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!

I haven’t posted here in a while for several reasons. First, the corona virus situation has put me out of the mood. Second, I had nothing to review because I’ve been reading this wonderful strip collection for the last month. I love Pogo, and I love these strip collections, but Pogo is a dense strip that takes time to read and appreciate, even when it’s just going for slapstick humor, and I can only read about 15 pages at a sitting. At over 300 pages of strips, that takes a while. Worth every minute, though.

There’s plenty of goofy humor, but also a share of political satire, as in the strip above where a pig takes the place of Soviet Union leader Nikita Krushchev. This collection covers 1955 and 1956, which was an election year, so there’s a fair amount of “Pogo for President” business and other election hoohah, with P.T. Bridgeport and other bombastic characters. The Olympics in Australia gets some funny coverage, as do a reporter and photographer from “Newslife,” who are quite sure Pogo is not a possum. The majority of these strips draw humor simply from the familiar characters of the Okeefenokee Swamp, their frequent misunderstandings and confusions, with Pogo about the only level head in the bunch. It’s great fun, and Walt Kelly is in fine form here.

Highly recommended.

Images © Peanuts Worldwide LLC.

As we near the end of Charles Schulz’s amazing fifty year run of daily and Sunday comic strips, the lines are getting shakier. There were some places in this volume where I wasn’t sure what was going on. Those are in the minority, most of it is fine. The writing is still strong, and made me laugh or chuckle pretty often. There are even some new things happening. Lucy and Linus’ little brother Rerun has been around for a while, but mostly in the baby seat on the back of his mom’s bicycle, as seen on the cover here (but not inside). In this book Rerun finally gets to interact more with his siblings. He’s been trying to play basketball for a year or two, and to get Snoopy to play with him, and there’s some of that, but his comments and interactions with other characters are getting more developed and funnier.

Some other themes take two of Snoopy’s brothers on a long trek, while Snoopy himself is stuck in Valley Forge in his fantasy life, when he isn’t working on his writing. There are many fun returns of past themes, of course. Not all appeal to me, I never liked Snoopy’s brother Spike for instance, but plenty of others do. In all, this is still great reading and great fun.

Recommended.

Images © Peanuts Worldwide LLC

For the last few volumes of this series covering 50 years of Charles Schulz’ wonderful comic strip, I’ve been waiting for it to go off the track. Get bad. Show that Schulz had overstayed his time. We’re almost to the end, and it hasn’t happened! The lines may be a little shaky at times, but the writing and humor are still sharp and hilarious, and the drawing remains a case study in casual simplicity that is much harder than it looks.

Okay, there are a few more of Charlie Brown lying awake at night pondering his fate, and I have to say I’ve never found Snoopy’s brother Spike funny (more sad than anything), but there’s hardly a page in this book that didn’t make me laugh or at least smile. What a remarkable achievement.

Highly recommended