No Home Like Place

Okay, last Hoodoo Man post.  Odd little story.

From Pogo #16

Magic of the HooDoo Man

The HooDoo Man wears roller skates to dress up, as Doc Noah wears his to, well, whatever.

This little story brings in Miz Rackety Coon, sorta tying the HooDoo Man to the Okefenokee. The writing isn't all that quirky and doesn't quite ring true to Kelly, but who knows.

From Pogo #15

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

Tears of the Hoodoo Man

We learn a fair amount about Hoodoo men from these stories, and in turn maybe a fair bit about Kelly as well.

From Pogo #13

Hoodoo Men are Strange People

I'm sorry to say that I only have one page of this two page story, but it introduces the concept of a Hoodoo man (the next level of Voodoo man as shown last post). This contents of this page gives us the notion that Doc Noah may actually be a Hoodoo man, as there are more than one, and folks think they're magical, but really their magic is more likely based on uncommon knowledge. 

So keep in mind, as we go further into Pandemonia, that Doc Noah and his brother from Siam are most likely Hoodoo Men.

From Pogo #12

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

The Name's Ugly, Eh?

"The S. S. Al Capp Victory", was an obvious poke against fellow cartoonist Capp. I'm sure there's a whole back story to this jab. But on the surface at least we know there was a feud of sorts between Kelly and Capp, as related by Milton Caniff in Phi Beta Pogo: 

. . ."The (anecdote) I remember involved Walt and Al Capp. . .two boys from Bridgeport, Connecticut, nose to nose," onstage at a meeting of the Newspaper Comics Council in the sixties. "Walt would say to Al, 'Of course, Al, this is really how you should draw Daisy Mae, I'm only showing you this for your own good.' Then Walt would do a sketch. Capp, of course, got ticked off by this, as you can imagine! So he retaliated by doing his version of Pogo. Unfortunately, the drawings are long gone; no recording was made. What a shame! Nobody anticipated there'd be this dueling back and forth between the two of them...."   

I'm curious as to the relevancy of the term 'Victory'. We know that Capp had spoofed Joan Baez in 1966, implicitly referring to her as a 'limousine liberal', which seemed to hurt her to the quick. She apparently threatened to sue, and just as apparently didn't. Does that have anything to do with this upside down ark and victory? There's a story here, but I'm not aware of it. Anybody? 

And an extra panel again, courtesy of Ger Apeldoorn, with the terrific unicorn: