Tag Archives: Pogo

Walt Kelly and Me

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“The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again. ‘The truth will not run away from us’: in the historical outlook of historicism these words of Gottfried Keller mark the exact point where historical materialism cuts through historicism. For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.”

 –Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (English translation Harry Zohn; Illuminations p. 255)

 

 Fig. 1

Fig. 1: Clipping courtesy of the Bridgeport History Center at the Bridgeport, Connecticut Public Library

I wonder sometimes if I’m being followed. I can’t seem to escape from Walt Kelly. R. Fiore’s recent TCJ review of the new Hermes Press collection Walt Kelly’s Pogo: The Complete Dell Comics Volume 1, compels me once again to consider the cartoonist, who died in 1973 and lived his formative years in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The Park City is about thirty miles south of Oakville, my hometown, and Oakville is just outside of Waterbury, where the Eastern Color Printing Company began producing comic books in the 1930s. Of course, I’d heard of Kelly long before I’d read any of his work. He’s on a short list of Connecticut luminaries, along with Nathan Hale, Rosalind Russell, Paul Robeson, and Thurston Moore, but I didn’t read Kelly’s celebrated strip until I was in my mid-thirties. Several years ago, one of my students gave me copies of two of her late father’s beloved Pogo collections. I know you enjoy comics, she said, and you teach them, too, so I think you might like these: Pogo, the first Simon and Schuster collection from 1951, and The Pogo Papers, from 1953. Covers creased, paper tan and brittle, bindings cracked. Her dad, I know, loved these books, returned to them, left them behind for his daughter, for me. I thanked her for this kind gift, but even then, in the summer of 2007, I neglected them. A year later I was asked to contribute an essay to a collection on Southern comics and I remembered what my student had said: You might need these. I think that’s what she said. I’d like to think so, anyway.

I begin with what is probably more than you need to know about me and Walt Kelly because, like Fiore, I, too admire the artist, and, in the years since my student handed me her father’s Pogo books, I’ve written about his work twice: first, in an essay on Bumbazine for Brannon Costello and Qiana Whitted’s collection Comics and the U.S. South (UP of Mississippi, 2012) and again last year for a paper presented at the Festival of Cartoon Art at the Ohio State University’s Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum. In the first essay, which Tom Andrae cites in his introduction to the new Dell Comics collection, I discuss the two scenes Fiore addresses in his review— the watermelon panel from “Albert Takes the Cake” (Animal Comics #1, dated Dec. 1942-Jan. 1943) and the railroad sequence from “Albert the Alligator” (Animal Comics #5, dated Oct.-Nov. 1943). You can read that 2012 essay, “Bumbazine, Blackness, and the Myth of the Redemptive South in Walt Kelly’s Pogo” here or from your local library; the Google Books version does not include the illustrations.

Fiore takes issue with Andrae’s analysis of the black characters who appear in “Albert the Alligator.” While he begins with the suggestion that “Andrae is on firmer ground in denouncing the characterizations in the story from Animal Comics #5,” Fiore then asks that we consider other readings of the narrative:

Once again, however, [Andrae] is sloppy in characterizing [the characters] as “derisive minstrelsy stereotypes.” The conventions of the minstrel show were as formalized as the Harlequinade, and the characters in the story at hand don’t fit them. Further, I believe a more sophisticated and context-conscious reading would come to a different conclusion.

As I read these remarks, I began to wonder, what would a “context-conscious reading” of this sequence look like? And is Fiore correct? Would it reach a different conclusion than the one in Andrae’s introduction?

I attempted just that sort of contextual reading in my Bumbazine essay, in which I trace the impact not only of minstrelsy but also of the rhetoric of the South as redeemer, a concept Kelly inherited from the Southern Agrarians. But any reading that hopes to place Kelly in historical context must take into account the tensions and fractures that exist in his body of work. Kelly is a significant cartoonist not because he was more progressive than other artists working in the 1940s but because he records for us the contradictions in his own thinking and practice.

 Fig. 2

 Fig. 2: Pogo takes on one of the Kluck Klams in a story from The Pogo Poop Book, 1966

Kelly, the child of working-class parents, a left-leaning, often progressive autodidact who, later in his career, would challenge Senator Joseph McCarthy, the Ku Klux Klan, and the John Birch Society, demands our attention because he forces us to ask another question: given his reputation as a cartoonist beloved by students and liberal intellectuals of the 1950s and early 1960s, how could he also have produced works such as “Albert the Alligator,” stories that clearly owe a debt to the conventions of the minstrel stage, and that traffic in derogatory stereotypes? To answer this question, I believe we need to understand Kelly’s nostalgia for his hometown of Bridgeport, Connecticut. One of the flaws in some of Kelly’s early work was his inability or unwillingness to interrogate the images and ideas he’d inherited from childhood artifacts such as, for example, Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories. As Andrae reminds us in the introduction to the Dell Comics collection, Kelly’s father enjoyed readings those stories to his son.

 

 Fig. 3

Fig. 3: Image of Bridgeport from Andrew Pehanick, Bridgeport 1900-1960, p. 124

What effect does nostalgia have on us, as writers, as artists, as critics—as fans? When I speak about Kelly, I find it difficult to separate my nostalgia for home from Kelly’s fondness for the Bridgeport of the late teens and 1920s. When I read Kelly now, I am reminded of my childhood in Connecticut, not because Kelly’s comics played any role in it, but because the setting he describes in his essays, for example—the industrial landscape of the Northeast—is also the world of my imagination. By the late 1970s and the early 1980s, however, the brass and munitions manufacturers that had attracted so many immigrants from Europe and migrants from the South were fading. The only traces that remained were signs with names like Anaconda American Brass on redbrick walls of abandoned factory buildings. And the stories, of course, of the men and women who, like Kelly’s father, like my grandparents and great grandparents, worked in those mills.

