Customer Reviews

I go Pogo (The Best of Pogo)

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...than the marsupial from the Offekenoffee--or however you spell that--Swamp. This is the classic work which started these Pogo trade paperback series in the pre-Jurrassic age. Of a not so innocent age, that is to say. If politics can be skewered by the likes of a comic strip artist--(actually, Walt Kelly did a lot of illustration in his day and a lot of work for the Disney studios. Check out his funny animal work in "Dumbo") in the 40's and 50's and still have poignancy and bite some fifty years later, then, I'd say it would be still worth a look see.

Anyway, it is HY-LArry-Yous! Albert the Aligator, Churchez LaFemme, Tammany Hall, Porky, PT Bear (whose grandiose pronounciations look as if they were ripped from a circus poster), Howland Owl, Bun Rabbit, Porky, the Grundoon kids and various creatures who look like J. Edgar Hoover, Winston Churchill and General MacArthur all are part of getting (or conspiring to stop) Mr. Pogo to Washington. There are crazy side plots like Albert's drive to flimflam Miz Beaver out of another free dinner, but overall, these turn out to be more tolerable mishaps than those that could come from the District of Columbia. Pogo gets my vote for President, Vice President, Senator, Swamp Keeper AND Dog Catcher...

As a aside, the only three strips today that come close to this political awareness and/or funny animal lunacy are "Doonesbury" "Over the Hedge" and "Zippy"...

And, by the way, original copies of this can cost somewhere in the neigborhood of $75-200 on auction sites such as the one here on Amazon and E-bay. It is reprinted in Pogo 1 and 2, I believe.

Pogo, if you have not yet learned to love him, is a peaceful `possum in the Okeefenokee swamp. This book follows the meandering story of him and his friends, through events that parody our culture still - more than fifty years after this was originally published. There's the poetry slam, with plenty of slamming when one entry comes written on a stone slab. Albert the alligator need not have produced such a weighty work to win, though. It turned out that his competitor's entries plagiarized his daughter's homework. Churchy the turtle composes his alliterative and inscrutable songs at every event, whether the others want it or not. P.T. Bridgeport announces everything and everyone with bombast, and the communistic cowbirds start their campaign to redistribute the wealth - other peoples' of course. (BTW, in real life, cowbirds parasitize other species by laying their eggs in other species's nests.)

Then, with the 1952 presidential campaign heating up in the real world, Pogo's campaign starts in the cartoon world of the swamp. Pogo, as always, doesn't realize this is happening until well into the campaign. His gentle and soft-spoken way wins out in the end: the others can play at any silly game they want. He simply goes on about his business, without the slightest impoliteness or the slightest need to join in the foofaraw.

That, I think, is Pogo's real lesson. Back then, people could disagree without being disagreeable. If one didn't like what another was doing, they just went their own way instead. How did we lose that civil tone? In its day, Pogo offered social and political commentary - and it does in our day, too, but in a very different way.

-- wiredweird