Creator of Pogo

I've pre-ordered this book from Amazon. I hope you all will want to also.

Up and Walking

Sorry it took so long to get started, but the new Walt Kelly site is up and, well, walking. Look for it and please follow it at Whirled of Kelly.

I hope to see you there.

SERIOUSLY

Howland and Kelly 

(sounds like the name of a radio team show, doesn't it?)

Really, serious thought is being given this new 'blog. Just need a bit of time to organize the material.

In addition, I've got two long distance trips I need to make in the next three weeks, so my plan is to have the new 'blog up and running by November 7. I would dearly love to make it sooner, but all things considered, that's the way it is. I still have a few things to share on this 'blog, so keep checking back, but ESPECIALLY, come back around Saturday, November 7 to find the link to (working title) Ever-Lovin' Blue-Eyed Years with Kelly.

Thinkin' Out Loud

?

Not that any of you need to worry about it, but I'm still trying to decide some things about the new Kelly 'blog. 

Please indulge me while I think this 'out loud'.

I was hoping to bring over the Sunday, Kelly Sunday strips from The Pictorial Arts 'blog, but those are from 1964 and aligned with the calendar of this year. I can give up that gimmick and post them back to back here, but I also have strips earlier, from 1963, that really deserve a showing as well, and from 1965 (not to mention the rest of 1967 plus '68, '69, '70 and '71). So a big question is: Do we want strict continuity for the Sunday strips? Or maybe 'story arcs', of a few weeks here and there? I lean toward that concept so that I can also throw in a whole bunch of other Kelly material between story arcs. You know, each Sunday will have its date in its file name, as always, so if you're saving em, they'll all go into order as you dump em into a folder, or folders, if you want to do em by year. So you can still have continuity on your end of the deal.

I think I've just convinced myself to do it that way. 

I'm going to post some non-Pogo Kelly stuff here and there, cuz we all love Kelly, right? Not JUST Pogo, please tell me that.

OK, so, well, I've talked it out and feel better for it. If any of you have some strong feelings about something or other that I should know before I kickstart the new 'blog, do please let me know. But really, even if you've seen a lot of this stuff here and there, like the comic books, or the special stories from the books, I promise to make the scans big and clean and worthy of Kelly, so it might be fun looking at it all again. 

And who knows? Maybe I'll post something you've never seen before. Wouldn't that be fun?

Take a Good Look at Oneself

Kelly gave a lot of talks over the years, many to college students, nationwide. In 1960 he gave this message to an auditorium of students (as excerpted and compacted from an article):

"Know yourself. Our problem is that we don't understand ourselves. Without self-understanding, it is impossible to comprehend the political and social problems of today.

However if you can find out who you are and if you can talk to yourself, the problems will be solved. Language will be unnecessary and love important. 

Cartoons can't teach you anything. They can only try to make you see what you already know."

Prolly Many Reasons

From this point on I've gotten really confused on dating the strips. I'm missing some dailies, the book jumps around, some of it might be extra art, etc, etc. Sorry, but I'm making best guesses. Soon we will have gone through the book in its entirety, but I've still got my clippings of dailies and Sundays.

Today is Walt Kelly's birthday! He was born 96 years ago. The drawing of Kelly, below, is one I made in a library from an old file picture that couldn't be checked out.

Sidebar

Just a tiny little interruption of continuity again to show this sidebar of information. Michel Francois has kindly sent a comparison of a recent post to show the difference of art between a typical published daily strip and the way it was printed in the book Prehysterical Pogo.

Directly below is how the strip elements would play in the daily paper, showing in red the elements that would be removed for the book. The 2 tier strip below that shows in red the rework for the book, extending the right edges and adding art elements within the panels. 

I think it's fascinating that Kelly and/or publishers felt the need for the alterations. I wonder if Kelly did the alterations, or an assistant or the publisher's graphic department. Whoever did it did a good job. It looks like most of the strips were altered in this way, and sometimes even the dialogue in the word balloons was reworked, as I will show within the next few posts.

Again, thank you Michel Francois.

The Nearsighted Duck

Sorry to stay away from Pandemonia proper for awhile, but I think the Hoodoo Man angle deserves playing through. It's pretty rare and pretty fun and gives us a little more insight into Kelly, and isn't that pretty much why we're all here?

From Pogo #14

Another Interlude

Jim Engel had a comment yesterday about ol' Doc Noah, being a favorite character and wanting to confirm the possibility that Doc had a forerunner character, from Kelly's comic book days, called the Hoodoo Man. 

Indeed, that is so. Only his first incarnation was the Voodoo Man, with a 'vee'. Comic books in those days were required by the postmaster to have text pages, and Kelly wrote some interesting ones for the Pogo comic books. The Voodoo Man was from Pogo #9.