Fig. 4

Fig. 4: My grandmother, Patricia Budris Stango, second from left, at work in 1941 at the United States Rubber Company, later called Uniroyal, in Naugatuck, Connecticut

As I argue in my essay on Bumbazine, Kelly did not write about the U.S. South. Rather, he told stories in a setting that, for all its southern trappings, looked and felt more like New England. The city of Bridgeport, Connecticut, was, in the early twentieth century, as Kelly describes it, “as new as a freshly minted dollar, but not quite as shiny. The East Bridgeport Development Company had rooted out trees and damned up streams, drained marshes, and otherwise destroyed the quiet life of buttercups and goldfinches in order to make a section where people like the Kellys could live.” In this essay from 1962, Kelly might be describing Pogo’s Okefenokee Swamp: “Surrounding us was a fairly rural and wooded piece of Connecticut filled with snakes, rabbits, frogs, rats, turtles, bugs, berries, ghosts, and legends” (Kelly, Five Boyhoods, 89).

 Fig. 5

Fig. 5: Clipping from the Bridgeport Post, January 14, 1951. Courtesy of the Bridgeport History Center.

Kelly scholars from Walter Ong to Betsy Curtis to R.C. Harvey to Kerry Soper and Tom Andrae have since the 1950s been looking closely at some of these legends. In his essay “The Comic Strip Pogo and the Issue of Race”—along with Soper’s We Go Pogo (UP of Mississippi, 2012), one of the best academic analyses we have of Kelly’s strip—scholar Eric Jarvis points out that Kelly often referred to “his elementary school principal in Bridgeport as a rather nostalgic model of how society should approach these issues with ‘gentility’” (Jarvis 85). Jarvis then includes passages from Kelly’s introduction to the 1959 collection Ten Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Years with Pogo in which the artist again remembers the Bridgeport of his childhood and that principal, Miss Blackham: “Somehow, by another sainted piece of wizardry, she sent us off to high school feeling neither superior nor inferior. We saw our first Negro children in class there, and believe it or not, none of us was impressed one way or another, which is as it should be. Jimmy Thomas became a good friend and the young lady was pretty enough to remember even today” (Kelly, Ten Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Years, 6).

As Kelly biographer Steve Thompson reminded us at the OSU conference, however, in other interviews Kelly describes the racism and ethnic tensions in the Bridgeport of the 1920s. So, like Jarvis, I am fascinated by the role nostalgia plays in Kelly’s art and in his essays because, after all, as Svetlana Boym reminds us, nostalgia is a utopian impulse, a desire not so much to recover the past as it was lived but to recall the life we wish we’d lived, in a world that never was. But, if it had existed, what would that world have looked like? “Nostlagia (from nostos—return home, and algia—longing),” Boym writes, “is a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia is a sense of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy” (Boym XIII).

When Brannon Costello asked if I’d contribute an essay to Comics and the U.S. South, I hesitated. My first thought was to write an article on Howard Cruse and Stuck Rubber Baby. Already taken, Brannon told me. Then I asked, What about Pogo? You can’t publish a book on comics and the South without Pogo. A friend later remarked, Why would you write about the South? You lived there for less than a year, and the whole time all you talked about was New England. That’s not exactly what she said. What she said was something closer to this: You hated it there. But, more recently, when I told my friend that I’ve now written two essays about Kelly and the South, she smiled and said, Of course. The more we resist something, the more we are drawn to it. The more I resisted Kelly’s comics, the more I found myself drawn to them and to the South and to the myths of Kelly’s youth—my youth—that I had ignored

So, in reading R. Fiore’s review of the new Pogo collection, I again find myself face to face with Walt Kelly. And I keep returning to Walt Kelly’s early comics not because they transcend discourses of race; rather, I return to them because they include these stock figures and because I believe these early stories, like my student’s gift, offer an opportunity to think and to reflect on how these discourses—how these racist stereotypes—have shaped my life, my thinking, my conduct in the world. I am writing about Kelly because, to borrow a phrase from Walt Whitman, he and I were “form’d from this soil, this air,” and I turn to him because he invites me to dig through that soil, to breath the air again, to remember.

 

 Fig. 6

Fig. 6: The final Pogo collection Kelly published in his lifetime (1972)

It is perhaps too easy to say that these early comics are a record of their time. They are, of course; they demand that we investigate and reconstruct the discourses of the era that produced them. But to deny the hurtful and derogatory nature of the images in Kelly’s early work, I believe, is also to deny his power as an artist. The images in these early issues of Animal Comics are ugly, but there is something in them that will not be ignored. In his mature work—read, for example, Ten Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Years with Pogo, or The Pogo Poop Book, or Kelly’s final collection, We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us—Kelly breaks with these conventions. And the image he leaves behind is this one: P.T. Bridgeport, the circus bear, the character who was, in many ways, the real soul of Pogo, now old, tired, but more real and true as he stares at his beloved swamp and sees not a pristine wilderness but a wasteland of junk.  But even here we find a possibility of hope and renewal:

 Fig. 7

Fig 8.

Fig. 7 and Fig. 8: From the last two pages of the title story of Kelly’s We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us (1972) (pages 41-42)

I started this post with a quotation from Walter Benjamin (translated into English by Harry Zohn) not for you but for me, as a way to remind myself of the value of interrogating images like the one of Pogo and Bumbazine sharing the slice of watermelon. If we fail to recognize images from the past as part of our “own concerns,” Benjamin argues, we run the risk of losing them, and their meaning, entirely. But here again I have left something out. Benjamin adds this final parenthetical statement to his fifth thesis: “(The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.)”

So, a paradox: we must look carefully, search for these “flashes,” but we also risk negating them and their meaning when we speak or write about them. But to remain in watchful silence offers no real alternative. We must speak of these things, although, as we do so, we are not speaking about the past, not really. We are instead addressing the pain of what it is to live here, now, with each other and with these discourses that continue to blind and disorient us.

 Fig. 9

 

Fig. 9: Two gifts.

 

References

Andrae, Thomas. “Pogo and the American South” in Walt Kelly, Walt Kelly’s Pogo: The Complete Dell Comics Volume 1. Neshannock: Hermes Press, 2014. Print.

