When I was a boy (I was born in 1957), since kindergarten wasn't a requirement in those days and in rural Georgia there wasn't a lot of emphasis on pre-school academic skills, I didn't learn to read till first grade. My mama would read my favorite comic strips to me from the Sunday funnies, and Pogo was one of my favorites. The first time I realized I could actually read, I had spread the Sunday funnies out on the living room floor one morning, and the first strip I looked for was Pogo. I found it, and then I realized that I was reading it! By myself! I was almost afraid to tell my mama, because I figured that would end our Sunday mornings on the couch with the funnies, but I was too excited not to tell her. I'm glad to say, it didn't end our special Sunday morning time. We just changed roles, and I read the funnies to her, and I've been reading ever since. In a way you could say...Pogo started it all. I'm glad that Walt Kelly's work is being preserved and honored. Thank you for this video!
@@DaveNadelberg Bill Watterson isn't a total recluse. He just didn't believe in a whole lot of stupid merchandising for a comic strip intended for children, and in general he likes to keep to himself. I have a couple of cassettes from his brother Tom's band The Rels, and Bill did the artwork for those (under the name Fang Wampire) just as he did the occasional editorial cartoon before Calvin and Hobbes. He was lucky enough to have come up with a creation that let him retire early and have a nice peaceful life. Talking about something beloved to him that influenced his work sounds exactly like the sort of thing I expect he would enjoy doing.
Hearing that this collection came from Selby Kelly gives me hope that someday we might see proper collections of the post-Walt Kelly Pogo strips, of which there were a significant number. I know that Don Morgan worked on the strip in some capacity after Walt fell ill. Then Selby began to draw the strip on Christmas 1973 with scripts by son Stephen Kelly and continued doing so through July 1975, when the shrinking size of the comics in newspapers made them decide it wasn't worth the effort. Then, following a nearly 15 year gap, the strip returned as "Walt Kelly's Pogo" in January 1989. It was written by Larry Doyle and drawn by Neal Sternecky through March 1992, after which Kelly's son Peter and daughter Carolyn took over producing it until October 1993 -- and that was when Pogo Possum left the pages of the nation's newspapers for good. That adds up to over six-and-a-half years' worth of strips (!) and while it's generally accepted that none of the above-mentioned teams produced material that was fully up to the quality of Walt Kelly in his prime, on the other hand, none of them churned out wretched dreck just to make a paycheck either -- and none of their work has been reprinted in any significant form, so it's all definitely worth a second look!
Awesome content, thank you so much, especially for all the guest commentary.i can't believe no one mentioned Albert 's habit of swallowing his friends, a lot of the strips were just nonsense after all.
Thanks so much for this. Pogo has held a central place in my life since my early teens. I was following it in the Bangkok Post when WK died while I was in the army. I appreciated Lucy Caswell's foreword to the latest edition of The Complete Pogo. This series is up to 1963-64 now. Although it is getting pricey, it is absolutely not to be missed at any price. Again thanks, WK and Pogo cannot be commemorated enough!
I enjoyed every second of this presentation. Thank you so much for doing these. Pogo, along with Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes are three of my mom’s favorite strips, so this was a real treat, and I was sure to send this video to her!
Thank you for this insight into the Pogo World. I love learning how cartoonists work and see other cartoonists. As a writer, I love Pogo because of Kelly's use of language and humor. I admire his ability to write in a dialect that belongs to Pogo and his friends. I follow many of the guest cartoonists, too. I wish I could see this exhibit in person.
Loved it! Thanks so much for creating this video. Inspiring visuals and great audio commentary by all. Hope to one day make a pilgrimage back to the Cartoon Library and Museum once this darn pandemic is over. In the meantime, this was a real treat :)
Many, many thanks for this. I’m not even (North) American but got to know about Walt Kelly and Pogo through Jeff Smith who is on this video as well. Later on I got hold of a bunch of first edition Pogo paperbacks from the 1950s which I still own. Kelly’s line work is so expressive and poetic it’s something I look forward to accomplish in my own drawings, only to realize there’s true mastery behind every stroke and character design. Kelly’s written humor is a little harder for me to get into, probably for the lack of cultural context. The Bill Watterson bit here is the icing on the cake, this being his second recorded intervention after the Stripped documentary (always off camera of course; the man guards his privacy to the nth degree). But seeing as the museum holds most of his strip artwork, he felt probably indebted to contribute - for which the rest of us are grateful.
