And Then I Read: POGO, THE COMPLETE SYNDICATED COMIC STRIPS VOLUME 6

Images © Okefenokee Glee & Perloo Inc.

As with all of these large collections of the Pogo comic strips, this one is a delight in every way. It takes me over a month to read one at about 15 minutes per day, as I find the strip too dense and full of content to go longer at one sitting. There’s so much to look at in the amazing art, and so much to enjoy in the humor and wordplay on each page. These daily and Sunday strips are from 1959 and 1960. In the dailies, a lot of time is spent covering the potential Presidential campaign of Fremount the baby bug whose only words are “Jes’ fine.” There are some appearances of a Russian bear resembling Kruschev, but otherwise the book is largely about things other than politics, with the usual silliness, confusion and droll humor among the regulars. The Sundays are even more fun, with long sequences about a purple cow and the Pogo equivalent of Boy Scouts, the Cheerful Charlies. Best of all, as if it was created just for me, is a sequence of Sundays about lettering! I think they were actually meant to amuse Walt Kelly’s letterer at the time, Henry Shikuma, who Kelly hired in 1958, and who lettered the strip even better than Kelly himself, no mean feat. Here’s a sample, reconfigured to be readable at the size I can show it on this blog:

There are more along these lines, but all the strips are terrific. This came out last year, but it and any of these strip collections are top notch reading. Highly recommended!

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