Andrae, Thomas and Carsten Laqua. Walt Kelly: The Life and Art of the Creator of Pogo. Neshannock: Hermes Press, 2012. Print.

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Shocken Books, 1968. Print.

Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Print.

Curtis, Betsy. “Nibble, a Walt Kelly Mouse” in The Golden Age of Comics. No. 1 (December 1982). 30-70. Print.

Fiore, R. “Sometimes a Watermelon Is Just a Watermelon.” The Comics Journal. April 3, 2014. Web Link.

Jarvis, Eric. “The Comic Strip Pogo and the Issue of Race.” Studies in American Culture. XXI:2 (1998): 85-94. Print.

Kelly, Walt. The Pogo Poop Book. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966. Print.

Kelly, Walt. Ten Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Years with Pogo. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959. Print.

—. “1920’s.” Five Boyhoods. Ed. Martin Levin. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1962. 79-116. Print.

Pehanick, Andrew. Bridgeport 1900-1960. Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 2009. Print.

Soper, Kerry D. We Go Pogo: Walt Kelly, Politics, and American Satire. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2012. Print.

Thanks to Mary Witkowski and Robert Jefferies at the Bridgeport History Center for their assistance in locating materials included here from the Center’s Walt Kelly clipping file. Also, I talk a little more about the Walt Kelly panel a November’s OSU conference here.

Fear of Wertham. And Possibly of a Black Planet.

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Earlier this week R. Fiore wrote a post at The Comics Journal defending the honor of Walt Kelly from the suggestion (made by Thomas Andrae in the introduction to Walt Kelly’s Pogo The Complete Dell Comics: Volume One) that maybe, possibly, you could see something slightly racist in the fact that he used blackface caricatures.
 

Pogo2

 
Fiore’s piece is a graceless performance. He spins and sneers, insisting that this image of a black child with a watermelon is not playing into racist jokes about blacks and watermelons because Kelly isn’t malicious and the black kid is portrayed positively so the watermelon must have ended up in there totally by accident, really, it could just as easily have been grapes. There’s no substantive engagement with, or really even mention of, the fact that Kelly’s cartoon blacks are based in blackface iconography, nor any effort to grapple with what that means.

The really depressing thing is that there’s an interesting article struggling to get out from behind Fiore’s special pleading. Jeet Heer, in the comments to the post, argues that (contra Fiore) Kelly did use blackface iconography but that (as Fiore says) Kelly’s depictions of blacks were in fact better than those of some of his contemporaries. Brian Cremins, who has written in an academic context about Kelly, also suggests in comments that the minstrel tradition was very important to Kelly’s art and humor, and that that’s something to be investigated rather than denied or fled from. I’m not a fan of Kelly’s especially, and haven’t read many of his comics, but it’s clear that there’s a discussion worth having about his relationship to race and racism. It sounds, in fact, like Andrae was engaged in such a discussion.

But Fiore isn’t having it. Kelly cannot have been touched by racism — or, if he was, that only goes to show how utterly awesome and virtuous he really is.
 

At the outset, we must presume that Walt Kelly was more enlightened than Thomas Andrae, or you, or me. This is because unlike Walt Kelly’s, our enlightenment is socially assisted. Walt Kelly had to come upon his all on his own. Now, any of us might have been one of the enlightened people in those days, and all of us think we would have been one of the enlightened persons in those days, but the odds say otherwise, and in the actual event Kelly was. We simply embrace the conventional wisdom of our time. Kelly swam against the tide.

The suggestion that you or me or Fiore have reached some level of enlightenment which puts us beyond the touch of racism, and therefore beyond moral censure or praise as regards racism, is perhaps the least of the idiocies in this paragraph. The vision of Kelly as great artist, achieving his goal of perfect equality and watermelons without any input from anyone, inventing anti-racism out of whole cloth, without the intervention or help of any actual black people anywhere, is, for its part, familiar in import. Anti-racism here isn’t really a goal in itself; reading Fiore’s piece, it seems fairly clear that Fiore couldn’t possibly care less about racism, or about black people. Anti-racism is just a accoutrement of (white) genius, like a punchy prose style or a pleasing ink line. Fiore admires Kelly’s humanism; if that humanism is compromised, so is the admiration. Ergo, the admiration being fulsome, no racism can exist. QED.

Fiore’s a longtime TCJ hand, and here he manages to embody some of the least enlightening aspects of old school comics fan culture: its hagiography; its crippling insularity (racial and otherwise); its smug distrust of academia; and most of all its defensiveness.

The last couldn’t be more counter-productive. A critical establishment that reacts with panic and dyspepsia to the suggestion that obvious blackface iconography is obvious blackface iconography is not a critical establishment that anyone beyond the most hard-core nostalgists is going to find welcoming. Join Team Comics! We were using watermelons in a totally non-racist way 70 years ago, pat us on the back! If you want to make your art form look clueless, ridiculous, and not a little repulsive, this would be the way to do it. Fiore’s handwaving doesn’t so much distract from the racism of comics’ past as it raises embarrassing and painful questions about the racism of comics’ present.
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Update: Brian Cremins has a lovely piece about Pogo, race, and nostalgia here.

