Everything about Walt Kelly totally explained
Walter Crawford Kelly, Jr (
August 25,
1913–
October 18,
1973), known as
Walt Kelly, was a
cartoonist notable for his
comic strip Pogo featuring characters that inhabited a portion of the
Okefenokee Swamp in
Georgia.
Biography
Walter Crawford Kelly, Jr. was born in
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. While he was still a child, his family moved to
Bridgeport, Connecticut where his father worked in a munitions plant. After graduating from
Warren Harding High School in
1930, Kelly worked a few odd jobs until landing a position as a crime reporter on the Bridgeport Post. There he took up cartooning and illustrated a biography of Bridgeport native
P. T. Barnum.
The Disney Studios
Relocating to Southern California, reportedly in pursuit of his future wife, Helen DeLacy, who had moved there, he found a job at
Walt Disney Productions as a storyboard artist and gag man on
Donald Duck cartoons and other shorts, requesting a switch to the animation department in 1939. Starting over as an animator, Kelly became an assistant to noted Disney animator
Fred Moore, and became close friends with Moore and
Ward Kimball, one of Disney's
Nine Old Men.
Kelly worked for Disney from January 6,
1936 to September 12,
1941, contributing to films including
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,
Fantasia,
Dumbo, and
The Reluctant Dragon. Kelly once stated that his salary at Disney averaged about a hundred dollars a week. During 1935 and 1936, his work also appeared in early comic books for what later became
DC Comics.
Kelly's animation can be seen in "Pinocchio" when Gepetto is first seen inside Monstro the whale, fishing; in "Fantasia" when Bacchus is seen drunkenly riding a donkey during the Beethoven/"Pastoral Symphony" sequence; and in "Dumbo" of the ringmaster and during bits of the crows' sequence; and his drawings are especially recognizable in "The Reluctant Dragon" of the little boy, and in the Mickey Mouse short "The Little Whirlwind" when Mickey is running from the larger tornado.
During the 1941 animators strike, Kelly didn't picket the studio, as has often been reported, but took a leave of absence- pleading "family illness"- in order to avoid choosing sides. Surviving correspondence between Kelly and his close friend and fellow animator
Ward Kimball chronicle his ambivalence towards the highly charged dispute. Kelly never returned to the studio as an animator, but jobs adapting the studio's films "Pinocchio" and "
Three Caballeros" for
Dell Comics- apparently the result of a recommendation from
Walt Disney himself- led to a new (and ultimately transitional) career.
Dell Comics
Kelly began a series of comic books based on fairy tales and nursery rhymes along with annuals celebrating
Christmas and
Easter for Dell Comics. Kelly seems to have written or co-written much of the material he drew for the comics; his unique touches are easily discernible. He also produced a series of stories based on the
Our Gang film series, provided covers for
Walt Disney's Comics and Stories, illustrated adaptations of Disney films, drew stories featuring "
Raggedy Ann and Andy and
Uncle Wiggily, wrote and drew a lengthy series of comic books promoting a bread company and featuring a character called "Peter Wheat", and did a series of pantomime (for example without dialogue) two-page stories featuring
Roald Dahl's Gremlins for Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories #34-41. Kelly also wrote, drew, and performed during this period on children's records, children's books, and cereal boxes. He was so prolific in the 1940s that it's assumed that the extent of his work can never be completely documented.
Although his health wouldn't allow him to serve in the military, during World War II, Kelly also worked in the Army's
Foreign Language Unit illustrating manuals, including several on language- a favorite Kelly subject- and one manual on the use of tools depicting his friend Ward Kimball as a caveman.
This period saw the creation of Kelly's most famous character,
Pogo, who first saw print in 1943 in
Dell's
Animal Comics. The initial stories, probably influenced by
Joel Chandler Harris' Uncle Remus stories, pitted a human boy named Bumbazine against wily Albert the Alligator, with Pogo Possum in a supporting role. Albert eventually supplanted Bumbazine for the lead role, and Pogo supplanted Albert, with the sole human character- whom Kelly ultimately considered less believable- disappearing from the series altogether.
Kelly's work with Dell continued well into the successful run of the newspaper strip in the early fifties, ending after sixteen issues of "Pogo Possum" (each with all new material) in a dispute over the re-publication of Kelly's early Pogo and Albert stories in a special comic book called "The Pogo Parade". Having grown tremendously as an artist and writer, Kelly no longer wished to see his earlier work in print.
