For more information on Walter Crawford Kelly, visit Britannica.com.
| Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Walter Crawford Kelly |
For more information on Walter Crawford Kelly, visit Britannica.com.
| 5min Related Video: Walt Kelly |
| Biography: Walt Kelly |
Walt Kelly (1913-1973) was the creator of the popular and acclaimed comic strip "Pogo," whose memorable characters and potent political satire set a new standard for topical humor and complexity. The work of Kelly influenced the creators of "Bone", "Calvin and Hobbes," "Liberty Meadows," "Mutts," and hundreds of other comic strips and books.
Walter Crawford Kelly was born on August 25, 1913, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. While he was still a child, Kelly's family moved to Bridgeport, Connecticut. Kelly's father worked in a munitions plant but dabbled in painting and drawing. He exposed Kelly to art and art technique. In high school, Kelly drew illustrations and cartoons for the school paper and yearbook and illustrated a biography of Bridgeport native P.T. Barnum for the local newspaper.
Kelly graduated from high school in 1930. That same year he met Helen DeLacy at a choir practice. For the next five years, Kelly pursued DeLacy, who was a few years older than him. DeLacy took a job as a Girl Scout executive in southern California in 1935, hoping to leave Kelly behind. But Kelly left his job at General Electric in Bridgeport and moved to Los Angeles, not only to be near DeLacy, but also to work for Walt Disney Studios. There, he finally won her over and they eventually married.
The Disney Years
At Disney, Kelly started as a story man and sketch artist on Pinocchio and then became an assistant animator. In addition to working on short subjects, Kelly animated sequences in Fantasia and Dumbo. But Kelly had problems at the studio, according to his long-time friend, Disney animator Ward Kimball. Most of the creative staff dressed in casual clothes, but Kelly always worked in a three-piece suit, starched collar and bow tie. And his highly personal drawing style made it hard for him to copy model sheets that others designed. Scenes Kelly drew were too distinct, spoiling the seamlessness of the animation. "When Kelly worked with other people, he would always manage to change the drawing of the character a little," Kimball told interviewers Thomas Andrae and Geoffrey Blum in 1988. "Maybe, in hindsight, we should have made our drawings look like his. He drew very funny Mickeys."
Kelly grew tired of trying to suppress his style. He was more of a writer than an animator and wanted to do his own work and be his own boss. A strike by animators at Disney in 1941 was a turning point for Kelly. Although he agreed with the strikers, mainly in-betweeners and assistants, he had friends in supervisory positions as well, and he did not want to be forced to choose between the two camps. The strike provided the impetus for Kelly to leave Disney. He took a leave of absence, claiming that his sister was ill, and moved back to Connecticut.
Pogo
After months of commuting to New York City looking for freelance work, Kelly took advantage of a contact Disney provided him at Western Printing and Lithographing Company, a magazine and children's book printer that produced Disney and Dell comics. Kelly began writing comic books for Western. In late 1942, his first original comic story, "Albert Takes the Cake," appeared in the inaugural issue of Animal Comics. It was the first appearance of the character that would make Kelly famous, Pogo Possum. Pogo and other residents, including Albert the Alligator and a small boy named Bumbazine, lived in and around a swamp Kelly imagined somewhere in the southern United States. Pogo and Bumbazine were both thoughtful, intelligent characters that provided contrast to the antics of others, and Kelly soon realized they were redundant. Bumbazine soon left the stories, which continued to run in Animal Comics, and human beings would never again appear in Kelly's swamp.
Health problems kept Kelly from military service during World War II. Instead, he illustrated dictionaries and guidebooks for the U. S. Army. He also continued drawing for Dell comic titles such as Our Gang and Raggedy Ann and Andy.
Animal Comics ended its run in 1947. In June 1948, just as Kelly was about to attempt a career as a political cartoonist, a new opportunity came his way. The independent liberal newspaper PM changed owners. The new owners changed the name to the New York Star and hired Kelly as art director and general illustrator. Kelly provided spot drawings, decorative borders, and even the daily "ears" that accompanied the one-word weather forecasts on the mast-head. He also became the paper's political cartoonist. Comics historian R. C. Harvey called Kelly's political cartoons "entirely competent, journeyman efforts" but "scarcely brilliant." They were only a foretaste of what was to come.
