape, but after a decade or so that turned brittle and brown and lost its hold, and I had to give it up. Some of the books are now composed entirely of loose single sheets of paper. They have miraculously remained intact, albeit a little worse for the wear and tear, with all the pages kept in proper order.

I recently read that some enterprising publisher has reissued the first few years of the original strips, without the editing and lacunae that Kelly introduced when he collected them into the Simon and Schuster editions. I’m certain they must be terribly expensive, although undoubtedly well worth the price.

Additional Pogo strips will appear in this space as I find time to scan, repair, upload, and annotate them.