The New York Star
He returned to journalism as a political cartoonist after the war. In 1948, while art director of the short-lived
New York Star, Kelly began to produce a pen-and-ink strip of current-events commentary populated by characters from Okefenokee Swamp. The first
Pogo strip appeared on October 4, 1948. After the
New York Star folded on Jan. 28, 1949 Kelly arranged for syndication through the
Hall Syndicate which re-launched the strip in May of 1949. Kelly eventually arranged to acquire the copyright and ownership of the strip, which was uncommon in that era.
Pogo
Pogo was a landmark strip in many ways and Kelly is arguably one of the greatest and most influential of cartoonists in the history of the craft. Kelly combined masterful line and brush-work (learned at the "mouse factory", Disney) with fluent and highly amusing story-telling acted out by an endearing cast of "nature's screechers". He borrowed from various dialectical sources and his own fertile imagination to invent a unique and charming backwoods-patois, heavy on the nonsense, to fit his cartoon swampland. Although
Pogo stands on its own as a superbly-realised cartoon strip for the ages, it was perhaps Kelly's interjection of political and social satire into the work that was its greatest pioneering accomplishment- such commentary was simply not done in the genre of dailies in Kelly's time.
The principal characters were
Pogo the
Possum; Albert the
Alligator; Churchy LaFemme (
cf.
Cherchez la femme), a
turtle; Howland
Owl; Beauregard (Houndog); Porkypine and Miss Mamzelle Hepzibah, a French
skunk. Kelly used the strip in part as a vehicle for his liberal and humanistic political and social views and satirized, among other things, Senator
Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communist demagogy (in the form of a shotgun-wielding bobcat named "Simple J. Malarkey") and the sectarian and dogmatic behavior of
Communists.
Another interesting facet of the comic strip were the unique speech balloons that several characters were drawn with. One character, Deacon Mushrat, an educated
muskrat, spoke in speech balloons with decorated
Gothic style lettering. The village mortician, Sarcophagas Macabre, a
vulture, had square, black-framed speech balloons with fine script lettering, resembling funeral announcements. P.T. Bridgeport, a
bear and showman/promoter of questionable repute, spoke with speech balloons in highly decorated type, resembling 19th century circus posters.
In
1952 and later, a "Pogo for President" campaign, with followers wearing "I Go Pogo" buttons, became an expression of political protest. "Pogo" was also distinguished by exceptional linguistic inventiveness and playfulness, as expressed, for example, in the Pogo version of songs such as "Deck Us All with Boston Charlie" (for "
Deck the Halls with Boughs of Holly") and "
Ma Bonny lice soda devotion" (for "My Bonnie lies over the ocean").
Perhaps the most famous quotation to come from this series is, "We have met the enemy and he's us" (a paraphrase of
Commodore Perry's famous "We have met the enemy and he's ours" from the
War of 1812). The earliest form of this expression appeared in his introduction to
The Pogo Papers (
1953); it was used much later in the comic strip and as the title of a collection of strips. This is typical of the wry and politically astute commentary to be found in the daily and Sunday strip. It was distributed by
King Features Syndicate to hundreds of newspapers for many years. The individual strips were collected into at least twenty books edited by Kelly, reprinted editions of some of these remain available today. He received the
Reuben Award for the series in
1951.
Walt Kelly illustrated
The Glob, a children's book about the evolution of man written by John O'Reilly and published in
1952. The characters and creatures in the book have a distinctly
Pogoian character.
In
1969, a half-hour animated television special,
The Pogo Special Birthday Special was produced, and aired on the NBC television network. Kelly himself provided the voices for P.T. Bridgeport, Albert Alligator and Howland Owl. In an interview
Ward Kimball, who had worked with Kelly at Disney, quoted Kelly as saying angrily that
Chuck Jones had changed the script without Kelly's ok, and altered
Miss Mam'selle Hepzibah's face to look more human.
Having previously lampooned McCarthy, Kelly was also censored by some papers in the
1960s for portraying Soviet leader
Nikita Khruschev as a pig and
Fidel Castro as a cigar-smoking goat spouting pseudo-Marxism like "The shortage will be divided amongst the peasants!" However Kelly was speaking partly from experience, having spent time in Cold War Berlin, writing newspaper articles about the situation there.
During the
1968 political campaign, Kelly's strip depicted rival Presidential candidates
Hubert Humphrey and
Richard Nixon as the Tweedle twins (
Tweedledum and
Tweedledee) but never established which was which: each twin claimed to be "Dee" while identifying the other as "Dum". In later years, Kelly's strip featured caricatures of Nixon depicted as a spider,
J. Edgar Hoover as a bulldog,
Spiro T. Agnew as a hyena and
George C. Wallace as a bantam cock.
