In the 1950s, as a ten-year old boy in Detroit, I discovered Walt Kelly's "POGO" while bumbling around my Uncle Leo's bookshelves. At the time, I favored "funny animal" comics, particularly "The Fox and the Crow", "SuperMouse" and Carl Barks' "Uncle Scrooge."  

I thumbed through "I GO POGO", a collection of comic strips that told the tale of Pogo Possum running for President of the United States as a "favorite son" of Georgia's Okefenokee Swamp. I couldn't believe how beautiful it was: page after page of exquisitely rendered swamp scenes and lively expressive animal characters rivaling anything produced by Walt Disney at his peak. It made all sense when I later found out that Pogo creator Walt Kelly had been a major character and background artist working on Disney animation masterpieces that included "Fantasia."  

As I sat down and began to read "I GO POGO", the characters' dialogue and Deep South dialect reminded me of the Joel Chandler Harris' Br'er Rabbit stories that I had also loved back then. "Pogo", however, didn't have the occasionally racial overtones of "Br'er Rabbit." The stories and dialogue were as nonsensical and anarchically hilarious as the Marx Brothers' movies.  

And there was also a political satire layer that I didn't fully understand at age ten, but it didn't matter. Like "The Simpsons" that came long afterward, "Pogo" worked on many levels. A three-year old could love the funny animal drawings themselves. Joe and Suzy SixPack or any ten year old could love the Three Stooges-like slapstick of Albert Alligator wrestling around on the ground with Churchy LaFemme the Turtle, while an urbane doctoral candidate might appreciate the badger that looked a lot like right-wing demagogue Senator Joe McCarthy and the bloodhound that looked a lot like LBJ.  

Yes, in the late fifties, Walt Kelly was one of the few artists with the stones to take on demagogues like McCarthy. In the sixties, he took aim at the John Birch Society with a book collection of Pogo comics called "The Jack Acid Society Black Book."   

When Walt Kelly died in 1973, so did any real hope of new Pogo comics. Even though there had been several attempts to revive the "Pogo" comic strip (one such attempt by Kelly's daughter), there could only be one Walt Kelly.

For more extensive information about Walt Kelly and Pogo, visit the official Pogo website, as well as tributes from the Lambiek collection and the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive.

http://www.pogopossum.com/

http://lambiek.net/artists/k/kelly.htm

http://www.animationarchive.org/2007/04/comics-walt-kellys-pogo.html