Bloom County in Contexts

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“This sort of thing–the mocking self-consciousness–confounded the poor newspaper editors. I thought everyone did it.”
—Berkeley Breathed

 
“I’d never read any comic besides Doonesbury,” Berkeley Breathed wrote, whenever people asked him about his influences. Reading early Bloom County and its predecessor, Breathed’s college strip The Academia Waltz, the dominant flavor is Trudeau: the sex & dating jokes, the political humor, the first faint touches of surrealism (talking animals aside) with Zonker descending, like Snoopy into his Doghouse, into the depths of two-foot-wide Walden Puddle. Though Breathed’s squash-and-stretchy, Chuck Jones artwork was always distinct from Trudeau’s thin lines, Trudeau was Breathed’s model for a comic strip: early on, he even unconsciously reused an entire punchline with Milo Bloom in the place of Mike Doonesbury. The two cartoonists later became friends, and by the late ’80s, the tables had turned: Bloom County influenced Doonesbury. After his 1984 hiatus, Trudeau followed Breathed’s lead, introducing more spot blacks, thicker linework, wilder camera angles, and surreal pop-culture parodies like Ron Headrest and Mr. Butts. (Trudeau was heavier-handed than Breathed; Trudeau’s parodies always had a point.)
 

academia-waltz

 
Bloom County reshaped the boundaries of American newspaper comics. Its appropriation of celebrity culture, politics and commercialism were the perfect expression of, and protest against, the booming ’80s. He used undisguised references to real people and things, real logos and real modified photographs; even Li’l Abner, the newspapers’ onetime satire king, had always hidden its pop-culture references and product titles under cheesy disguises (i.e. TIME+LIFE=LIME magazine), and when it featured celebrities (like Frank Sinatra) they were fawned-over guest stars, not subjects of mockery.  In Breathed’s case his only restraint—the mellow heart of the strip—was a Shel Silverstein-like mix of whimsy and perversity, and an unwillingness to talk down to children.

But he was uninfluenced by comics apart from Trudeau; to hear Breathed tell the tale, he created Bloom County in a vacuum from the comics world, isolated after moving to Iowa City with his then-girlfriend. The over-the-top, Hunter S. Thompson-esque persona Breathed displayed on his dust-jacket bios was half true: apparently he really did prefer kayaking and flying airplanes to sitting at his desk reading comics and drawing them (though I suspect he watched a lot of daytime TV). Bloom County was not an exercise in nostalgia for comics past (like this article), or a self-conscious work of art burdened by the History of the Medium (like Patrick McDonnell’s Mutts). Nor did Breathed have any particular interest in his own fans, let alone the kind of “fan dialogue” and “community-building” that is a requirement for being an artist in the 2014 world of social media; although I’ve never heard of him being rude to a fan, he confessed in the catalog to the 2011 Cartoon Art Museum Berkeley Breathed exhibit that he didn’t really understand their enthusiasm at the time (he came to appreciate it later) and he was always nonplussed at things like book signings. Breathed’s lack of interest in comic strips allowed him to become one of their last true originals.
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As an upper-middle-class child in coastal Northern California in the ’80s, I was a Democrat by default, although not from any deep political awareness: my issues were mostly fear of nuclear war (and thus of Reagan), and a kind of Al Gore “don’t build your houses near my house” environmentalism. I started reading Bloom County sometime in elementary school, probably because my friends brought the collections to school, and soon afterwards it started in the local newspaper.

I was 10, the same age as the strip’s ostensible main characters Milo and Binkley, and Bloom County fascinated me. It had content I’d never seen in comics before: atomic mutants, plastic surgery, nuclear spills, cocaine, and scenes of the U.S. Marines invading Antarctica (“Operation Antarctic Fury”), running around chasing penguins and firing guns. It introduced me to people I’d never seen on the comics page, and some I wasn’t familiar with at all: of course I knew about Brooke Shields and Michael Jackson, but Geraldo Rivera, Mike Wallace, James Watt and Mick Jagger, to name a few, all came to my attention through Bloom County first. Lastly, it introduced me to words I’d never seen in comics: “hijackers,” “war mongers,” “imperialist pig.” In one early strip radical schoolteacher Ms. Harlow leads her students in a protest, ending with the gag of a little girl wearing a gas mask, “In case the fishes tear-gas me.” Harlow corrects her: “Fascists, dear.” I learned the words “liberal” and “left-wing” from Bloom County, although I wasn’t sure what they meant at first, since my only context were Breathed’s strips about “the vanishing American Liberal! Once they thundered across the American scene in great herds, but now they have been hunted to near extinction!”
 

Picture 1

 
With underdog stubbornness and absurdist self-mockery, throughout the Reagan years, Breathed kept the liberal/leftist torch burning on the comics page. My mother, who started reading the strip shortly after I did, certainly got references that I didn’t; but even to me Bloom County was, as Li’l Abner might have put it, eddycayshunal. Although it’s not annotated by IDW, I remember exactly what scandal Breathed was parodying in the December 3, 1983 strip (when lousy politician Limekiller announces proudly of his campaign team “We’ve got every kind of weird mix you can imagine…a black, a woman, two dips and a cripple!”), because our elementary school teacher had used it as an inroad to talk about prejudice and affirmative action. Even to the most politically apathetic kid or adult, Bloom County’s other hook was that it was visually unpredictable, a break from the 1960s flat aesthetic popularized by Peanuts and enforced by the size of the comics page (and later, by Flash animation). Bloom County used camera tricks, fake advertisements and newspaper articles and other meta-play with the comics medium, and starred a variety of grotesques, hallucinations, dream sequences and monsters, the latter usually but not always birthed from Binkley’s Anxiety Closet. (Calvin and Hobbes, which came later, also had cool aliens and monsters, but was sadly lacking in machine guns and chainsaw murderers.)

Like most comic strips, Bloom County took awhile to find its voice. The first collection from Little, Brown & Company didn’t come out ’till 1983, three years after the launch, and eliminated tons of material only reprinted in the complete collection from IDW. Apart from the then-undifferentiated funny animals, the strip started as a dialogue between Milo Bloom—young, liberal, cynical, an author-insertion character—and old Major Bloom, the gun-toting, Commie-hating, Patton-imitating right-winger. Major Bloom was joined, from then till the end of the strip, by a variety of other parodies of conservatives and rotten political types: Moral Majoritarian Otis Oracle; merely drunk and corrupt Senator Bedfellow; drunk, corrupt and poor Limekiller; and Republican fratboy lawyer Steve Dallas. Gradually the early characters departed, leaving their useful qualities to be distributed among the survivors. Major Bloom faded away, and his conservative politics were absorbed by Steve Dallas and the lesser animals (Hodge-Podge the rabbit and Portnoy the gopher). Milo never entirely left, but he became more of a coldly calculating newspaperman and politico; his functions as a romantic lead were ceded to two more sensitive characters, first hapless, Linus-like Binkley—introduced as a wimpy young dreamer who’s a perpetual disappointment to his macho Archie Bunker-like father—and then even more hapless, and thus more sympathetic, Opus the penguin. In 1982 Opus began to take center stage, writing his poetry, dreaming of flight, becoming the center of innocence in a chaotic world. With the introduction (and, in 1983, first death) of Bill the Cat, the drooling, brain-dead, bulging-eyed, cocaine-addicted parody of every celebrity imaginable (including Garfield, E.T., Little Orphan Annie, etc.), Opus had his partner and the strip had its core.
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“Single, red-headed female, 23, sensual, intelligent, delicious; seeks short, flightless aquatic bird on which to lavish kisses and affection…”

