Mr. Write's Page

When I was in my early teens — back when I was not only smarter and more perceptive than everyone else, but also had better taste — I had three passions: science fiction, Mad Magazine, and the comic strip Pogo.

I loved all three, but honestly, Pogo and his goofball animal friends were closest to my heart — in large part because my mom loved Pogo, too.

(Mom’s taste and mine did coincide on occasion. There was Pogo. There was comedian Jonathan Winters. The comedy team of Bob and Ray. Johnny Cash. The Sopranos. It was a bonding thing.)

Pogo ran from 1948 until 1975, a time when comics were still a big deal in the daily newspapers. Today, most people know about Pogo only vaguely. They may be aware that he was a possum, and he and his animal friends did humorous things.

If that’s all you know, that’s a shame. Pogo was a treasure — clever, intelligent, and downright uplifting. Reading Pogo every day was like visiting some delightful place and hanging out with your favorite pals.

Pogo was the creation of illustrator Walt Kelly, who got his start in the business with Disney Studios. The strip was set in the Okefenokee Swamp in South Georgia, which Kelly, a Connecticut Yankee, had never seen.

The strip was populated by a menagerie of swamp creatures whose adventures were a glorious mix of humor, satire, allegory, puns, whimsy, and silliness.

Somehow, Kelly took the opossum, an ugly, sneaky, generally unpleasant scavenger, and turned it into the cute and friendly Pogo Possum.

Pogo could be read and enjoyed by both children and adults. On the surface, the stories were simple and entertaining enough for kids to appreciate. On another level, Kelly deftly made points to the adults about society, politics, and human nature.

I always thought one of Pogo’s special charms was the gentle nature of the characters. Eventually, even the laziest and most rascally of them was revealed as good-hearted.

In fact, Kelly never introduced a character so malevolent that the readers were turned off. Even his villains, usually parodies of politicians of the time, were deftly defused with a touch of confusion, stupidity, or incompetence.

The Pogo comic strip ran in black and white on weekdays and in color on Sundays. Virtually all the strips were later republished in book form. Simon & Shuster alone published 45 trade paperback Pogo books between 1951 and 1989. A dozen are now displayed proudly on the shelves of my li-bry.

Pogo’s world in the swamp was surprisingly complex and filled with major and minor characters. Coming up with a representative sample of three decades worth of Pogo strips is a tall order.

But I’ll give it a shot.