Some Thoughts On Pogo

Adapted from a speech given at a Walt Kelly retrospective exhibit at Ohio State University

I discovered Pogo when I was in fifth or sixth grade, when I found a copy of The Pogo Papers at a library book sale. Flipping through it, I was struck by how dense and black the drawings were -- which I interpreted as meaning this was for grownups, not kids -- and I asked my mom if she'd ever seen the work. She said my dad used to read Pogo, and had always liked it. After some inner debate, I decided Dad was worth the 25 cents, so I asked my mom for a quarter and bought the book for him. When got home I started to read it. ..and Dad never got the book.

Most of the original Pogo books are long out of print. Over the years, with the help of a friend or two, I've been able to acquire the entire set. It is a shame that these books are so rare. They are the last glimpse we have of the comic art form at its peak. There have been a few fine and imaginative strips since Pogo, of course, but none has taken such complete advantage of the cartoon medium. Pogo shows what a comic strip can really be.

Comic strips are not generally regarded as fine art, but if you think about it, words and pictures are the two most powerful tools of communication we have. With words and pictures, there is little in the way of human thought we cannot express. The significance and sophistication of the commentary is limited only by the ability of the cartoonist. I was fortunate to discover fairly early with Pogo just how much impact a comic strip can have. With the exception of Krazy Kat, I can think of no other strip that has used both words and pictures so effectively or so powerfully.

The standard cartoon wisdom is that "a good drawing will not save a bad idea," and it has come to be accepted that a bad drawing will not hurt a good idea. This is generally true enough. What many people have forgotten, though, is that a good drawing can send a good idea a to the moon and back. Pogo's writing was funny, but the drawings made the characters come alive.

I imagine that Kelly's experience as a Disney animator taught him the comic potential of visual liveliness. Whatever its source, Kelly certainly had a wonderful gift for letting his characters reveal themselves through expression, gesture and action. This is something one rarely sees anymore, in either animation or in comics. A blinking profile head does nothing to establish the character. The viewer must rely entirely on the words the character says. Some cartoonists are good enough writers that they can make characters who never move interesting and likeable. Even so, they miss the great potential of this visual medium. Pogo, like older animation, shows how much drawings can say about the character without any words at all. A foreigner could get a pretty fair idea of what Albert Alligator was like, just by looking at the pictures of him. More to the point, Kelly used his artwork to enhance the story, not jut to prop it. Porkypine's secret soft-heartedness is all the more tender for his perpetual scowl. Pogo's nervous romance with Hepzibah is made all the more ridiculous for the skunk's shaded eyes and curvaceous figure. The drawings were integral to the strip's charm.

The next time you look at the strip, notice the characters' weight. I get a kick out of seeing loving details like the back of a bear's neck bulging out over his collar, or a character's cheeks squishing up when he puts his head in his hands. This stuff is by no means essential to a cartoon, but again it brings life to the drawings. These animals have flesh and solidity. It's a very subtle, and I think very funny, form of realism.

Kelly took the power of drawings to the nth degree by making the dialogue balloons artwork as well. P.T. Bridgeport spoke in circus posters, or even newspaper headlines with accompanying photos of himself. Deacon Mushrat spoke in Gothic typeface. These characters were defined not only by what their words said, but also by the way their words looked. This is brilliant. Kelly's art did more than almost any other cartoonist's. Pogo was never a strip a friend could tell you about. You had to see it to appreciate it, and the more you looked at it, the better it got. The drawings were fun all by themselves. Pogo was a comic strip to look at... How far we've fallen since then!

I think the most important part of any comic strip is characterization. The characters need to have unique, rounded personalities to make the strip believable and engrossing. Developing this is tough work. Many cartoonists rely on stereotypes as an easier way around the problem. Rather than unfold personalities through time, they cast their strips with recognizable cliches: The hen-pecked father; the liberated, confident career woman; the precocious child; the rebellious teenager; and so on. These are characters who are identified and defined entirely by their social circumstances. Take them out of their roles and they have no reason to exist. These characters are not individuals who happen to be in certain societal roles, they are roles incarnate. Flat characters like these are the death of spontaneity and surprise -- two things on which all humor depends. A cartooning rule of thumb it took me a long time to learn is this: if you can sum up who your characters are in a sentence or two, you're in trouble.

People are complicated, and cartoon characters need to reflect that complexity to be intriguing to the reader. One reason Pogo is fun to read and re-read is that the core characters are many-sided. They react differently in different circumstances. They all have good sides and bad that reveal themselves gradually. The characters are full of life and unpredictability.

Like the level of draughtsmanship I mentioned earlier, the writing in Pogo is also quite different from what you see in comics now. I once called Pogo "the last of the Enjoy the Ride strips." If you look at Krazy Kat or Little Nemo in Slumberland, two very early comic strips, you'll see an approach to humor that is unlike that of current comic strips. Krazy Kat revolved around the throwing of the brick, and the story in Little Nemo was always a dream where the kid wakes up in a heap on the floor in the last panel. The destination of these strips was always pretty much the same, but the cartoonist took us on a different road to get there each time. In comics nowadays, we want to go somewhere new every day, and we just want the shortest road. We tell our cartoonists to get us to the punchline as quick as possible. This is a shame for those of us who like to meander around and see the sights on the back lanes. Kelly often took so many detours that he seemed to forget where he was taking us anyway. It didn't matter. The fun was in the trip.

