New Pogo Strip Planned

That perdurable 'possum -- Pogo -- returns to newspapers January 8 in new strips by First Comics Managing Editor Larry Doyle and artist Neal Sternecky.

An agreement signed August 26 between the Los Angeles Times Syndicate and representatives of the Walt Kelly estate will put the beloved marsupial and his friends back in newspapers for the first time since 1975.

Doyle told The Comics Buyer's Guide "the strip will be as close to the original as Neal and I can possibly make it.

"It's not a tribute," Doyle told the Guide, "because those often tend to be stale. I hope it will have all the life [the original] Pogo had... People remember Pogo as being one thing or another but it was many different things: slapstick, political satire, plain silliness, complicated wordplay, literary allusions, vaudevillian knockabout. We're going to try to have all of it."

Walt Kelly created Pogo Possum in 1943 as a secondary character for his Bumbazine and Albert the Alligator feature in Animal Comics. Bumbazine was a little boy living in the Okefenokee swamp with his pet alligator -- Albert -- but soon faded from the strip as Pogo emerged and the title changed to Albert and Pogo.

By 1948, Kelly had placed Pogo with the New York Star, and successfully syndicated the strip (through the Hall Syndicate) when that paper folded in 1949. Pogo ultimately ran in about 750 newspapers nationwide.

Kelly died from diabetes on Oct. 18, 1973, leaving his strip in lesser hands until its cancellation on July 20, 1975.

In The World Encyclopedia of Comics. Maurice Horn said of Pogo: "In the loose social structure of the of the Okefenokee swamp, where everybody anybody tries to impose their idiosyncracies, there throbs a teeming population composed of all animal (and social) classes... Pogo the little opossum, sagacious, modest, tolerant, and generous, and Albert the alligator, anarchistic, nihilistic, egotistic and vain, dominate this little world.

"With his wild flights of fancy, his sudden impulses, his unbridled imagination, Albert is the perfect incarnation of the poet whom Plato wanted to run out of the city. It is Pogo's role in the strip to re-establish the order and harmony of the society, which Albert does his best to disturb…

"Reuel Denny has compared Pogo to Socrates confronting Albert the Sophist [but] whatever interpretation one chooses to give it, Pogo is undeniably the most self-analytical and self-reflective strip in the whole history of the comics -- which Walt Kelly gave the following definition in a famous 1959 Pogo page: 'A comic strip is like a dream... a tissue of paper reveries... it gloms an' glimmers its way thru unreality, fancy an' fantasy.'"

Sho' 'nuff.