Pogo Meets the Papers
In September 1948, Kelly decided to start his own comic strip at the Star, using the swamp creatures from his earlier story but making the strip more sophisticated. Kelly indulged his love of language with stronger Southern accents, more colorful word choices, malapropisms, and plenty of puns. But the Star folded in January 1949.
Kelly shopped the strip around to a number of syndicates, and Post-Hall agreed to give it a try. Pogo debuted nationally on May 16, 1949. Kelly reused some of the material from the Star strips with revisions. Over the next year, Pogo grew in circulation, while Kelly's style matured greatly.
Kelly and his wife had three children, Kathy, Carolyn, and Peter, but in 1951 their marriage ended. He soon married his second wife, Stephanie, who may have been the model for Pogo's love interest, Mam'selle Hepzibah, a cute skunk with a French accent. They would also have three children, Andrew, John, and Stephen.
Pogo Meets the Real World
In 1952, Kelly began to hit his stride with Pogo. The possum threw his hat into the ring for the U.S. presidential election. He became the candidate of many college students, and the slogan "I Go Pogo" appeared on posters and lapel pins. Pogo would run for president in every election through 1972 and again in 1988. Also in 1952, the first caricature of an identifiable public figure appeared in Pogo, a bullying backwoods wildcat named Simple J. Malarkey, who bore more than a passing resemblance to U.S. Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin.
McCarthy was becoming famous and powerful by investigating the U.S. Army and searching for Communists in the U.S. State Department. He used misinformation and bullying to manipulate the media and Senate witnesses to support his claims. These were tactics that Kelly despised, and he made Malarkey look evil and dangerous. Some newspapers complained that the comics pages were not the place for politics. Some editors moved the strip to the editorial page, others dropped it all together, and a few demanded that Kelly stop drawing caricatures of McCarthy. Kelly responded by putting Malarkey's head in a sack. That only made Malarkey more ominous, since the sack resembled the hoods worn by Klansmen or executioners.
The rest of the 1950s was Pogo's heyday. Kelly reviewed books, wrote articles and nonsense verse, illustrated books, drew magazine covers, delivered hundreds of lectures, and wrote and sang some of the strip's many songs in the record Songs of the Pogo. Kelly's peers elected him president of the National Cartoonists Society.
Still a Political Cartoonist
Though an unapologetic liberal, Kelly was never afraid to poke fun at any politician. In 1968, Pogo strips featured characters based on Democratic presidential candidates Bobby Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy. The 1970s brought even more acidic caricatures of U.S. Vice President Spiro Agnew and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Once again, some newspapers dropped Pogo and others moved it off the comics page. This time, Kelly provided replacement "bunny strips," non-political gags often featuring cute rabbits.
Kelly's strips championed the underdog, the powerless, and the threatened. In the late 1960s, his attention turned to the environment, and he provided the world with an unforgettable slogan. As Pogo looked upon a large pile of trash that was cluttering the swamp, he said: "We have met the enemy, and he is us." This was a paraphrase of a famous dispatch announcing the victory at the battle of Lake Erie during the War of 1812: "We have met the enemy, and they are ours." Kelly's version became a household catch phrase.
Ventured into TV
By the 1960s, Kelly's heart disease, diabetes, smoking, drinking, and hard work began to catch up with him. His wife, Stephanie, was diagnosed with cancer. His assistants, George Ward and Henry Shikuma, began to take over more of the art chores on Pogo, and Kelly cut back on some of his outside interests. In the late 1960s, Kelly began to toy with the idea of animating his characters. Legendary cartoon director Chuck Jones, famous for his Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck cartoons in the 1950s, teamed up with Kelly to produce a half-hour television cartoon, The Pogo Special Birthday Special. Selby Daley of MGM Studios, who had also worked for Disney in the 1930s, became Kelly's assistant on the production.