Kelly's gags are hard for Americans to understand, mainly because the very clever (bit now politically incorrect) manner of using the vernacular or way to write using accents, which I have loved my whole life, and still use, starting back with Dickens, but many people now feel that it's condescending and racist to do that. I adore it and I still use it when writing, but people have to be able to read it aloud in your head.
The recent Fantagraphics hardcover editions of Pogo have excellent notes at the back that really help to understand a lot of the strips. The books can be pricy, but they are really great!
Wonderful! "Pogo" and Walt Kelly were the single most important influence on my thinking , world view, and taste in art and writing (except my father, who introduced me to "Pogo" in the first place) as a young person. As far as I can see, the Ohio State University Library of comic strip art is the apex of academic study of comic strips in this country. Comic strips may well be a dying art (as are most of my interests), but they will never really perish as long as people like Lucy Caswell and Jenny Robb carry on with their very important efforts. (It sounds very much as if I were a student assistant at this library, but I'm just an old comic strip collector in Texas; I've never even set foot in Ohio.) Great to see Ben Sargent, whom I was lucky to meet when he came to speak as a distinguished alumnus of Amarillo College, where I worked for many years. It was a real coup for the organizers to get the very shy Bill Watterson to talk on this tour. I've never heard his voice before! Jeff Smith was in his own (excellent) movie, THE CARTOONIST, so his love for "Pogo" is pretty widely known. I'm glad he was able to participate. Garry Trudeau, Lynn Johnston and Jan Eliot are, of course, at the top of their profession, and their contributions were excellent as well. As a former museum educator, I have to say that this is one of the best presentations of its kind that I've seen, and I hope it gets a lot of views.
Thank you very much for your wonderful comments! We're delighted that you found the tour engaging and valuable. You may also be interested in the behind-the-scenes tour of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum we filmed last year for Cartoon Crossroads Columbus; it's available on our channel under the Billy Ireland playlist!
@@OhioStateLibraries Thank you! I will definitely look at that and other videos about the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library. Thank *you* for all you do in preserving and studying what I regard as a unique American art form comparable, at the very least, with jazz.
Love Walt Kelly. Pogo's pretty much unknown in the UK but my uncle worked in Canada in the 50s and brought back some of the books which I read avidly as a kid. Most of the political stuff went over my head then, so it's interesting to learn the context of the strips.
I forget which cartoonist referred to Kelly's Fidel Castro as a dog; the ears might be confusing, but the hooved feet definitely belong to a goat. I have a CD of "Songs of the Pogo" I love, featuring Kelly himself bellowing out songs and orating some of his writings; the man was "drunk" on language, on the sound of words...one of the best half hours I've ever spent on RU-vid btw 😃
Loved the tour. My mom has a couple of books she'd had since she was a child, and she'd purchased a 3-volume collection that was published within the last 10 years or so. There was a third Pogo cartoon titled "The Pogo Special Birthday Special" released in 1969, directed by Chuck Jones and Ben Washam. Kelly hated the cartoon, with his main complaint being that Jones made Miss Mam'zelle Hepzibah's face too human-like. Jones and Kelly argued constantly over the special's production. The special has been uploaded to RU-vid by two or three separate users, the most recent being the most cleaned up version you can find. It has yet to be released to DVD.
I had an enormous crush on Miss Mam'zelle Hepzibah when I was growing up (probably one of the influences that turned me into a furry), always looked forwards to her appearances in the strip; I used to wonder if she and Pepe Le Pew were brother & sister.
He did NOT draw with a brush @OhioStateLibraries He drew with the same non-photo blue "Col-Erase" pencil that every single animation artist uses to this very day. He Inked with a brush or a thick pen. I am an animation artist for many years, and it seems silly to me that academic scholars don't know these very basic, working-class professional things about commercial art.
Look as the Castro caricature if you look at the feet, those are hooves look at the other dogs in the comic strip their feet look completely different. I believe that Kelly was saying that Castro was a demon using the goat as a double entendre my guess is that underneath the hat there’s a set of horns
