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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. Walt 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 place of fantasy, as lively as the world in Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (1908). "Deck us all with Boston Charlie, Walter Kelly war born in Philadelphia. When he was two, his
family
moved to Bridgeport, Connecticut. His father, Walter Kelly, Sr., who never completed elementary school,
worked in munition
factories. He was also a theatrical scenery painter and taught his son
how to draw. The winter quarters of Barnum & Bailey circus were
only a few blocks away from Kelly's home. In his teens Kelly suffered
for two years of a
paralysis that affected his left side. His first jobs had nothing to do
with art. At the age of seventeen he
was employed in a ladies' underwear factory as a sweeper. While at high school Kelly edited the school magazine and also drew for the local paper, the Bridgeport Post. His cartoons were influenced by newspaper comic strips such as Krazy Kat, Regular Fellows, and Skippy. After graduation in 1930 he worked as a journalist and cartoonist at the Post. At that time especially Mutt and Jeff inspired him. He worked at almost every job in the art and editorial departments and eventually he drew editorial cartoons. His duties also included drawing a biographical strip about the circus entrepreneur P.T. Barnum. After two years Kelly got fed up
drawing Barnum's life. For a short time he was an
investigator for the Bridgeport Welfare Department and studied art in
New York. For the National Allied Publications, run by Major Malcolm
Wheeler-Nicholson, he drew scenes from Gulliver's Travels, and did some
other drawings too, but when the Major's checks began to bounce, he
left the company. 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. His co-animators included Hank Ketcham, who later
drew Dennis the Menace.
Half the time Kelly spent in the story department, half in the
animation studio. He also enrolled in the weekly life art class at the
studio. In
1937 he married Helen DeLacy; they divorced in 1951. Kelly's second
wife was Stephanie Waggony, who died of cancer in 1970. After her death
he married the cartoonist Selby Daley. Unhappy with the studio's assembly-line process of animation, Kelly returned in 1941 to east, upon hearing that Western
Printing & Litographing were looking for artists and writers.
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. Animal Comics turned
out to be the turning point in Kelly's career. He created Bumbazine
and Albert the Alligator, which appeared in issue number one of the
magazine.
(The name "bumbazine" is Kelly's word play on "bombazine"; a black fabric he had wrapped up in the
underwear factory.) Kelly's first story, called 'Albert Takes the Cake'
(Animal Comics, December
1941), was the basis for Pogo, starting with the words "Once
there was a big old alligator named Albert who loved
chocolate cake." (Pinhook: Finding Wholeness in a Fragmented Land by Janisse Ray, 2005, p. 40) 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 it was titled Albert and Pogo. For the Fairy Tale Parade, aimed at very
young children, Lebeck gave Kelly free hands to design the comic the
way he saw fit. 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. Between 1946 and 1947 Dell issued
two Albert and Pogo Possum
comics; both sold well. 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. At
that time comic strips were mostly free of politics. Kelly also dealt with environmental issues. In 1952 the
National Cartoonist Society named Kelly "Cartoonist of the Year."
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. When Dell tried to prevent a series of
paperback Pogo books, Kelly signed a contract with Simon and Schuster. Pogo made the
unusual transition from comic to newspaper strip successfully. With this work Kelly
realized his dream and was able to give his wife and children financial
security. A mock
presidential bid by his comic strip possum turned into national movement when the writer Carl Sandburg
stated in
1953, "I've read some of the comics that are around now, a dozen or
two, just to find out what some people are trying to do to the youth of
the country.... I think Pogo for the
young or the old who understands it, it's health to them.... I go Pogo!" (Walt Kelly and Pogo: The Art of the
Political Swamp by James Eric Black, 2016, p. 19)
150 colleges embraced Pogo as their official candidate. Twenty-eight
students were arrested in a mock rally held at Harvard for "disturbing
the peace." (We Go Pogo: Walt Kelly, Politics, and American Satire by Kerry D. Soper, 2012, pp. 202-203) Highly
appreciated by his colleagues, Kelly was elected in 1954
president of
the National Cartoonist Society. Moreover, he was the first strip
cartoonist to be
invited to contribute originals to the Library of Congress. Following a
disagreement with his publisher, Kelly quit doing books and
concentrated on strips. The last issue of the Pogo comic book went on sale in
1954. 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 Popeye'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." (America's Great Comic-Strip Artists: From the Yellow Kid to Peanuts by Richard Marschall, 1997, p. 272) In the 1960s Kelly had health problems and he left more and
more of the drawing to others. 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,
written by Larry Doyle and drawn by Neal Sternecky, started to run in
1989. 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.
Kelly's fans felt that didn't have the magic of the original. POGO: The strip depicts Okefenokee swamp, where worms, insects, birds, reptiles, herbivores and carnivores live in more or less peacefully, and are filled with similar whimsical humor as the Mad Hatter's tea party in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). 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 George Wallace (Prince Pompadoodle), Lyndon Johnson (a Texas longhorn centaur), Nikita Khrushchev, who was a boorish pig, and Fidel Castro, a seedy goat. Curiously, when Simple J. Malarkey made his appearance with his mean grin, no serious effors were made to censor Pogo. Richard Nixon was Kelly's most represented figure, portrayed as Malarkey's sidekick, Indian Charlie, and later as a teapot-shaped spider named Sam. However, Herbert Block's (known as Herblock) cartoons about Nixon, with the five-o'clock shadow and pointed nose, are the most famous. Much meaning can be deriverd from the way Kelly presented political personalities: Angew was a uniformed hyena and J. Edgar Hoover as a bulldog. In the 1950s, when the political scene was a taboo even in the Mad magazine, Kelly's joking on actual politicians was an unique act. It has been said, that Pogo was the most censored comic strip of its time. For further reading: America's Great Comic-Strip Artists by Richard Marschall (1989); 'Pogo' by J.A.L. [John A. Lent], in 100 Years of American Newspaper Comic, edited by Maurice Horn (1996); The Classic Era of American Comics by Nicky Wright (2000); 1001 Comics You Must Read Before You Die, edited 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 by Thomas Andrae and Carsten Laqua (2012); Heroes of the Comics by Drew Friedman; foreword by Al Jaffee (2014); Walt Kelly and Pogo: The Art of the Political Swamp by James Eric Black; foreword by Mark Burstein (2016); 'The Importance of Being Irreverent', in Sparring with Gil Kane: Debating the History and Aesthetics of Comics, edited by Gary Groth (2018); 'Bumbazine, Blackness, and the Myth of the Redemptive South in Walt Kelly’s Pogo' by Brian Cremins, in Comics and the U.S. South, edited by Brannon Costello and Qiana J. Whitted (2023) - Animal fables: see the classical roots in the literature: Aesop, Krylov, La Fontaine Selected works:
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