 
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Much of the later strip featured around long, tabloid-like melodramas about these characters—Opus & Bill’s 1983 presidential run, Opus switching places with Michael Jackson, Opus, Bill and Steve’s stint in the heavy metal band Deathtöngue—and this was another thing about Bloom County: it was the last of the great story strips. It wasn’t the only one of course, but for me in 1984, Doonesbury and For Better or Worse were too adult and boring (also, someone had drawn erect penises on all the characters in the Doonesbury book at the local library) and even back then, the oldtimers like Little Orphan Annie and Alley Oop were obviously preserved corpses, propped up and hideously embalmed. But my mother and I eagerly looked forward to the daily newspaper to see what was happening with Opus’ latest crush, or Oliver Wendell Jones hacking the Pentagon and going to jail, or Bill the Cat’s affair with Jeane Kirkpatrick. Other humor strips rarely kept continuity longer than a predictable week-long arc, but Bloom County had the cliffhangers and emotional tug of a soap-opera continuity (with Breathed’s typical snark: when Steve Dallas is kidnapped and then zapped back to Earth by aliens, the final caption for that day’s strip reads “To be continued! Or maybe it won’t! Ya never know, do ya?”). I had to read Bloom County every day because it always seemed like the next day Opus might wake up in bed with someone, or our heroes might be lost on their balloon flight over the Atlantic, or Bill the Cat might die (again). Towards the end of Bloom County‘s 9-year run the stories started to repeat themselves, and perhaps Breathed needed a break; but when he relaunched the comic as Outland (and later, Opus) and switched from a continuity-focused daily to Sundays-only, he removed one of the strip’s great appeals.
 

Bloom County bears some resemblance, apparently unintentional, to Pogo, another strip about politics and talking animals. Though more vicious in his satire, Berkeley Breathed shared Walt Kelly’s love of silliness and rhyme, as well as an innocent hero surrounded by incompetence and guile, and there is a similar charmingly rinky-dink feel to their respective storylines when the meadow/swamp animals ineptly attempt to run businesses and political campaigns. They also share another theme: love. Pogo Possum and the other male animals were always circling the star of the skunk Mam’zelle Hepzibah (the Love Goddess Ishtar of furry fandom), and Opus’ unrequited romances are the center of many plotlines; when not involved romantically, he’s pursuing another unattainable female presence, his long-lost mother, whom he first sought in 1984. Bloom County was exceptionally frank about love and sex, not to mention bestiality, as in the Greystoke parody with a half-disrobed Andie MacDowell wooing an as always half-comatose Bill the Cat (“Oo, Lord Orangestoke…it must have been so…so…terribly lonely…in that big…lush…steamy…sweaty jungle…”).

This was mind-blowing stuff to me at age 10. Unlike most newspaper strips which, if not about school or workplace, focus on families (typified today by Zits and Baby Blues—grandparents drawing comics for grandparents about their nostalgic memories of parenthood), Bloom County‘s emotional fixation was always dating and single life. Breathed was a young man. One of the early continuing characters was Bobbi Harlow, the schoolteacher whose defining traits were that she was an (attractive) leftist feminist in a hick town surrounded by chauvinist jerks; Breathed resurrected sexist fratboy Steve Dallas from his college strip as her antagonist and stalker. (Whether a difference of artists’ personalities and/or of late ’60s culture vs. late ’70s, the women in Breathed’s college strips generally come off better than in Trudeau’s, where they are more often just conquests or fanservice.) Through Dallas, Breathed mocked male machismo with a few Portlandia-ish detours to mock New Agey feminism (“There’s no need to be threatened by my womanhood…You turned your rear towards me, obviously an effort to deny a strong feminine presence nearby”). But Harlow started dating wheelchair-bound Cutter John (basically a Breathed self-insertion character) and slipped out of the comic.
 
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Breathed introduced some other female characters, usually temporary, like shy, long-suffering teenager Yaz Pistachio (a sort of female Binkley), and Lola Granola, the free-spirited hippie artist who ends up fairly well-fleshed-out as a person who might consider marrying a penguin (over or because of her mother’s objections). But the strip mostly looks, mockingly or sympathetically, at the insecurities of men. Binkley’s Anxiety Closet, normally known for disgorging giant snakes and other monsters, surprises him one night with a beautiful woman demanding “Kiss me, Binkley! Kiss me like only a real man can kiss! I want fireworks, Binkley…I expect nothing less from the men of today!” Prepubescent Binkley ducks and hides under the covers. Though Breathed never degenerated into pin-up fanservice and “guy humor” (and even worse, “nice guy” humor) like Frank Cho’s blatant Bloom County imitation Liberty Meadows, Bloom County falls into the long cartoon tradition of a world where women are humans and men are (mostly) talking animals and monsters. And children.
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“I will probably go out on my sword one day, insisting on a particular strip running despite the furor. One day.”
—Berkeley Breathed, May 2007

Al Capp, whose Li’l Abner was considered liberal in the ’40s but which changed by the ’60s into a vehicle for Capp’s grumpy and increasingly vehement right-wing politics, claimed in the foreword to his career-retrospective anthology The Best of Li’l Abner that it was liberalism, not he, who had changed: “I turned around and let the other side have it.” Berkeley Breathed never got conservative, but he did get grumpy (or grumpier, considering his always-slightly-ornery public persona).

