Bill Peckmann &Comic Art 08 Jan 2010 09:18 am
Walt Kelly Comics
- Like all would-be child animators of the 50/60′s, I was obsessed with cartoons and cartooning. Naturally, enough one of the great heroes for all of us, during this period, was Walt Kelly.
Here was an artist of sublime dimensions. He’d animated for the best of the Disney films and then moved onto his own comic strip, Pogo, for generations of us kid (and adults). Let me tell you, Pogo was the be-all and end-all of comic strips. I clipped a lot of these strips out of the newspaper and saved them, until I realized I could buy the bound volumes of Pogo comics. I got rid of the clipped-strips and started collecting those collections of his strips – organized by him into subject matter. There were lots of them, so I went back to find some of those on the market that I had missed. Then there was the collected hard-cover volume of the books – Ten Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Years with Pogo. I bought that, too.
Funny, that they did a couple of animated programs adapting Pogo – a couple with the help of Kelly – but all these shows didn’t cut it. Not even the Chuck Jones show, The Pogo Special Birthday Special. It, naturally, was more Chuck Jones than Walt Kelly. It didn’t work.
Between animation and strip, Walt Kelly had had a foray drawing comic book art. These comics are rare today and pretty hard to find. One person who seems to have all of these is comic collector, John Benson. Years ago, he’d sent color copies of all the covers – front & backs – to Bill Peckmann. Bill sent me these copies, and I’m sharing them here. (Michael Barrier wrote about and posted one of these stories.) These comic pages date from June, 1942 onward.
If you’re a Walt Kelly fan, this should be a treat. Thanks, of course, to Bill Peckmann and John Benson for the viewing.
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(Click any image to enlarge.)
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I repeat my thanks to John Henson and Bill Peckmann
for the chance to see these gems.
on 08 Jan 2010 at 9:48 am 1.Mark Mayerson said …
You can find some of the interiors of Kelly’s comic book work here and also here.
There’s more here.
Thomas Haller Buchanan has two blogs devoted to Kelly. One reprints the entire Prehysteria sequence from Pogo, here, and the other is a general blog of Kelly work, here.
Ger Apeldoorn has also reprinted Kelly, including some Peter Wheat comics, giveaways that were done for a bakery that used to make home deliveries in the New York area. That’s here.
on 08 Jan 2010 at 9:50 am 2.Mark Mayerson said …
I screwed up a couple of those links. There are two places where “Kelly” has fallen out of the link and it needs to be included. You’ll have to cut and paste the link rather than just click on it in order to make it work. Sorry.
on 08 Jan 2010 at 10:46 am 3.bill said …
Years ago, our teacher Selby Kelly showed us a short Pogo film Walt Kelly animated himself and rendered in colored pencils. Not much of a plot, but man, it was beautiful. He also supplied the voices. Selby said the film would never be released, since the soundtrack was flawed and she didn’t want it redone without Walt. With her death, I fear this film is lost forever.
Believe me no Kelly fan would care about the “quality” of the soundtrack.
on 08 Jan 2010 at 11:08 am 4.Mark Mayerson said …
That film was for sale on VHS and may still be. Go to http://www.idiom.com/~lexmark/WHMtE.htm Email: wrabbit@worldpassage.net to find out.
on 08 Jan 2010 at 12:52 pm 5.Mike McLaren said …
Kelly has always been my comics guru, and I am ashamed that I never knew about these. This collection is incredible! Thanks for the post!
on 08 Jan 2010 at 4:06 pm 6.Eric Noble said …
My God, I am in the presence of a true master of cartooning. There will never be another like him. Here’s hoping we can learn from him and carry on the tradition he passed on to us.
on 08 Jan 2010 at 10:39 pm 7.Stephen Worth said …
Here is some more amazing Walt Kelly stuff… Promo pieces, Raggedy Ann & Andy comics, and two original Pogo Sunday page inks…
http://www.animationarchive.org/2007/04/comics-walt-kellys-pogo.html
on 09 Jan 2010 at 1:18 am 8.Galen Fott said …
Great post! Kelly also animated on the film from your previous post, The Little Whirlwind. I found an amusing freeze frame in that film from a scene Kelly animated:
http://www.grundoon.com/The_Little_Whirlwind.html
on 09 Jan 2010 at 12:39 pm 9.Joel Brinkerhoff said …
Kelly is still one of my heroes. I believe he illustrated a comic book version of “Our Gang” too.
on 10 Jan 2010 at 6:06 am 10.Pilsner Panther said …
Would you mind someone entering a dissenting word about Walt Kelly and “Pogo?”
It was, perhaps, the wordiest comic strip ever published… reminiscent of “The Third Policeman” by Flann O’Brien, in which the footnotes keep interrupting the narrative and eventually crowd the main story right off the page!
But O’Brien was doing that deliberately— undermining his own narrative technique for comic effect. The talk balloons in “Pogo” eventually took on a life of their own, like a horror-movie Zombie that came to control its master, but I doubt that Kelly had the same ability to “juggle” his creations.
Walt Kelly, draftsman and writer, apparently met the enemy… and it was indeed himself, not “us.”
Or to put it in more contemporary terms— “Pogo” SUCKS! Why anyone still likes its dated political satire is beyond me. Anyone for Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew caricatures, in 2010?
They weren’t very funny then, and they’re completely irrelevant now.
on 10 Jan 2010 at 9:21 am 11.Michael said …
I recently read a similar commentary stating Ben Shahn was no longer considered an artist because of the political fervor in his paintings. Unfortunately for some (meaning you, Pilsner Panther) the mere inclusion of politics – whichever side – doesn’t make an artist bad or his drawings/paintings less beautiful. It doesn’t make the compositions or the framing or the design less artful. In short it makes the strip or painting relevant to an audience. We may as well call Goya irrelevant because his Capriccios was so political in nature, or Daumier not a good cartoonist because his politics were so anti establishment. You’re speaking nonsense.
If you don’t like Kelly’s work, fine. No one requires or requests that you do. But don’t feel obligated to tell the rest of us that he is/was irrelevant. I lived through the times, and he was very relevant to me. He also is/was a damned good artist and cartoonist.
on 10 Jan 2010 at 11:17 am 12.Pilsner Panther said …
Michael, I didn’t say anything at all about Walt Kelly’s draftsmanship. If anything, his getting on a soapbox all the time was a waste of that talent. Being (I think) somewhat younger than you, as a child I found “Pogo” to be, at best, out of place on the comics page. Like “Doonesbury” later on, it really belonged on the editorial page.
His trouble (to my untrained little eye), was that his panels were almost always too busy and wordy; he had no desire to edit himself, or perhaps he didn’t care to, being a hapless victim of self-indulgence. Anyway, thanks for publishing my contrary opinion in this generally worshipful atmosphere, and I’ll leave you with two quotes:
“Satire is what closes on Saturday night.”
—George S. Kaufman
“The most important notes are the ones I leave out.”
—Miles Davis
on 10 Jan 2010 at 11:45 am 13.Michael said …
There’s also Samuel Goldwyn’s quote that a message is something you send by telegraph not in a film (or in this case a comic strip.) I’m of the school that doesn’t believe that axiom; I think you have to reveal who you are as a person or artist otherwise what you’re doing is worthless. It doesn’t matter to me if the balloons are large and the words are many, as long as they’re professionally lettered.
As for “allowing” you to dissent with me – don’t be ridiculous. That’s what makes any conversation a conversation. Just because I believe in something doesn’t necessarily mean I’m right.