It's our yearly Comics Should Be Good Advent Calendar! This year, the theme is A Comic Strip Christmas! Each day will spotlight a notable comic strip, and at least three Christmas-themed comics from that strip. Today's comic is Pogo.
Every day until Christmas Eve, you can click on the current day's Advent Calendar post and it will show the Advent Calendar with the door for that given day opened, and you can see what the "treat" for that day will be! You can click here to see the previous Advent Calendar entries.
The drawing for this year's Advent Calendar, of Santa Claus giving out presents to comic strip kids (although instead of a present for Charlie Brown, his dog, Snoopy, gets a present instead), is by Nick Perks.
Day 14 is now opened (once opened, the door will feature an image from the featured comic strip)...
WHAT WAS POGO?
Walt Kelly moved to Los Angeles to pursue a young woman he has met in his local choir after he graduated high school. He got a job working for Walt Disney, and slowly worked his way up to being one of the most reliable artists in the animation department at Disney, with his work clearly recognizable in a number of Disney projects of the early 1940s. During an animator's strike, Kelly decided to leave animation and decided to pursue a career as a comic book artist (he had already done some comic book work while working as an animator). He worked for Dell Comics, the publishers of Disney comics. At the time, the biggest thing in humor comics were so-called "Funny animal" comics, and so Kelly eventually invented Pogo Possum for Dell in 1943's Animal Stories (along with Albert Alligator).
He worked on Pogo for Dell Comics for the next few years, as well as drawing many other comic book works, but during World War II, he helped with the war effort (Kelly's diabetes kept him from serving active duty in the military) through illustrating manuals for the military. After the war ended, he became a political cartoonist for the New York Star, and eventually pitched the newspaper on a comic strip featuring his old animal characters called Pogo. It launched in 1948 and was nationally syndicated through the Hall Syndicate beginning in 1949.
Pogo starred the various animal creatures of the Okefenokee Swamp. The creatures all became famous for their distinctive "swamp-speak" that Kelly had them use, including a number of notable malapropisms. The animals went on various adventures and had comedic storylines, but Kelly also used the strip as a piece of political commentary, as well. He is probably most famous for an Earth Day strip he did in 1971, where he showed Pogo and a friend lamenting the pollution in the swamp from people throwing their trash away in the swamp. He reworked the iconic phrase from American Captain Oliver Hazard Perry during the War of 1812 ("We have met the enemy, and he is ours") into a classic line, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."
Kelly sadly passed away in 1973 from diabetes complications. His widow continued the strip with his assistants for a couple of years before it closed shop in 1975. Although it has been nearly 50 years since Pogo was an active comic strip, it is still beloved by fans who read it back then or just appreciate quality comic work.
HOW DID POGO CELEBRATE CHRISTMAS? AND WHAT WAS "DECK THE HALLS WITH BOSTON CHARLIE"?
I guess I'll get right into it. Very early in the strip's history, there was a 1949 strip where the gang were singing Christmas Carols. Remember what I mentioned before about how people loved the "swamp-speak" of the characters? And how they adorably used a number of malapropisms? Well, that obviously carried over to Christmas Carols, as well, and so instead of "Deck the halls with boughs of holly," their version of the song was "Deck the halls with Boston Charlie," and then a series of other nonsense lyrics...
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The fan response was big, and so Kelly leaned heavily into it, even releasing a songbook (with this song included). In 1962, a collection of Christmas jazz tunes called Jingle Bell Jazz included a performance by the popular jazz vocalist trio Lambert, Hendricks & Ross of the song (interestingly, Lambert, Hendricks and Ross had broken up, replacing Ross with a different singer, by the point this album came out)...
Over the years, then, Kelly would revisit the famous song in the strip, like this 1966 piece where the characters casually debate the lyrics as a chance for Kelly to rewrite them to share them with the audience...
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And here, we see the song all decked out throughout the strip...
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Kelly partially revisited the song constantly because people constantly forgot the lyrics. It was not important, of course, as the lyrics were mostly nonsense, but the song was so popular that people really DID want to know what the lyrics were, and in the years since, the song has remained a big deal, as rarely a year goes by when someone doesn't write into one of those "Ask a question" columns in local newspapers to ask about the lyrics to the song. It had THAT much of an impact on the public.
Of course, Kelly did other comic strips about Christmas, as well. A whole lot of them. Here's a funny one from 1960 about a mouse who is stirring a pudding when he hears that no creature was stirring, not even a mouse, and he gets irate...
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And in keeping with Kelly's sharp editorial wit, here's one from 1956 where he uses the animal characters to poke fun at humanity's misbehavior when it comes to drinking on the holidays...
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