Throughout the run of
Pogo, the strip's characters frequently traversed the
Okeefenokee Swamp aboard a flimsy flat-bottomed boat. Kelly developed the pleasant gimmick of lettering the boat's name on its hull ... the gimmick being that the name changed from one day to the next, and even from panel to panel within the same day's strip, but was always a tribute to some obscure real-life person whom Kelly wished to salute in print.
In contrast to the rigidly straight-edged panels of most other comic strips, the panels of
Pogo were always defiantly hand-drawn in Kelly's beautiful ink lines with no attempt at straightness. Frequently a
Pogo character would lean against the edge of the panel, or Albert would strike a match (to light his cigar) against the nearest panel edge, invariably distorting the panel even further.
Walt Kelly died in
1973 in
Woodland Hills, California from diabetes complications, following a long and debilitating illness that had cost him a leg. During his final illness, work on the strip had fallen to various assistants (and occasionally reprints), and Kelly characteristically joked about returning to work as soon as he re-grew the leg. He is sometimes listed as having been interred in the
Cemetery of the Evergreens in
Brooklyn, New York, but there's no grave for him there. He is believed to have been cremated.
Legacy In Print And Other Media
"Pogo" was continued by Kelly's widow, Selby, and various assistants until the summer of 1975. Reprint books continued in a steady stream, including a series reprinting several original books under a single cover according to various themes- romance, elections- that ran into the 1980s. In 1977, a small publisher called the Gregg Press reprinted the first ten "Pogo" books in hardcover editions with dust jackets. In 1995, another small press called Jonas/Winter issued another ten "Pogo" titles in navy blue cloth editions. In the 1980s a series of trade paperbacks-
The Best Of Pogo,
Pogo Even Better,
Outrageously Pogo,
Pluperfect Pogo, and
Phi Beta Pogo collected material from Kelly
fanzine "The Okefenokee Star" and combined examples of Kelly's massive output of non-strip material with new interviews, essays, and in each volume, a complete year of dailies from the strip starting in 1948.
In
1980, a
clay animation feature film,
Pogo For President (aka
I Go Pogo) was released, but failed to gain much media attention. Ironically, it was ultimately purchased by The Walt Disney Company and has seen limited release in home formats.
In 1989 the
Los Angeles Times attempted to revive the strip with other artists, including Kelly's children Carolyn and Peter, under the title "Walt Kelly's Pogo". The new strip ran through the early nineties. Also in 1989, Eclipse Books began publication of a hardcover series called
Walt Kelly's Pogo And Albert collecting the "Pogo" comic book stories in color and starting with his first appearance in 1943. The series reached four numbered volumes, with volumes 2, 3, and 4 subtitled At
The Mercy Of Elephants,
Diggin' Fo' Square Roots, and
Dreamin' Of A Wide Catfish, respectively.
In 1992,
Fantagraphics Books began a series of chronological strip reprints in paperback form, simply titled
Pogo. Through 2000, the series reached 11 volumes and reprinted daily strips from the first New York Star strip of October 4, 1948 through February 12, 1954.
In 2002,
Dark Horse Comics issued Pogo and Albert figures in limited editions as part of their "Classic Comic Character Series" of statues. Issued in lavishly illustrated tin containers, the figures quickly sold out.
In 2003, Reaction Records re-issued Kelly's 1956 album "Songs Of The Pogo" on
compact disc. The album features Kelly singing his own comic lyrics and nonsense verse to melodies written by Norman Monath. The disc also features the content of Kelly's later recordings, "No" and "Can't", which were issued as childrens' book-and-record sets in the late sixties, with booklets written and illustrated by Kelly to go along with his recorded performances.
In February 2007 it was announced that
Fantagraphics Books would begin publication of
The Complete Pogo, a projected 12-volume series collecting the complete chronological run of daily and Sunday strips, to be overseen by Kelly aficionado and famed comic book creator
Jeff Smith.
The first volume in the series was scheduled to appear in October 2007, but delays, reportedly resulting from the difficulty in locating early Sunday strips in complete form, have pushed its release until sometime in mid 2009.
Fantagraphics Books has also published two volumes of a series collecting Kelly's "Our Gang" comic book stories from 1943-1945, with cover art by Jeff Smith and introductions by
Leonard Maltin and Kelly chronicler Steve Thompson.
Awards
Further Information
Get more info on 'Walt Kelly'.
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