I thought I had all the Pogo (Walt Kelly’s comic strip about a possum and an alligator) collections, but I’m not sure.
I remember a sequence, in a bound collection (not the daily newspaper strips) where Pup Dog is missing (he’s later found in an old wardrobe, right during the trial where Albert is accused of eating him.) Two new characters wander in: a Pig wearing a folded newpaper for a hat, and a cat/dog/bear/I dunno wearing a Sherlock Holmes deerstalker. The pig was named “Hogshaw.”
It’s from the very first collection, titled merely Pogo. The strips are from 1950 and the characters are Hawgshaw and Cully, caricatures of McCarthyite publishers William Randolph Hearst and Robert McCormick. Read all the background on The Unexpurgated “Swamp Talk” Annotations from Pogo Vol. 1.
The sequence is included in Fantagraphics Books’s first volume of The Collected Pogo, a series well worth owning.
"The Pup Dog enjoyed the water, didn’t he? You could say he was…JUST LIKE A FISH?
– Fox prosecuting attorney, trying to come up with an explanation why the Pup Dog’s supposed remains consist of fish bones
One tidbit that I’m surprised that the obsessive annotator on the Fantagraphics page missed is the pun behind Hawgshaw, a true cartoonist’s homage.
Gus Mager started as a cartoonist at the turn of the 20th century and in 1904 created a strip called Knocko the Monk about monkeys who looked almost human and had names based on their human traits. Tightwado the Monk, Braggo the Monk, and so on. In December of 1910 he hit upon his Big Idea, a pair of characters called Sherlocko the Monk and his acolyte Watso. They got famous, famous enough to be heard of in England where Conan Doyle slapped Mager with legal papers.
You don’t give up a Big Idea that easily, so when Mager started a prestige Sunday strip he took the same characters and merely renamed them as Hawkshaw the Detective and The Colonel. Hawkshaw was an old-time slang term for detective, probably from the title character in an 1863 play by Tom Taylor, The Ticket-of-Leave Man. By the 20th century only a few theater and slang historians would think that Mager didn’t invent the term.
Hawgshaw, a detective wearing a Sherlock Holmes outfit, is a reference to Hawkshaw that everybody at the time would recognize - because the strip was still running!
And wait, there’s more. Mager started a fad for people getting nicknames based on their personalities. He even had a character named Groucho the Monk. Groucho the Marx said that a comic named Art Fisher gave them all nicks. Leonard was the chick (or chicken) chaser, so he became Chicko (later de-kayed); Milton wore sneakers or gum-soled shoes, so he became Gummo; Julius was a grouch, although there’s also a theory that he was a miser who protected all his money by putting it in a bag around his neck, then called a grouch bag; and Adolph played the harp and later transliterated his name back from the Cyrillic as Exapno Mapcase.
The circle is complete. Assuming any of the above is true or accurate, always an iffy assumption when the Brothers are involved.
I seem to remember coming across a old post here that claimed that maybe Groucho’s manager was a fan of the comic and he was the one who gave him the nickname. The other nicknames were just to fit in with Groucho’s.
Groucho didn’t have a manager in 1914. The Brothers managed themselves, except when their mother took charge. And she called them by their birth names.