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Walter Crawford Kelly (1913-73) |
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American cartoonist, whose best-known creation Pogo made its first appearance in the late 1940s. Kelly's daily strip represented political and social satire in its highest form. His characterization, language, dialect, art and lettering aimed for perfection. Pogo Possum's swamp in Georgia's Okefenokee, populated by philosophizing animals in the great tradition of Aesop, Krylov and La Fontaine, is a fantasy world, as absurd as Alice's Wonderland. "Deck us all with Boston Charlie, Walter Kelly war born in Philadelphia. When he was two, his family moved to Bridgeport, Connecticut, where his father worked in munition factories. His father also was a theatrical scenery painter and taught the boy how to draw. In his teen Kelly suffered for two years of a paralysis that affected his left side. While at high school Kelly edited the school magazine and also drew for the local paper, the Bridgeport Post. Especially Mutt and Jeff inspired him. After graduation in 1930 he worked as a journalist and cartoonist at the Post. He worked at almost every job in the art and editorial departments and eventually he drew editorial cartoons. For a short time he was an investigator for the Bridgeport Welfare Department and studied art in New York In the mid-1930s Kelly moved to Hollywood, where he became an animator for Walt Disney Studios, working among others on Dumbo, Snow White, The Reluctant Dragon and Fantasia. Among his co-animators was Hank Ketcham, who later drew Dennis the Menace. In 1941 he returned to east and did comic book work for Western Printing & Litographing. Editor Oskar Lebeck hired him to write and draw stories for Animal Comics, Our Gang, Fairy Tale Parade, Raggedy Ann&Andy, and Santa Claus Funnies. He drew covers for a number of Disney titles, whose interior stories were sometimes produced by Carl Barks, the most celebrated artist behind Donald Duck. In 1943 Kelly created Bumbazine and Albert the Alligator, which appeared in issue number one of Animal Comics. Its story, called 'Albert Takes the Cake,' was the basis for Pogo, and started "Once there was a big old alligator named Albert who loved chocolate cake..." The cartoon depicted the adventures of Bumbazine, the black little boy of the title, who lived in the Okefenokee swamp in the company of his pet alligator. Gradually Bumbazine faded out of the strip and later the strip was titled Albert and Pogo. During World War II Kelly was at the Foreign Language Unit and
illustrated manuals for the Army. Although his works at Western Publishing
were aimed mostly for very young readers, Kelly also created such features
as Seaman Sy Wheeler, and a srewball saga Pat, Patsy and
Pete. In 1948 he was hired to draw political cartoons for the New York
Star, a new liberal and short-lived advertising-free paper. He also made spot art, and design work. Pogo began
to appear as a daily feature in the Star in 1949. In the same year it was picked up for distribution by the Post-Hall Syndicate. The initial stories had been more slapstick-centered than allegorical, but gradually jokes about current events creeped in. Pogo started out slowly in syndication
but in the late 1950s it was subscribed by almost 600 newspapers. For the next six years Pogo was available simultaneously in comic books and newspapers. In 1952 Kelly was named "cartoonist of the year." A mock presidential bid by Pogo grew into literary event when the writer Carl Sandburg proclaimed "I Go Pogo!" Two years later Kelly was elected president of the National Cartoonist Society. By 1954, his relationship with the publishing company had soured, prompting him to quit doing books and concentrate on strips. However, he was the first strip cartoonist to be invited to contribute originals to the Library of Congress. In addition to his work on Pogo, Kelly reviewed books, wrote articles and nonsense verse, illustrated books, delivered hundreds of lectures and sang some of the songs in the record 'Songs of the Pogo.' His wide influence in seen in the works of such artists as Jeff Smith (The Bone) and Cathy Hill (Mad Raccoons). "Pogo's swamp was as real as Hogan's Alley or the Katzenjammers' island or Slumberland or Popey's Dice Island or Flash Gordon's underwater world of Mongo or Terry's Orient or Kokonino Kounty. Or as unreal - take your pick. And, like the other settings, it was wonderful in no small part because it was a place that could exists only in the comic strips – in no other medium, no other art form." (Richard Marschall in America's Great Comoc-Strip Artists, 1989) In the 1960s Kelly had health problems and he left more and more of the drawing to others. He regularly reprinted Pogo, resulting in more than three dozen paperbacks during his lifetime. In 1969 a Pogo animated cartoon was shown on TV. For the sake of economy, the size of the strips became more reduced in later years, which made the dialogue more difficult to read. Kelly died in Hollywood on October 18, 1973, of complications of diabetes. He had recently had a leg amputated. From 1973 the strip was continued for some years by Kelly's son Stephen and his widow Selby, with the help of several assistants. A new version, titled Walt Kelly's Pogo started to run in 1989. The strip was written by Larry Doyle and drawn by Neal Sternecky. Doyle left the strip in 1991, Sternecky went solo with it until Kelly's children Pete and Carolyn took it over in 1992; it ended the next year. POGO: The strip depicts Okefenokee swamp, where worms, insects, birds, reptiles, herbivores and carnivores live in more or less peacefully. Central characters are Pogo, the warmhearted and modest little opossum, "a possum by trade," the anarchistic and egoistic Albert the Alligator, Dr. Howland Owl, the bear P.T. Bridgeport, Beauregard, the retired bloodhound, the snooping turtle Churchy-la-Femme, and Porky the porcupine. The antagonism between Albert and Pogo has been seen as symbolic representation of the Ego and Id. "A comic strip is like a dream..." Kelly once said. Comparable philosophical juxtapositions has been widely used in cartoons, as in Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes or in Charles Schulz's Peanuts. "Yep, son, we have met the enemy and he is us." (Pogo's observation upon seeing the garbage-cluttered swamp. Note: "We have met the enemy, and they are ours." Dispatch from U.S. brig Niagara to General William Henry Harrison, announcing his victory at the battle of Lake Erie, September 10, 1813.) "I'll tell you, son, the minority got us out-numbered!" (Congressman Frog) Kelly put more than six hundred named or otherwise identifiable creatures in the swamp, each with a distinct personality and different voices. His characters talked and argued constantly with a poetic language that mixed Elizabethan English, French, and white and black Southern. Once Dr Owl explained: "The natural born reason we didn't git no yew-ranium when we crosses the li'l yew tree and the gee-ranium is on account of cause we didn't have no geiger counter". He played on words and especially on names, thus Simple J. Malarkey, a mean-spirited bobcat, referred to Senator Joseph McCarthy. He mocked also such well-known figures as J. Edgar Hoover, George Wallace, Spiro Agnew, Nikita Khrushchev, who was a boorish pig, and Fidel Castro, a seedy goat. Richard Nixon was Kelly's most represented figure, portrayed as Malarkey's sidekick, Indian Charlie, and later as a teapot-shaped spider named Sam. Much meaning could be deriverd from the way political personalities were drawn: Angew was a uniformed hyena and J. Edgar Hoover as a bulldog. For further reading: The World Encyclopedia of Comics, ed. by Maurice Horn (1976); America's Great Comic-Strip Artists by Richard Marschall (1989); 100 Years of American Newspaper Comics. ed. by Maurice Horn (1996); 1001 Comics You Must Read Before You Die, ed. by Paul Gravett (2011); We Go Pogo: Walt Kelly, Politics, and American Satire by Kerry D. Soper (2012); Walt Kelly: The Life and Art of the Creator of Pogo HC by Thomas Andrae and Carsten Laqua (2012) - Animal fables: see the classical roots in the literature: Aesop, Krylov, La Fontaine Selected works:
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