R. Fiore on the new "Walt Kelly's Pogo" strip

Walt Kelly's Pogo (Los Angeles Times Syndicate)

Though I knew it was coming, it was a pleasant but somewhat spooky shock to see something that looked very much like Pogo in my Sunday newspaper. That it displaced Drabble was an equally pleasant bonus. It's particularly disconcerting to see this style from the days when comic strips were really drawn dropped into the middle of what passes for cartooning now. If looks were all there was to it, the new Pogo would do fine, but Larry Doyle's scripts have been pedestrian at best. For one thing, he's fallen into the popular misconception that Pogo was primarily a topical strip. Kelly dealt first and foremost in character comedy, and the appearances of political personalities were far less common than most people think. When they did appear, they were seamlessly integrated into the daily continuity as fully rounded characters. One can imagine an ironic cycle of events: the popularity of Doonesbury and Bloom County leads the syndicate to accept the revival of Pogo, which then tries to follow the pattern of Doonesbury and Bloom County, which were both to a greater or lesser extent inspired by the original Pogo.

(Actually, the closest of the three to the original Pogo is Breathed. His problem, aside from the occasionally precise resemblance to other cartoonists' work, is that he's never taken the steps to properly distance himself from his models. While you can read Doonesbury without thinking of Feiffer and Kelly, you can't read Bloom County without thinking of Kelly and Trudeau. I've been as hard as anyone on Breathed, but the truth remains that day in and day out, year after year, Bloom County has been one of the half dozen best contemporary strips, and that's something you can't steal. And his "Elvis is alive" gag was better than Trudeau's.)

Another irony is that it's character comedy that makes a strip merchandisable, which I assume is one of the main reasons for bringing Pogo back. The new Pogo is still in its fledgling stage, but it needs work.

I would like to thank all our southern readers out there for not sending any "You Dumb Yankee" letters when I placed the Confederate war heroes monument on Lookout Mountain in Tennessee rather than Stone Mountain in Georgia. You're a credit to the slaveholders and mutineers you're descended from.