The Pogo Special Birthday Special aired in May 1969, and although it was a ratings success, it disappointed fans of the comic strip. Most disappointed was Kelly. The characters - although they were speaking Kelly's words, and in some cases, even using his voice - were drawn in a style that unmistakably belonged to Jones, not Kelly. After his wife died in early 1970, Kelly decided that he wanted to see his characters animated correctly, and he began to work with Selby Daley on a new television special, We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us.
In October 1972, Kelly had his left leg amputated above the knee due to diabetes. He and Daley were married in the intensive care ward a half-hour before Kelly was wheeled into surgery. The two lived in New York City for the next year. In the fall of 1973, Kelly and Selby traveled to Hollywood to work on We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us. Though under doctor's orders not to drink alcohol, Kelly had one or two drinks. He lapsed into a coma. He died in the Motion Picture and Television Hospital in Woodland Hills, California, on October 18, 1973. The film, though completed by Daley, was never broadcast.
After Kelly's death, Daley and Kelly's son Stephen, with the help of several assistants, continued the strip for a few years. In 1989, the Walt Kelly Estate authorized a new version, titled Walt Kelly's Pogo. The strip was written by Larry Doyle and drawn by Neal Sternecky. After Doyle left the strip in 1991, Sternecky went solo with it until 1992, when Kelly's children Pete and Carolyn took over. It only lasted one more year.
Kelly's Legacy
All other attempts at Pogo strips paled in comparison to Kelly's originals. Simon and Schuster, for years the publisher of Pogo in book form, kept many of the 30-plus titles in print long past Kelly's death and the strip's disappearance from the newspapers. Early editions of the books are prized by collectors and command large sums of money. Another publisher is currently taking on the daunting task of reprinting the entire run of Pogo daily strips in multiple volumes, each with remarks by R. C. Harvey.
Pogo broke the ground for comic strips that followed, especially those that wanted to say something about the world. Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury and Berke Breathed's Bloom County both featured political commentary. Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes borrowed a lot of Pogo's sense of whimsy and humanity.
Jeff Smith, creator of Bone, a fantasy comic book that is published around the world, wrote: "Whenever I get to thinking I've got this whole cartooning gig down cold, I just pull out a Pogo book and see how much better it can be."
Books
Kelly, Mrs. Walt and Bill Crouch, Outrageously Pogo, Simon and Schuster, 1985.
Kelly, Mrs. Walt and Bill Crouch, Phi Beta Pogo, Simon and Schuster, 1989.
Kelly, Mrs. Walt and Bill Crouch, Pluperfect Pogo, Simon and Schuster, 1987.
Kelly, Walt, Pogo, Volume 1, Fantagraphics Books, 1992.
Levin, Martin, ed., Five Boyhoods, Doubleday, 1962.
| Quotes By: Walt Kelly |
Quotes:
"We have meet the enemy; and he is us."
"Now is the time for all good men to come to."
| Wikipedia: Walt Kelly |
| Walt Kelly | |
|---|---|
| Born | Walter Crawford Kelly, Jr. August 25, 1913 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania |
| Died | October 18, 1973 (aged 60) Woodland Hills, California |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Animator, cartoonist, newspaper journalist, poet |
| Spouse(s) | Helen DeLacey (divorced), Stephanie Waggony (widowed), Margaret Selby Daley |
| Children | Kathleen, Peter, Carolyn, Stephen |
Walter Crawford Kelly, Jr. (August 25, 1913–October 18, 1973), better known as Walt Kelly, was an American animator and cartoonist, best known for the classic funny animal comic strip, Pogo. He won the National Cartoonists Society's Reuben Award in 1951 for Cartoonist of the Year, and their Silver T-Square Award in 1972, given to persons having "demonstrated outstanding dedication or service to the Society or the profession."
