If people don’t already know, the first volume of the long-announced (four years!) reprinting of the complete Pogo strips finally appeared literally this week. I’ll be getting it, although I have all the Pogo books already (in first editions). At least the Sunday strips will be properly in color this time.
Pogo is older than I am, so I came to them after the fact rather than as daily comics. I found the collections and became hooked.
As others have said, Pogo can’t be thought of as a daily laugh. The strips form long, rambling stories that are about the characters and their antics, not punchlines. Reading a single strip is like reading a single sentence from a book. Even if the sentence is a good one, you get zero flavor of the characters, the plot, or the value of the book as a whole. Reading Pogo needs to be total immersion. You have to figure out who the characters are, what human foibles they represent, what their relations are to one another, their pasts, their purposes. Just like any novel. Some knowledge of the politics and culture of the 50s is mandatory. Kelly was a political commentator, and Garry Trudeau is the best modern equivalent. You have to keep up with current events to get Doonesbury and if you don’t you lose a lot of the humor. Same with Kelly. This is a huge hurdle for most people. I’ve done a lot of reading about the 50s but I’m sure I’m missing huge amounts.
That’s not to say that Kelly was all political satire. Like Trudeau, he alternated politics with social satire and fun with his characters’ weaknesses. In some ways this new series is a good place to start. There will be very little political commentary in it. You can learn the characters and see them develop. The dialect can be offputting, but it’s not standard dialect humor. Kelly’s dialog was wordplay, with no attempt to be faithful to any real-world speech. It’s pure nonsense, and pure nonsense is timeless. And I guarantee you can skip all the songs and poetry and miss nothing. Don’t worry about Boston Charlie. He’s playing with sounds, not meaning. If it doesn’t work for you, just skip on to the next page. Even though people love the songs, for me they’re the least part of his work.
I will admit that if you don’t like Doonesbury you probably won’t like Pogo. They both have enormous casts of character, are totally contemporary, hate punchlines, and dive into their own insides a bit too often. If you do like Doonesbury, then Pogo will be a revelation. All the brilliance with richer language and art and targets even more despicable. Kelly is a much better artist and his world has backgrounds viewable for themselves with tiny details that come alive after several viewings. And he’s working at a slower pace that gives him more room to stretch his vocabulary, in several senses of that term. Both are in the top tier of all comic strips. They’re both truly great.