<"There are no sacred cows (although perhaps penguins) in Bloom County,” reads the back cover text on the 2009 IDW edition Volume 1, suggesting that it was infamous in its time as some major boat-shaker. But although its groundbreaking nature is undeniable, I don’t remember Bloom County being particularly controversial in the ’80s: not like, say, Dungeons & Dragons (ignored by Breathed), heavy metal (affectionately parodied), Stephen King novels or video games (mocked scornfully). A google search for 20th-century Bloom County controversies and censorship doesn’t turn up much, except for grumbling from frequent targets like Mary Kay Cosmetics and Donald Trump, and newspapers changing “Reagan sucks” to “Reagan stinks” in a November 1987 strip. (Breathed responded “Today’s youth have long since legitimized the word.”) Breathed never charged suicidally into the windmill like, say, Bobby London; Bloom County was, like any newspaper strip had to be, a strip a 10-year-old boy could read at breakfast with his mother. In the annotations to the IDW edition, however, Breathed repeatedly points out strips he “couldn’t get away with nowadays.” In a 1981 strip poking fun at victimization and censorship (ending with the censors’ horrified realization “My gosh…LIFE is offensive!!”) he digs in the point with the 2009 annotation “It must feel very empowering to be offended all the time.”
 

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The rebranding, however slight, of Bloom County as a firestorm of political incorrectness presumably comes from Breathed’s own experiences at the end of his newspaper-strip career. In late summer 2007 two Opus strips jumped into the headlines when the Washington Post, Breathed’s home syndicate newspaper, refused to print them due to their satire of Islam (specifically through a white American convert, presumably an attempt to decouple religion from race). Breathed had mocked religion before, such as the Hare Krishnas in 1982, the “Bhagwan Rajneesh Cult Center” in 1984, and Christian fundamentalists, always. Although Breathed did not retire Opus until a year later, to hear him describe it in later interviews, listening to his publisher at the Washington Post relay concerns from a Muslim staffer about how much hair should stick out of Lola’s hijab convinced him that it was impossible to write the strip the way he wanted anymore. (“I thought that I saw it coming and approached it with probably more sensitivity than I am known for. I was not mocking anything about the Muslim dress—I was mocking the reaction to it,” Breathed said later.) Opus became a punching bag of the grotesquely partisan media landscape of 2007-2008, when Sony Computer Entertainment could recall the video game Little Big Planet for fear of offending Muslims with Quranic verses in the music (in a soundtrack created by an African Muslim musician), while right-wing news channels unapologetically stoked fear stories of American mosques and Obama’s “closet Muslim” religion.
 

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To my eye, looking back over the old strips, Breathed does a good job of walking a delicate tightrope: creating a true Gonzo comedy, a broad satire of humanity, without veering into sexism, racism and stereotypes. At least not nonselfconscious ones. Throughout the strip Breathed made a strong effort to include African-American characters in a noncaricatural way, both in jokes about racism (mocking Diff’rent Strokes, the “Michael Jackson Caucasian Kit,” etc.) and race-neutral contexts. Oliver Wendell Jones, the 10-year-old genius computer scientist, was the Schroeder of the strip and one of the core cast. On December 11, 1983 Breathed reused an old daily strip joke as a Sunday strip with Oliver Wendell Jones and his grandfather in what had been Milo and the Major’s roles. Later, less successfully, Breathed introduced Ronald-Ann Smith, a poor black girl from the inner city, who was intended to be the main character of Outland; but in this case Breathed seemingly found it too difficult to make her a character rather than just a symbol, and she faded out of the strip (like all of the new Outland characters, for that matter). (The true fusion of Bloom County with African-American issues ended up being Aaron MacGruder’s The Boondocks, openly influenced by Breathed.)
 

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Breathed wasn’t above using stereotypes to tell an essentially anti-stereotypical message, as in a late Academia Waltz strip when an Iranian-American calls his brother in Iran to beg him to stop burning American flags on TV, so he himself won’t be beaten up by bigots like Steve Dallas. (“Allah help me…it is fratboy!”) Garry Trudeau had introduced the first (openly -_- ) gay character in mainstream newspaper strips in 1976, but it was still very unusual in the early ’80s when Bloom County made fun of homophobia, in the recurring storylines in which TV preachers torment Opus with crusades against “penguin lust.” (“The biggest moral threat to the very moral fiber of our immoral society…penguin lust!!! Nothing but urges from hell!“) In elementary school I didn’t get this joke, although neither did I get the joke when the heroes go to San Francisco for a political convention and stay at a hotel run by a pair of bondage-loving leather daddies. In Bloom County one finds the occasional one-panel of a wacky Asian chef with Ginsu knives, or Milo disguised as an oil sheik to entrap a politician (“Want some dough, O fat one?”). But Breathed didn’t merely parrot the default American stereotypes, as demonstrated in a 2006 Opus strip in which he included a threatening, bazooka-wielding IDF soldier among a bevy of turbaned terrorists springing out of Opus’ Anxiety Closet of Modern Fears. Outnumbered five to one by turbans, but still enough to anger conservative bloggers, like the 2009 Doonesbury Old Testament joke that provoked a disapproving letter from the ADL.

When Breathed quit newspaper comics in 2008, he cited frustration with things like the 2007 Islam controversy, and another incident he mentions in the IDW annotations, when the Washington Post “shut down my gentle mockery of Scientology in 2008” (apparently completely shut it down, since no mentions of Scientology appear in Opus strips in that year as far as I can tell). He blamed the partisan political climate and the timidity of newspaper editors. It’s difficult not to wonder how long Opus would have kept going in any case, since Breathed, like many aging newspaper strip artists, had long expressed frustration about the dwindling relevance of newspapers, and had twice before canceled his strips in an attempt to switch over to children’s books and other media. Like the other major comic strip artists who arose in the ’80s, Bill Watterson and Gary Larson, Breathed had a completely different attitude towards his art than the strippers of earlier generations: i.e., it’s better to stop while you’re ahead than to beat the horse ’till death and beyond.