As you'll see, the next time around, it evolved to Hoodoo Man, with an 'aitch', and came back several times as such. And the tie-in to Pogo in Pandemonia is that he truly seems to be a forerunner for Doc created over a decade before Pandemonia. It arouses curiosity as to whether this was an intentional reinterpretation of days of yore for Kelly, or was it a subconscious 'type' that Kelly had lying fallow in his imagination.

For what it's worth, I have the personal memory of Kelly describing to me, in January of '66, that Pogo would be running into an odd little fellow, a magician of sorts. As it turned out, Doc Noah seems to have some weather magic at least, and we'll see here shortly that the Voodoo Man did as well.

All in all, it seems that Kelly had characters and scenarios that he reprised as part of his own personal mythology. When you look at it objectively, Kelly's entire oeuvre was really devised as a unique set of fairy tales, with talking animals and a fantasy wonderland (even with much of that wonderland being a swamp). When I talked with him, he waxed poetic about fairy tales for a good long time, and I have to think that listening to him cemented my life-long interest in fairy tales as well.

From Pogo #9

If You're Following Pandemonia, Please Read This Post

Here we begin dailies with the Sundays in chronological, consecutive order. It gets a little complicated here, so let me explain. 

I have most of the dailies, clipped from the paper. But scanning from cheap newsprint is far from crisp and archival. The book, Prehysterical Pogo, is less than complete for total continuity, yet has extra art to help bridge the abridgments, and the art is crisp'n'clean. 

OK, so what I'm doing is this (completist that I am for this kind of project): I'm scanning the daily strips from the book for the cleanest purest art, cross-checking with my clippings to make sure they're in proper order, but when they skip strips (usually the ones that revert back to the Okefenokee) I am inserting my clipping scans (and you can tell which those are because they will be the 4 panels, straight across strip). The book scans will be the 2 tier squarish format (easier to scan that way, but also makes it more convenient for you to look at, and also to make any digital compendium you might want to assemble).

Following me so far?

OK. So just for your completist information, the panels from the book have extra art around the edges of each panel. I don't know if they were cropped for the newspaper, or if they were added for the book, but many times where it's done you can see, on close-up inspection, where that occurs. So that's a plus for using those book scans for our continuity. But also, though, the book strips sometimes have extra lettering or little image inserts to, as I said before, bridge the abridgments. 

On a couple of occasions new art is inserted to summarize a Sunday strip that wasn't reprinted but had pivotal plot devices. I am including those as well (completist that I am) immediately following that particular Sunday strip, and I will try to make note of that for your enlightenment.

Basically, I'm trying to post everything I have for Pandemonia, in proper order, and please note: each day's strip and its addenda will be one post at a time (but maybe several times a day). That way I can keep track of chronology and YOU, dear reader, can keep track if you are downloading these for some reason. Each strip is dated on its file label so that if you dump them into one file, they will stay in order.

Whew, have I explained enough? Um, not yet. The strip shown above is just to show you what the clipping looks like compared to the book dailies, which will start in the very next post. So if you Kelly faithfuls are going to collect these in some organized form you'll need to figure a system, but I've tried to help, with the order and the embedded dates.

I wish I could post a whole batch at any given time, but I've got other (paying) deadlines, and besides, I want this 'blog to last more than a week. But even so we're going to blaze through the year pretty quickly.

So have fun, and I'm going to continue to annotate as I am inspired. But PLEASE, drop some comments along the way so that I know someone's following along. I'd love for you to share your feeling about Kelly, his art and storyline, Pandemonia, what any of this means/meant to you and your life and work. Please tell friends to check in, Kelly's work should be seen and appreciated by more people.

These posts and any downloading you might do are for your enjoyment and edification only. Any unauthorized commercial use of them would be unlawful and would violate the copyright of this work.

Interlude for a Prelude

We're ready to enter into the complete continuity of Prehysterical Pandemonia, with dailies merging in with Sundays. But first an interlude for a prelude of sorts.

OtherEric, Kelly fan Supreme, had the great presence of mind to remind us of Kelly's first foray into Prehysteria, called appropriately Prehysteria, and the scans presented here are courtesy of him. First presented in Animal Comics #21, way back in the 40s, it displays some nascent Kute Kelly Kritters in fore and backgrounds. It shows us that this story arc may have been bouncing around in Kelly's mind for some time.

OtherEric has scanned and shared some nice Kelly comic book stories over at goldenagecomics.co.uk where you can find a great (complete!) run of Animal Comics and Fairy Tale Parade, as well as a ton of other great golden age comic stories.

Hypnoticklish Magic

Kelly's in no hurry at all. Just some lazy Sunday afternoons around this time.

Stren'th Through Joy

Yes, the story is moving along quickly now, isn't it folks? Kelly didn't dawdle in his storytelling as much as meandered.

Below, again a dropped panel that would have been placed as the 5th panel in this strip. Again thank you to Ger Apeldoorn of The Fabulous Fifties.

And who in the whirl is Toozy Borsmat?

Justice Dunn?

All the hub-bub of Seinfeld being a show about nothing was nothing compared to Kelly's nothing. Kelly was the master of nothing, making nothing into something.

