Pogo (comic)

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Pogo is the most famous comic book character by the American comic artist Walt Kelly . Kelly received the Reuben Award in 1951 for his stories about an anthropomorphic opossum, which only caught on at the third attempt .

Plot and characters

The location of the comic is the Okefenokee swamp, in which the anthropomorphic opossum Pogo lives with his friends and acquaintances. Other important figures include Pogo’s friend Albert, an alligator, the long-eared owl Howard Owl, the bear Phineas T. Bridgeport and the turtle Churchy le femme. A total of one hundred and fifty figures appeared regularly or over a longer period of time; there were several hundred in total. At the beginning, with the boy Bumbazine, there was still a human character in the stories, but this disappeared in the summer of 1945 and the comics became pure animal stories.

While the stories were initially intended for children, the strips were increasingly aimed at adults by processing current events. So was Joseph McCarthy , Chairman of the Senate Committee on Un-American Activities, with Simple J. Malarkey his own figure. But then Vice President Richard Nixon also found himself in Pogo as Indian Charlie . Other celebrities in the comic were J. Edgar Hoover , Fidel Castro and Nikita Khrushchev .

Publication and draftsman

The comic was invented by Walt Kelly , who contributed a series entitled Bumbazine and Albert the Alligator to Animal Comics, a new issue created by Dell in 1942 . When Animal Comics was discontinued in 1948, Kelly moved to the New York Star newspaper, which had recently been founded . A daily strip by Pogo appeared there for the first time on October 4th of the same year . After hiring the New York Star in early 1949, Pogo paused for four months before the comic reappeared on May 16, 1949, distributed by the Post-Hall Syndicate. Pogo was published in nearly six hundred newspapers and a first book impression in 1951 sold just under half a million copies.

After Kelly's death on October 18, 1973, his widow Selby took over the comic and continued it for almost two more years, supported by Kelly's son Stephen, among others, by adding new speech bubbles to old drawings. The last strip appeared on July 20, 1975. From 1989 to 1992, Neal Sternecky drew pogo strips on texts by Larry Doyle , which were published in over three hundred daily newspapers. In 1992 and 1993, more new pogo stories appeared, drawn by Kelly's daughter Carolyn.

In 1974, Melzer Verlag published an album with pogo stories in the Brumm Comix series in German-speaking countries .

An cartoon titled The Pogo Special Birthday Special was released in 1969.

reception

According to Andreas C. Knigge , Pogo is one of the “most ingenious animal strips in comic history” and a “virtuoso masterpiece of satire”. Harald Havas sees Pogo as “probably the most psychoanalytical and political US comic ever”.

In 1951, Kelly received the Reuben Award for Pogo .

literature

  • Marcel Feige : The little comic dictionary . Schwarzkopf and Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-89602-544-9 , pp. 603-604.
  • Franco Fossati: The large illustrated Ehapa comic lexicon . Ehapa Verlag, Stuttgart 1993, ISBN 3-7704-0865-9 , p. 206.
  • Harald Havas : Comic Worlds. History and structure of the ninth art , Edition Comic Forum 1992, ISBN 3-900390-61-4 , pp. 36, 172, 200–201, 228.
  • Andreas C. Knigge : Comic Lexicon . Ullstein Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin and Vienna 1988, ISBN 3-548-36554-X , pp. 272-273
  • Andreas C. Knigge: 50 classic comics. From Lyonel Feininger to Art Spiegelman . Gerstenberg, Hildesheim 2004, ISBN 3-8067-2556-X , pp. 134-137

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Andreas C. Knigge: 50 classic comics. From Lyonel Feininger to Art Spiegelman . Gerstenberg, Hildesheim 2004, ISBN 3-8067-2556-X , p. 135.
  2. ↑ a b Marcel Feige: The little comic dictionary . Schwarzkopf and Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-89602-544-9 , p. 603.
  3. ↑ Neal Sternecky on lambiek.net (English) , accessed on October 27, 2011
  4. ↑ Carolyn Kelly on lambiek.net (English) , accessed October 27, 2011
  5. ↑ Pogo in Melzer Verlag on comicguide.de , accessed on October 27, 2011
  6. ^ The Pogo Special Birthday Special. Internet Movie Database , accessed June 10, 2015 .
  7. ^ Andreas C. Knigge: Comic Lexikon . Ullstein Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin and Vienna 1988, ISBN 3-548-36554-X , p. 272.
  8. ↑ a b Andreas C. Knigge: 50 classic comics. From Lyonel Feininger to Art Spiegelman . Gerstenberg, Hildesheim 2004, ISBN 3-8067-2556-X , p. 137.
  9. ↑ Harald Havas : Comic Worlds. History and structure of the ninth art , Edition Comic Forum 1992, ISBN 3-900390-61-4 , p. 200.
  10. ↑ REUBEN AWARD WINNERS 1946-PRESENT ( Memento from September 27, 2012 in the Internet Archive )