All this is a roundabout way of saying that Pogo celebrated conversation and dialogue for their own sake. The strip rarely had a punchline per se. I can't imagine people cutting out one day's strip and putting it on the refrigerator; it wasn't the kind of strip with a snappy saying in the last panel that makes Mom think of little Junior. Instead, it was a strip where characters talked and talked, inevitably misunderstood each other, and argued. It was a wonderful, rich parody of what passes for communication between human beings. The word balloons were filled with puns, obscure references, inside jokes, utter nonsense, and, once in a while, quiet wisdom. If the drawings in Pogo get better with each re-reading, so do the words.

Another aspect of the words worth reflection is the dialect. Comic characters don't talk in dialect any more, either. Part of the reason, of course, is an increased sensitivity about ethnicity and regionalism, but I think we've also lost some appreciation for the fun of language. And playing with language takes space, a commodity in outrageously short supply these days on the comics page.

Most of the characters in Pogo that didn't speak in some elaborate typeface talked in pidgin Southern that twisted words into pretzels and gave them new meaning and cadence. It gave the swamp a cohesiveness, and made it a world all its own. The swamp was not just an exotic backdrop for cute animals. The swamp was a place, a locale. You could tell it was a real place because the creatures there talked differently from us. The swamp language had a rhythm to it, and had its own internally consistent way of mangling the meaning of ordinary words. Unlike the simple phonetic renderings of hick pronounciation in Li'l Abner, the language in Pogo was a type of running poetry, similar in spirit to Krazy Kat's, although worlds apart in look and sound. It provided the characters with a unique voice that was part of us, and part making fun of us.

How the politics in Pogo must have affected readers is difficult for me to imagine. Apparently Kelly sometimes drew substitute strips for squeamish editors, so they would have an alternative to running his political commentary. It is a sad fact that a substantial part of newspaper readers still think the so-called "funnies" are meant exclusively for the entertainment of children and other imbeciles, and that newspapers have an obligation to protect innocent minds from the sinister influence of actual thought. We still seem to have trouble accepting that comic strips are legitimate vehicles for comment, satire, and criticism. This is unfortunate because it's one of the things cartoons do best. Despite the daily bombardment of images we face each day, pictures still have a visceral power over us. Rather than call someone a pig, you will offend him more if you draw him as one. This is because the drawing will tell the person exactly what kind of pig you mean. A picture is indeed worth a thousand words, and the best cartoons are often fueled by rage.

I had a job for six months as an editorial cartoonist in Cincinnati. The brevity of my employment there gives you some idea of my skills as a political analyst, so I will not bluff my way through a discussion of Pogo's politics, despite their significance to the strip. I will say that, in my opinion, Pogo's commentary in the '50s holds up the best. I think the suspicion and demagoguery of the McCarthy years focused Kelly and sharpened his attacks to a degree unmatched later, even with Agnew and Hoover. One thing, anyway, is clear: Pogo's swamp had true evil in it.

Most cartoonists ridicule prominent politicians by making them look foolish and stupid. Kelly, of course, did this often. With Simple J. Malarkey, though, Kelly introduced a fearsome character. This caricature of Senator McCarthy was not so much a buffoon as a monster. His eyes were black with white pupils, which gave him an appearance of soulless menace. Malarkey was dangerous.

I remember my surprise as a kid reading the sequence where Molester Mole, hardly a sympathetic character in his own right, runs into the swamp to flee a tarred, but not yet feathered, Malarkey, The swamp water is thick and black, and the twisted, vine-covered trees are so dense that no light comes in from above. Malarkey, with only the whites of his eyes showing through the tar, wades in after him with an axe. Suddenly the mole was sympathetic, and the creepy atmosphere of this scene was quite unlike anything I'd ever read in a comic strip before. Other bad guys could be made into buffoons, but Malarkey was evil and scary.

Pogo showed me in a very concrete way how powerful a comic strip can be. This has been Kelly's most lasting influence on me. Over the years, I have learned from dozens of other artists as well, but I still enjoy coming back to Pogo. The humor and the artwork were what first attracted me to Pogo, but those things are the colorful sugar coating on the medicine. The medicine is that Pogo is about something. There is a message and a unique sensibility that permeates the work, and this is what makes it endure.

Pogo talked about the quiet dignity and common sense of the average man. It talked about shortcomings of human nature and human behavior -- "we have met the enemy and he is us." It talked about suspicion and prejudice, pollution, and the bomb. It also celebrated silliness, nonsense, the simple pleasure of a big picnic. It talked about friendship and love, our strange political system, baseball, and hundreds of other things great and small. The artwork and humor were wonderful in themselves, but they were ultimately tools to a greater end. This is what sets Pogo so far beyond most other comic strips.

A comic strip can be more than just an illustrated gag a day. It can be commentary. It can be art. Pogo was one man's overview and opinion of our species and the world we've created for ourselves. Like all the very best cartoonists, Kelly humbles us by holding up a magical mirror that distorts and exaggerates our physical presence, but reveals our inner selves with unblinking objectivity. In Pogo, you and I appear as ludicrous animals; as naive and silly as Churchy la Femme, as loud and full of illformed reasoning as Albert Alligator, as pompous and smuggly self-righteous as Deacon Mushrat, as sinister and blind as Molester Mole... and as simple and virtuous as Pogo Possum.

Walt Kelly produced this world with as much style, energy, and sophistication as the comics have ever seen. He brought to the comics page a beauty and intelligence one rarely sees in this poorly-used medium. In short, although Pogo ended years before I ever had a drawing published, Kelly gave me a standard to apply to myself and to cartooning as a whole. Kelly opened the door for me to the limitless potential of cartoon art.