Tim Keck, co-founder of The Onion, recently said in a lecture that the changing relationship between media and audience makes it harder to use edgy humor with a mass audience: the same hyperconnected social media that makes it possible to, say, fund Kickstarter projects also makes public outrage/disapproval much faster, stronger and harder to ignore. In the 2010s, artists are assumed to be in constant communication with their fans, and the kind of outsider distance that artists like Watterson or Breathed had in the 1980s—Breathed once said he wasn’t aware when Bloom County had become popular until many months later—whether a disadvantage or an advantage, seems quaint. Similarly, the things Breathed pioneered on the comics page—the combined mockery of pop culture and politics, the intermedia visual play with altered photographs, hoax headlines and ads—are now commonplace (if not as well done as Breathed did them), easy to make with Photoshop and fast to upload into memes. (And as a result of their instancy, sadly, they’re rarely strung together into the hilarious narratives and recurring characters Breathed did so well.) Like much about Bloom County, it’s easy to look at these things and think, “ahh, how ’80s!”; but Breathed himself would probably resist casting the book as a mere piece of ’80s nostalgia. Breathed’s Bloom County was a work of genius, but it was never nostalgic; as long as it is controversial, it is current. Old comic strips, like all old comedies, have power when they are humor, not humored.
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The entire Bloom County roundtable is here.

#8: Pogo, Walt Kelly

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Lenny Bruce will always get credit for having house-invaded the Fifties, but the satirists who threw the bricks through the front window and gadflied the powerful were saloon comics like Mort Sahl, folkies like the Kingston Trio and the Limelighters, that sublimest of television shows, Rocky and Bullwinkle (still state of the art “kids” teevee), and three cartoonists: Jules Feiffer, Herblock, and mainly Walt Kelly. Pogo was Doonesbury before the name. Kelly, who came to panel cartooning with a Disney pedigree (he worked on Pinocchio), understood that the only defense of humanism against the ideologues was irony. He went after Joe McCarthy unprotected and was prophetic in seeing that the problem was Tailgunner Joe. And so? The Gulf of Tonkin, Vietnam, Watergate, Reagan and Irangate, the Savings and Loan fiasco, Iraq I and II, the Clinton Impeachment, the present economic crises, and the Tea Party—where is he when we need him?

J. T. Barbarese is an Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University.

Pogo, by Walt Kelly, received 24 votes.

The poll participants who included it in their top ten are: J. T. Barbarese, Robert Beerbohm, Alice Bentley, Kurt Busiek, Brian Codagnone, Dave Coverly, Francis DiMenno, Jackie Estrada, Andrew Farago, Larry Feign, Bob Fingerman, Larry Gonick, Diana Green, Sam Henderson, Kenneth Huey, John MacLeod, Eugenio Nittolo, Rick Norwood, Stephanie Piro, Kenneth Smith, Tom Stiglich, Ty Templeton, Jason Thompson, and Mark Tonra.

Walt Kelly’s Pogo began with the story “Albert Takes the Cake” in Animal Comics, published in 1942. The story introduced Pogo Possum and Albert Alligator. This was the beginning of a regular comic-book feature that continued in Animal Comics and other titles through 1948.

On October 4, 1948, Pogo was launched as a daily newspaper strip in the New York Star, a left-leaning newspaper for which Kelly worked as art director and provided editorial cartoons. This initial run continued until the newspaper stopped publishing on January 28, 1949. On May 16, 1949, the strip was relaunched under the auspices of the Post-Hall Syndicate.

During this time the comic-book feature continued in its own title, Pogo Possum, which began in 1949 and continued until 1954. With its end, Pogo became a newspaper-only comic. It continued for the next three decades.

In 1972, Walt Kelly became seriously ill. During this time, the strip was largely restricted to reprints. After he died on October 18, 1973, the strip was continued by his widow Selby Daley Kelly and others until its cancellation on July 20, 1975.

There have been dozens of Pogo collections and other books published over the years. None are in print at this time. The best one-volume introduction is probably Selby Daley Kelly and Steve A. Thompson’s Pogo Files for Pogophiles, published in 1992. It can be found in many public libraries.

–Robert Stanley Martin

Best Comics Poll Index

Strange Windows: Keeping up with the Goonses (part 3)

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This is part three of our look at comics’ contributions to colloquial English.

Another prolific contributor to the language was Al Capp, creator of the strip Li’l Abner.

“My Mom and Dad met when she picked him out at a Sadie Hawkins dance.”

Sadie Hawkins is one of Capp’s memorable characters; she first appeared in November 1937, and until the mid-50s, November was known as Sadie Hawkins month and became an unofficial collegiate holiday.

Hawkins was the ugly daughter of the most wealthy and powerful man in town and was avoided by all the town’s men.

Hawkins’ father lined up all eligible males and shot off his gun. When the gun was fired, they ran for their lives and their freedom from matrimony.

click image to enlarge

The gunshot signaled the unwed women to enter the race and try to catch a man. When an unlucky male was brought back, kicking and screaming, he had no choice but to marry the woman. Thus was born a Dogpatch annual tradition: Sadie Hawkins Day.

Capp also came up with the idea for a Sadie Hawkins dance — a dance where only the ladies picked their partners.

The craze spread throughout the ’40s and ’50s, and continues today.


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Original Art: Living with Comics Art

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As with any hobby, collecting comics original art has its own complexities which take in both the aesthetics and economics of the form.

The latter aspect is one of the most hotly debated topics in the hobby because of the escalation of prices of original art over the last few years – prices which which have been barely affected by the ongoing global recession (more on this at a late date).

With regards the aesthetics of original art (i.e. an original page of comics art viewed in isolation on a wall), the academic Andrei Molotiu has written an approach to this in The International Journal of Comic Art (IJOCA) the main points of which I might bring up sometime in the future.