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| “ | We are confronted with insurmountable opportunities. | ” |
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—Walt Kelly |
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Born of Irish-American heritage in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Walter Crawford Kelly, Sr. and Genevieve (née MacAnnula) Kelly, Walt's family moved to Bridgeport, Connecticut during his second year.[1] His father reportedly worked in a munitions plant–although other sources report that Kelly's father was a painter of theatrical scenery. After graduating from Warren Harding High School in 1930, Kelly worked at odd jobs until he was hired as a crime reporter on the Bridgeport Post. He also took up cartooning and illustrated a biography of fellow Bridgeport native, P. T. Barnum. Kelly was extremely proud of his journalism pedigree and considered himself a newspaper man as well as a cartoonist.
Described as gruff on the exterior–although reportedly personable, highly energetic and extroverted. Kelly liked most animals–except for cats. He didn't like them; or said he didn't, according to his widow, Selby. When Kelly first saw a live opossum during a camping trip, he didn't know what it was and was "frightened to death," said Selby. His fascination with a Los Angeles production of Show Boat reportedly inspired the Southern setting of Pogo.
Kelly is often associated with two other cartooning giants: Milton Caniff (Terry and the Pirates, Steve Canyon) and Al Capp (Li'l Abner). The three were close friends and professional associates throughout their adult lives and occasionally referred to each other in their strips. An anecdote in Al Capp Remembered relates how Capp and his brother Elliot Caplin ducked out of a dull party at Capp's home, leaving Kelly alone to entertain a group of Argentine envoys who didn't speak English. Kelly retaliated by giving away Capp's baby grand piano. According to Capp, who loved to relate the story, Kelly's two perfectly logical reasons for doing so were: (1) to cement diplomatic relations between Argentina and the United States and (2) "because you can't play the piano anyway." Capp said "Walt, when he chooses to be, is one of the funniest men in the world."[2]
Milton Caniff related another event in Phi Beta Pogo involving Walt Kelly and Al Capp, onstage at a meeting of the Newspaper Comics Council in the 1960s:
Politically, Kelly would be more accurately described as a "progressive" independent rather than a liberal–he was a great supporter of Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower over Adlai Stevenson. Conversely, he seemed to tilt to Democrat Harry S. Truman over Thomas Dewey, and he claimed to be against "the extreme Right, the extreme Left, and the extreme Middle." He skewered both Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon in later years, as well as J. Edgar Hoover, George Wallace and Spiro Agnew. Kelly was considered a sufficient enough threat that his phone was tapped by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the U.S. Government corresponded with a newspaper reporter who claimed that the eccentric jargon Kelly created was a secret Russian code. Kelly was an great supporter of desegregation and free speech, and his name was recently discovered on a petition in support of Lenny Bruce.
His influences included cartoonists George Kerr, Frederick Opper, E.W. Kemble, A.B. Frost, John Tenniel, George Herriman and (especially) T.S. Sullivant. Kelly, a great admirer of Lewis Carroll, was also a prolific poet, especially in the "Anguish Languish" form (of which Deck Us All With Boston Charlie is considered one of the prime examples). Kelly's singing voice, a boozy Irish baritone, can be heard on the Songs of the Pogo album, for which he also supplied the lyrics.
Walt Kelly died in 1973 in Woodland Hills, California from diabetes complications, following a long and debilitating illness that had cost him a leg. During his final illness, work on the strip had fallen to various assistants (and occasionally reprints), and Kelly characteristically joked about returning to work as soon as he re-grew the leg. He is sometimes listed as having been interred in the Cemetery of the Evergreens in Brooklyn, New York, but there is no grave for him there. He is believed to have been cremated.
Relocating to Southern California, reportedly in pursuit of his future wife, Helen DeLacy, who had moved there, he found a job at Walt Disney Productions as a storyboard artist and gag man on Donald Duck cartoons and other shorts, requesting a switch to the animation department in 1939. Starting over as an animator, Kelly became an assistant to noted Walt Disney animator Fred Moore and became close friends with Moore and Ward Kimball, one of Disney's Nine Old Men.
