Pogo (comic strip)

Pogo is the most famous comic character of the American comic artist Walt Kelly. For his stories to an anthropomorphic opossum, which prevailed until the third attempt, Kelly was awarded in 1951, the Reuben Award.

Plot and the characters

Scene of the comics is the Okefenokeesumpf in which the anthropomorphic possum Pogo lives with his friends and acquaintances. Among the most important other figures, along Pogos friend Albert, an alligator, the Long-eared Owl Owl Howard, the bear Phineas T. Bridgeport and the turtle Churchy le femme. Total were a hundred and fifty pieces on a regular basis or for a prolonged period of time, there were a total several hundred. While at the beginning the boy Bumbazine still a human character in the stories included, so this disappeared in the summer of 1945 and the comics were to pure animal stories.

Were initially intended for children the stories, so the strips oriented increasingly to adults by current events have been processed. So was Joseph McCarthy, chairman of the Senate Committee on Un-American Activities, with Simple J. Malarkey his own figure. But even then- Vice President Richard Nixon found himself as Indian Charlie in Pogo again. Next celebrities in the comic were J. Edgar Hoover, Fidel Castro and Nikita Khrushchev.

Publication and draftsman

Inventor of the comic was Walt Kelly, who contributed a series entitled Bumbazine and Albert the Alligator in 1942 for the newly created by the Publishing Dell Comics book Animal. With the setting of Animal Comics in 1948, Kelly moved with his comic to the previously established short daily New York Star. There appeared on 4 October of the same year for the first time a daily strip Pogo. After adjustment of the New York Star at the beginning of 1949 Pogo paused for four months before the comic on May 16, 1949 distributed by the Post- Hall Syndicate, appeared again. Pogo was published in almost six hundred newspapers and a first book imprint in 1951, sold nearly half a million times.

After Kelly's death on October 18, 1973, his widow Selby took over the comic and put him, among other things, supported by Kelly's son Stephen, just two years away, by Sided old drawings with new speech bubbles. The last strip was published on July 20, 1975. From 1989 to 1992 drew Neal Sternecky to texts by Larry Doyle Pogo strips that were published in more than three hundred newspapers. In the years 1992 and 1993, more new pogo stories that were drawn by Kelly's daughter Carolyn appeared.

In the German-speaking area of Melzer Verlag published in 1974 in the series hum Comix an album of pogo stories.

An animated film titled The Pogo Special Birthday Special appeared in 1969.

Reception

According to Andreas C. Knigge is at Pogo one of the " most brilliant animal trips the comic book history " and a " virtuoso signed masterpiece of satire ." Harald Havas sees Pogo " probably the most political psychoanalytischsten and U.S. comic ever ."

In 1951, Kelly received the Reuben Award for Pogo.