Walt Kelly

Walt Kelly (1913-1973) was a cartoonist, humorist, and animator, best known as the creator of the long-running comic strip Pogo. His early career included a stint as a reporter and political cartoonist for The Birdgeport Post, followed by nearly seven years at the Walt Disney Studio. While at Disney, Kelly worked his way from assistant to full animator, animating on Mickey Mouse shorts and contributing to such features as Pinocchio, Dumbo, and Fantasia, often under the supervision of friend Ward Kimball. Kelly left the studio in 1941, following a labor strike. He remained associated with the Disney characters, however, contributing covers and stories for Dell's Disney comic book line throughout the 1940s.

In 1942, Kelly, still working for Dell, introduced Pogo Possum in the debut issue of Animal Comics, along with a black child named Bumbazine and a hungry alligator named Albert. Sans Bumbazine, who was gradually phase dout, Pogo and Albert accrued new friends until the end of the comic book in 1947, and made a successful transition as a newspaper comic in 1949. Pogo followed Pogo, Albert, and such diverse (and often punningly named) characters as Howland Owl, superstitous turtle Church LaFemme, and dour Porky Pine in often surreal adventures in, around, and outside of the Okefenokee Swamp of Georgia (in real life, the largest swamp in the US.) The comic was characterized by a "Southern-fried" dialect, the inventive use of lettering and panel borders to visually illustrate a character's speaking habits and personality, poetic lyrics and songs, and variations on existing tunes such as "Deck The Hall," most famously transposed as "Deck Us All with Boston Charlie." Political humor was a mainstay, with caricatures of such figures as J. Edgar Hoover, Communist leaders like Kruschev and Castro, and Joseph P. McCarthy, turned into recurring antagonist Simple J. Malarkey.

The strip ran until Kelly's death in 1973, was continued by widow Selby Kelly and assistant Don Morgan for two years, and revived yet again in 1989. A television special, with Kelly supplying character voices, was produced by Chuck Jones in 1969, and in 1980, a stop-motion feature entitled Pogo for President was released, featuring the voices of The Electric Company alumni Skip Hinnant (as Pogo), Stan Freberg, Vincent Price, Jonathan Winters, and Ruth Buzzi.

Influence
As widely documented, in such texts as Jim Henson: The Works and Jim Henson's Designs and Doodles, Pogo was Jim Henson's favorite comic strip, and the Henson family "often gathered around the organ and sang songs from the A. A. Milne and Pogo songboks..."

In a 1987 interview, Henson explained the influence Kelly had on the entire structure of The Muppet Show: "Walt Kelly put together a team of characters. And it started with Pogo as the central character . . . a fairly normal, ordinary person . . . and all around him, he had Albert Alligator and a bunch of comedy characters bouncing off him.

We use a very similar chemistry. Kermit is the Pogo. You have one normal person who represents the way people ordinarily think. And everything else, slightly crazier comedy characters are all around that person."