Kelly worked for Disney from January 6, 1936 to September 12, 1941, contributing to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia, Dumbo and The Reluctant Dragon. Kelly once stated that his salary at Disney averaged about $100 a week. During 1935 and 1936, his work also appeared in early comic books for what later became DC Comics.
Kelly's animation can be seen in Pinocchio when Gepetto is first seen inside Monstro the whale, fishing; in Fantasia when Bacchus is seen drunkenly riding a donkey during the Beethoven/"Pastoral Symphony" sequence; and in "Dumbo" of the ringmaster and during bits of the crows' sequence; and his drawings are especially recognizable in "The Reluctant Dragon" of the little boy, and in the Mickey Mouse short "The Little Whirlwind" when Mickey is running from the larger tornado.
During the 1941 animators strike, Kelly did not picket the studio, as has often been reported, but took a leave of absence — pleading "family illness" — in order to avoid choosing sides. Surviving correspondence between Kelly and his close friend and fellow animator Ward Kimball chronicles his ambivalence towards the highly charged dispute. Kimball stated in an interview years later that Kelly felt creatively constricted in animation, a collective art form, and possibly over-challenged by the technical demands of the form, and had been looking for a way out when the strike occurred.
Kelly never returned to the studio as an animator, but jobs adapting the studio's films Pinocchio and The Three Caballeros for Dell Comics — apparently the result of a recommendation from Walt Disney himself — led to a new (and ultimately transitional) career.
In a May 25, 1960 letter to Walt Disney Kelly wrote regarding his time at the studio:
Kelly began a series of comic books based on fairy tales and nursery rhymes along with annuals celebrating Christmas and Easter for Dell Comics. Kelly seems to have written or co-written much of the material he drew for the comics; his unique touches are easily discernible. He also produced a series of stories based on the Our Gang film series, provided covers for Walt Disney's Comics and Stories, illustrated the aforementioned adaptations of two Disney animated features, drew stories featuring Raggedy Ann and Andy and Uncle Wiggily, wrote and drew a lengthy series of comic books promoting a bread company and featuring a character called "Peter Wheat", and did a series of pantomime (i.e. without dialogue) two-page stories featuring Roald Dahl's Gremlins for Walt Disney's Comics and Stories #34-41.[4] Kelly also wrote, drew, and performed during this period on children's records, children's books, and cereal boxes. He was so prolific in the 1940s that it is assumed that the extent of his work can never be completely documented.
So highly regarded was his work that Dell editor Oskar Lebeck in the introduction to Fairy Tale Parade #1 spoke of him as "the artist who drew all the wonderful pictures in this book".[5]
Although his health would not allow him to serve in the military,[6] during World War II, Kelly also worked in the Army's Foreign Language Unit illustrating manuals, including several on language — a favorite Kelly subject — and one manual on the use of tools depicting his friend Ward Kimball as a caveman.
This period saw the creation of Kelly's most famous character, Pogo, who first saw print in 1943 in Dell's Animal Comics. The initial stories, probably influenced by Joel Chandler Harris' Uncle Remus stories, pitted a boy named Bumbazine against wily Albert the Alligator, with Pogo Possum in a supporting role. Albert eventually supplanted Bumbazine for the lead role, and Pogo supplanted Albert, with the sole human character- whom Kelly joked was less believable being 'merely human'- disappearing from the series altogether. Some cartoon historians have speculated that the removal of the only human (a black one) was done to allow the creation of Kelly's ideal of a Southland with no black or white - just critters.
Pogo was almost unrecognizable in his initial appearance, resembling a real possum more closely than in his classic form. He gradually assumed a rounder and more appealing shape and construction, much like Mickey Mouse's, including a black nose that he would retain until the eve of his transition to the comics page in 1948.