Below, another panel dropped from the tabloid, originally the 5th panel. Again thanks to Ger Apeldoorn of The Fabulous Fifties for this panel.

Pure & Unpolloopaded

OK, the first mention of Mars in our sojourn. The motivation is set.

Happy New Year! Happy All Year in 2,001,966 B.C.

Happy 1966 everyone! This is where we begin our expedition to Pandemonia.

First off, I want to thank and show much appreciation to Ger Apeldoorn, of The Fabulous Fifties, for graciously combining his efforts with mine to present a completist version of this 14 month long arc. We are putting heads and collections together to showcase Kelly's magnum opus the best we can while still under a huge weight of our respective career deadlines.

If you ever choose to read the malarkey (14K or otherwise) that I may annotate these strips with, this is where you'll find it, under each strip. That way you can easily ignore it and go about your downloading. 

I think it best that we post one Sunday strip per post so that it's easier for you (and me) to keep them in order. It will be Sunday strips from January through the first of June, 1966. Then we'll fold in the dailies, supplemented by extra material from the book. As well, where possible, we will addend the extra panels that were dropped from tabloid pages. The Sunday strips will be tabloids and (as one viewer noted) they are more of a comic book format. So perhaps if you choose to download them you can create a compendium using the Comic Book Reader program.

So I'll post when I can, one at a time for now, sometimes 2 or 3 a day. Remember it is 6 months of material before we get to Pandemonia, so be patient and enjoy the slow build-up. We'll be there before you know it.

Twinkle in His Eye

1966 was indeed a new year for Kelly, as of course it was for all of us who were up and kicking back then. But Kelly had traveled extensively in the previous year and was currently on a speaking circuit when he confessed to me that he was tired and felt he needed to slow down. What he had been drawing had been drawn quickly with minimal attention to detail. But, he said, this year would be different. He was going to spend more time at the board and regain his spirit. He was overweight and breathing a bit hard (we were at high altitude after all), but the twinkle in his eye was blinding as his enthusiasm was infectious. I probably was jumping in my seat as he was describing the upcoming storyline.

Above is the first panel of the first Sunday of 1966. Next post, we begin.

Summer of '66

In the summer of '66, these spot ads were used in some editions (but curiously not all) of the paper. I was on vacation of sorts that summer, visiting my brother in Chicago, so while my mom saved the comics for me at home, I was also clipping Pogo from the Daily News. I had to have my daily dose of Pandemonia.

Sense Found in Nonsense

Prehysterical Pogo in Pandemonia was a book curiously lacking in enthusiasm or celebration of some of Kelly's finest moments. Other than the cover, there were no special spot drawings (like so many of his other books had), it was abridged and abbreviated from its first run, and Kelly's Foreword did not allude to the contents of the book, except to use the word "Martian" twice. There were no explanations, no insights for the storyline. And apparently it didn't sell well. It is one of the rarer tomes in Kelly's canon of works.

Below is the foreword of the book:

I can only imagine how wonderful it would be for a publisher to come out with a large album of the entire arc, complete with full page, full color three tier Sundays on the recto and six crisp dailies on the verso, with full insight essays, and a clay-coat beautifully designed cover and binding to boot.

* SIGH *

As you can see above, sometimes Kelly's essay-cum-forewords could be somewhat obscure. They might be hard to discern meaning or practical knowledge, but they brimmed with wit and reeked of worldly experience.

You knew that the man was no ivory tower cartoonist, but an activist—in the very best sense of the word. A man willing to side with the underdog—nay, to forcibly side with the human bean that has no hope. He seemed to believe strongly in hope, in a cynical sort of way.

Kelly didn't cry over spilt ink, he would quickly dip his brushes into it and dive into a new drawing, creating something new that otherwise might never have existed, due to procrastination or just plain idle hands. Yet he didn't avoid the devil's workshop. Rather he confronted the old bastard and took him to task for his mephistophelian misdeeds. Kelly faced sulfurous dragons of Hades, ready to wield his brush and pen and sometimes typewriter to remind the world that sense could be found in nonsense. Kelly's messages weren't obscure — we were.

I've taken this drawing out of context, but drawn 23 years prior to the incident, this drawing looks to be symbolic of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 culminating in the Tiananmen Square Massacre, where a single Chinese person stood alone to block a line of tanks heading east on Beijing's Cangan Blvd. 

Setting the Stage

Over the years Kelly had an agenda of sorts for prehistoric hijinx and this beautiful ad that he made for Pan Am (with whom he had a professional relationship), appeared in a National Cartoonists Society April dinner booklet, and helps set the stage for our sojourn to Pandemonia.

As this was for his fellow cartoonists, he was allowed some bared breasts, and it is fascinating (and frustrating) to think of where his creativity might have soared if he had more adult venues. But I guess we can bemoan that for any of the great cartoonists, being grateful that here and there restrictions were lifted.