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Pogo: Walt Kelly
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Pogo was the title and central character of a long-running (1948-75) daily comic strip created by Walt Kelly. Set in the Georgia section of the Okefenokee Swamp, Pogo often engaged in social and political satire through the adventures of the strip's funny animals. Since Pogo occasionally used slapstick physical humor, the same series of strips could often be enjoyed by young children and by savvy adults on different levels. Kelly's strip earned him a Reuben in 1951.
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Pogo [I]s set in the Okefenokee Swamp, and this gives Kelly both freedom and insulation. Although Kelly borrows a real geographical name, it is clear that his swamp is purely imaginative: "The Okefenokee swamp in which those animals live is not an odd corner of the state of Georgia...but on the outskirts of Arcadia."25 It is a timeless, primeval realm of fantasy, and its primitivism and seclusion make it an ideal locale for investigating the essential nature of man. The natural surroundings parallel the natural disorder of the strip, provide a suitably pastoral setting for contemplation, and focus the reader’s attention on Kelly’s anthropomorphic animals.
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By that time, Pogo had begun to star in his second major venue, newspaper strips. On Oct. 4, 1948, the Possum began as a daily strip in The New York Star. It was then that Kelly's political views began to be noticed in what had formerly been strictly a children's feature. (In comic books... Pogo remained free of politics as long as the series lasted.)
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Pogo [I]lluminates the flawed brotherhood of man, and its central paradox is Kelly’s attempt to use humor based on the fragmented state of man and language to lessen that fragmentation. Yet, as a rebel who clings to traditional values, a satirist who often employs sentimentality, and a commercially successful artist who uses sophisticated linguistic and artistic techniques, Kelly is a artist whose work exhibits many paradoxes. The pursuit of wholeness means simultaneously grasping the slippery contrarieties of innocence and experience, comedy and tragedy, idealism and common sense.
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It is difficult to compile a definitive list of every character that appeared in Pogo over the strip's 27 years, but the best estimates put the total cast at over 300. Kelly would create characters as he needed them, and discarded them when they ceased to be funny, or had served their purpose. Most characters were at least nominally male, but a few female characters appeared regularly. Kelly has been quoted as saying that all the characters reflected different aspects of his personality.
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The comic strip Pogo, created by Walt Kelly, ran in daily newspapers from 1948 to 1973. The strip was set in Georgia's Okefenokee Swamp and was populated by animals talking in a fractured southern dialect. Over the years Pogo often referred to Georgia and to several of the state's locales, such as Waycross, Fort Mudge, and Ware County. In one story line, involving cold war themes, the swamp characters used the state as a counterpoint to the Soviet Republic of Georgia. Overall, Pogo provided the American newspaper-reading public with a humorously stereotyped view of southern life, complete with folksy sayings, strange food (such as chicken foot perloo), corncob-smoking females, and images of chivalrous southern manhood. For the animals of the Okefenokee, the Confederacy still existed, with Jefferson Davis as its president and Richmond, Virginia, its national capital.
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Walt Kelly