Kelly's work with Dell continued well into the successful run of the newspaper strip in the early fifties, ending after 16 issues of Pogo Possum (each with all new material) in a dispute over the republication of Kelly's early Pogo and Albert stories in a special comic book called The Pogo Parade. Having grown tremendously as an artist and writer, Kelly no longer wished to see his earlier work in print.
| “ | Now is the time for all good men to come to. | ” |
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—Walt Kelly |
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He returned to journalism as a political cartoonist after the war. In 1948, while art director of the short-lived New York Star, Kelly began to produce a pen-and-ink daily strip featuring anthropomorphic animal characters that inhabited the Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia. The first Pogo strip appeared on October 4, 1948. After the New York Star folded on Jan. 28, 1949 Kelly arranged for syndication through the Hall Syndicate which relaunched the strip in May 1949. Kelly eventually arranged to acquire the copyright and ownership of the strip, which was uncommon in that era.
Pogo was a landmark strip in many ways and Kelly is arguably one of the greatest and most influential of cartoonists in the history of the craft. Kelly combined masterful line and brush-work (learned at the "mouse factory", Disney) with fluent and highly amusing story-telling acted out by an endearing cast of "nature's screechers". He borrowed from various dialectical sources and his own fertile imagination to invent a unique and charming backwoods-patois, heavy on the nonsense, to fit his cartoon swampland. Although Pogo stands on its own as a superbly-realised cartoon strip for the ages, it was perhaps Kelly's interjection of political and social satire into the work that was its greatest pioneering accomplishment. With rare exceptions (such as Al Capp's Li'l Abner), satirical commentary was simply not done in the genre of dailies in Kelly's time.
The principal characters were Pogo the Possum, Albert the Alligator, Churchy LaFemme (cf. Cherchez la femme), a turtle, Howland Owl (a partial self-parody), Beauregard (Houndog), Porkypine, and Miz Mamzelle Hepzibah, a French skunk. Kelly used the strip in part as a vehicle for his liberal and humanistic political and social views and satirized, among other things, Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communist demagogy (in the form of a shotgun-wielding bobcat named "Simple J. Malarkey") and the sectarian and dogmatic behavior of Communists in the form of two comically doctrinaire cowbirds.[7]
Another interesting facet of the comic strip were the unique speech balloons that several characters were drawn with. One character, Deacon Mushrat, an educated muskrat, spoke in speech balloons with decorated Gothic style lettering. The village mortician, Sarcophagas Macabre, a vulture, had square, black-framed speech balloons with fine script lettering, resembling funeral announcements. P.T. Bridgeport, a bear and showman and promoter of questionable repute, spoke with speech balloons in highly decorated type, resembling 19th century circus posters. George Ward and Henry Shikuma were among Kelly's assistants on the strip.
In 1951 Simon and Schuster issued the first paperback book collection of the strip, simply titled Pogo, to excellent sales. The book introduced Kelly's unusual format: rather than simply reproduce strips, Kelly edited them heavily, removing many panels, adding many others, and omitting many strips entirely in order to create many short, humorously titled chapters that read in a comic book (rather than comic strip) style. I Go Pogo quickly followed the first book. Kelly would go on to produce about thirty titles in this format during his lifetime, with several more issued posthumously. All are highly sought by collectors. Still ultra-prolific, Kelly often wrote and illustrated short poems for these books, and eventually began adding elaborate full-length stories that were specially created for the books. Over time, the amount of special material in these books would grow to the point that some contained no daily or Sunday Pogo material and were created by Kelly from scratch.
In 1952 and later, a "Pogo for President" campaign, with followers wearing "I Go Pogo" buttons, became an expression of political protest. Pogo was also distinguished by exceptional linguistic inventiveness and playfulness, as expressed, for example, in the Pogo version of songs such as "Deck Us All with Boston Charlie" (for "Deck the Halls with Boughs of Holly") and "Ma Bonny lice soda devotion" (for "My Bonnie lies over the ocean").