That article uses Molotiu’s own collection as a frame of reference. I should say here that much of the writing concerning original art tends to focus on the individual writer’s personal collection if only because of the lack of public access to most of the art in question. Not only are public collections of comic art small in number, even fewer have sufficient depth to allow for the study of a broad range of cartoonists. In fact, the vast majority of important pieces lie in private hands. There are exceptions of course. The large collection of original art from Little Orphan Annie under safekeeping at Boston University and the complete art to Amazing Fantasy #15 for example.

Viewing a piece of original art can sometimes reveal circumstances not immediately apparent on a simple reading of the final product (i.e. the comic itself). For example, some might find the number of corrections and white out marks on this page by Frank Miller from The Dark Knight Triumphant worthy of interest.

The fact that people own small panels from the same comic which are likely to be Miller’s reworking of some scenes as well as possible corrections to Klaus Janson’s inking might also be of note historically speaking.

At the risk of stating the obvious, pages from The Dark Knight Returns are some of the most expensive pieces of art in modern comics. Pages from Walt Kelly’s Pogo on the other hand are cheap. Certainly much cheaper than a page from The Dark Knight Returns but also considerably less expensive than art from some other classic strips like Flash Gordon, Krazy Kat or Prince Valiant etc.

[A Pogo Sunday from an upcoming Heritage Auction which is another site to find high quality scans of comics original art.]

Most of Kelly’s strips have not seen publication for a few decades which obviously contributes to their lack of visibility and desirability. Only a person with access to a sizable collection of vintage newspaper cartoon sections would be apprised of the bulk of Kelly’s run.

Pogo is, to me, one of the greatest strips ever published. A full Sunday is available at a fraction of the price of other more illustration-based strips or even the estimated price of a Calvin and Hobbes daily – a strip which it influenced significantly and to which it compares very favorably. This relates to supply and demand. Not only is art from Calvin and Hobbes much more desired than art from Pogo, the supply is virtually non-existent (though there’s this example by one of the biggest collectors in the hobby) because of Bill Watterson’s understandable reluctance to sell his art work.

One of the pleasures of “living” with a piece of art is that you begin to notice details which you would not in a 2-3 minute gallery appraisal (online or otherwise). Most readers would probably have read through an average Pogo Sunday like the one below in a matter of minutes (if not less). Take a moment to read it now.

As most readers will know, while Pogo is of particular note for its political content, it began life as a children’s comic in Dell’s Animal Comics. The example above reflects the strips more light-hearted origins. Even so, it reveals a great deal of Kelly’s craft.

For one, there’s the extensive wordplay which may not register, in all its fullness, on a simple Sunday morning read through. The constant exposure to the Pogo Sunday above (which hangs in my apartment) has made me even more acutely aware of the density of Kelly’s technique.

In the fourth panel of the strip, we have Miz Beaver commenting on “the finest mess of pies..ever seed” in anticipation of what is to happen later in the strip – something which would require more than a single reading to pick up (And who has actually asked the question of her? Are we the readers asking with anything but our eyes?).

In the sixth panel, Albert breaks into a soliloquy on the seasons declaiming, “Off I spring, as prettily as a summer zephyr…” , as he launches into one of his cricket hops. In the eighth panel, Miz Beaver exclaims, “Oh dear, always they go Splobsh”, almost as if she had some experience in the bespatterment of pies, while the last 2 panels of the Sunday suggest a reference to the economics of the same. The pies are noted to be “a mite tart but tasty”, not only referring to their slightly acidic taste (def: 1 : agreeably sharp or acid to the taste 2 : marked by a biting, acrimonious, or cutting quality) but also a synonym for that type of confection. And let’s not forget that Albert is using the word in relation to a female baker who has recently laid out her wares.

Perhaps most complex of all is Albert’s complaint in the third panel where he states, “My Ma was cricket champeen of Ol’ Gummidge-on-the Wicket”. Gummidge-on-the-Wicket is an obvious reference to a cricket ground and nothing to do with insects. Nor is it named after any notable first class cricket ground but is ostensibly some Anglicized village in the middle of the Okefenokee Swamp in the Southern United States. If anything, the name of the cricket ground has more to with the nature of Albert’s mother. One online encyclopedia defines “gummidge” as:

“Gummidge a peevish, self-pitying, and pessimistic person, given to complaining, from the name of Mrs Gummidge, a character in Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850).”

And here we have the Wikipedia entry which I have not confirmed myself since I read David Copperfield far too many years ago to remember the character’s exact nature:

“Mrs. Gummidge – The widow of Daniel Peggotty’s partner in a boat. She is a self-described “lone, lorn creetur” who spends much of her time pining for “the old ‘un” (her late husband). After Emily runs away from home with Steerforth, she changes her attitude to better comfort everyone around her and tries to be very caring and motherly. She too emigrates to Australia with Dan and the rest of the surviving family.”

The crickets which appear in over half the panels remain silent bemused observers throughout, pacing along with Pogo while not demonstrating any of their own hopping skills.

Beyond the dense wordplay, there are certain elements which can be seen only upon viewing the original art. There’s the carefully hand-drawn title “Pogo” which contrasts with the occasional title paste-ups which occur in some of Kelly’s Sundays.

There are the ubiquitous blue pencils which were used to sketch in the script in many of Kelly’s strips and his careful arrangement (or rearrangement) of word balloons.

A pencil sketch which does not correspond to the final inked version is used to delineate Albert’s flight (a change of heart or merely a guide?) …

… and later, Kelly corrects the disposition of one of Miz Beaver’s pies to allow for a more accurate trajectory with respect to a previous panel.

Something else which might not be apparent from a simple reading of the final printed strip is Kelly’s effortless technique which is devoid of hesitation, a single inking correction or white out.

A simple and somewhat insignificant Pogo Sunday like this one may not have the endless fascination of a truly great painting or etching but it still affords a reasonable amount of pleasure whenever I glance at it each day.