Perhaps the most famous quotation to come from this series is, "We have met the enemy and he is us" (a paraphrase of Commodore Perry's famous "We have met the enemy and they are ours" from the War of 1812). The earliest form of this expression appeared in his introduction to The Pogo Papers (1953); it was used much later in the comic strip and as the title of a collection of strips. This is typical of the wry and politically astute commentary to be found in the daily and Sunday strip. It was distributed by King Features Syndicate to hundreds of newspapers for many years. The individual strips were collected into at least twenty books edited by Kelly, reprinted editions of some of these remain available today. He received the Reuben Award for the series in 1951.
Walt Kelly illustrated The Glob, a children's book about the evolution of man written by John O'Reilly and published in 1952. The characters and creatures in the book have a distinctly Pogoian character.
In 1969, a half-hour animated television special, The Pogo Special Birthday Special was produced, and aired on the NBC television network. Kelly himself provided the voices for P.T. Bridgeport, Albert Alligator and Howland Owl. In an interview Ward Kimball, who had worked with Kelly at Disney, quoted Kelly as saying angrily that Chuck Jones had changed the script without Kelly's ok, and altered Miz Mam'selle Hepzibah's face to look more human.[8]
Having previously lampooned McCarthy, Kelly was also censored by some papers in the 1960s for portraying Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev as a pig and Fidel Castro as a cigar-smoking goat spouting pseudo-Marxism like "The shortage will be divided amongst the peasants!" [9] Kelly had spent time in Cold War Berlin, writing newspaper articles about the situation there.[10]
During the 1968 political campaign, Kelly's strip depicted rival Presidential candidates Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon as the Tweedle twins (Tweedledum and Tweedledee) but never established which was which: each twin claimed to be "Dee" while identifying the other as "Dum". In later years, Kelly's strip featured caricatures of Nixon depicted as a spider, J. Edgar Hoover as a bulldog, Spiro T. Agnew as a hyena and George C. Wallace as a bantam cock.
Throughout the run of Pogo, the strip's characters frequently traversed the Okefenokee Swamp aboard a flimsy flat-bottomed boat. Kelly developed the pleasant gimmick of lettering the boat's name on its hull... the gimmick being that the name changed from one day to the next, and even from panel to panel within the same day's strip, but was always a tribute to some obscure real-life person whom Kelly wished to salute in print.
An alternative explanation to the changing names on the hull of the simple punt is that they represented the names of newspapers which had recently syndicated his comic strip. Inspection of the names makes this pretty obvious.
In contrast to the rigidly straight-edged panels of most other comic strips, the panels of Pogo were always defiantly hand-drawn in Kelly's beautiful ink lines with no attempt at straightness. Frequently a Pogo character would lean against the edge of the panel, or Albert would strike a match (to light his cigar) against the nearest panel edge, invariably distorting the panel even further.
Pogo was continued by Kelly's widow, Selby, and various assistants until the summer of 1975. Reprint books continued in a steady stream, including a series reprinting several original books under a single cover according to various themes — romance, elections — that ran into the 1980s. In 1977, a small publisher called the Gregg Press reprinted the first ten Pogo books in hardcover editions with dust jackets. In 1995, another small press called Jonas/Winter issued another ten Pogo titles in navy blue cloth editions.
In 1968, the country rock band Poco made their debut at Doug Weston's Troubadour Club in West Hollywood, California under the name "Pogo". After they had performed enough to establish themselves, they were sued by Kelly and subsequently changed the name to "Poco" in order to minimize the damage. Band member Richie Furay said, "When the Buffalo Springfield Roller Company found out we were using their name, they wrote back and said, 'Hey, really glad to see the name. Use it, have fun.' It was really neat to have someone encourage us like that. But Walt didn't see things that way."
Kelly has been compared to everyone from James Joyce and Lewis Carroll, to Aesop and Uncle Remus. He was elected president of the National Cartoonists Society in 1954, serving until 1956, and was also the first strip cartoonist to be invited to contribute originals to the Library of Congress.
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| "We Have Met The Enemy, and they are Ours" (American history) | |
| Songs of the Pogo (1956 Album by Walt Kelly with Norman Monath) | |
| Peggy's Pie Parlor (2003 Album by Ralph's World) |
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