Number 1389: Enter Albert and Pogo

Any ardent Pogo fan can tell you Walt Kelly’s familiar character did not spring forth from his creator’s forehead fully formed. Rather he was developed over time. As you can see in this, the first appearance of both Albert Alligator and Pogo Possum in Animal Comics #1 (1942), they were hardly recognizable as to what they would someday become. No matter. The Kelly humor is here, and while the Pogo characters went through an evolution, Kelly was as talented in his beginnings as he was at the end of his career, which came with his death in 1973.

I’m also showing another Kelly strip from the same issue of Animal Comics. “Muzzy and Ginger,” is a more typical funny animal strip.

Number 1091


"East Lint," starring Albert and Pogo


East Lynne was a popular 1861 Victorian novel, made into a stage play which ran in various versions almost constantly during the 19th Century. It's been largely forgotten, because it is an old-fashioned melodrama, and because of implausibilities in the plot. They didn't bother Victorian audiences as much as they might bother us. A movie version of the play was made in 1931, but it was another 50 years before the BBC made a version. It has been 30 years since any version of East Lynne has been filmed. It's probably safe to say it has dropped from general public consciousness.

"East Lint" is a story starring Albert the Alligator, Pogo Possum and a stock company of animal characters from the Okefenokee Swamp, who populate artist Walt Kelly's wonderful theater of the absurd. It has very little, if anything, to do with East Lynne except for its punning title. That's a good thing. I'd much rather read Kelly than a Victorian melodrama.

From Albert the Alligator and Pogo Possum, Dell Four Color #148, 1947:













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Sly Stanley?

I have lately been going through the classic Little Lulu tales in Dark Horse's Giant Size Little Lulu books. These books, with their sharp black line stories, are an economical way to read Little Lulu without having to spend a fortune on the original comics. (If you collect comic books you can't go wrong with Little Lulu, but if you just want to read the stories these are an excellent way to do that.)

I couldn't help but notice that the classic "Five Little Babies" from LL #38 (1951), looks kinkier to me than it did in the reprints from The Smithsonian Book of Comic Book Comics or The Toon Treasury of Classic Children's Comics, both of which showed the story in color. Maybe the black line just made it look more stark to me, or less a kiddie story than fetish-style nudge-in-the-side type humor.

Giving John Stanley the benefit of the doubt, it's most likely what he thought was funny for the story's purposes, the kinkiness unintended. Maybe it's just my jaded brain, warped from years of exposure to fetishism, out in the open now, but underground in 1951.

Then I ran into the single panel from the story in "The Witch, Hazel, and the Sleepy Seamstress," from LL #50 (1952), which seems to show the well-known obscene gesture using the middle finger, which I used every day in junior high school. It has a thimble on it, but it is what it is.

Perhaps Stanley was giving a very sly "up yours" to someone who had displeased him.

...Or was he...?

Number 1030


"Ah swoons to think of how Albert will be outdid."


Time for our Glee and Perloo Society meeting. Welcome to those of you who showed up.

Albert and Pogo give another lesson, drawn by Walt Kelly, in how to make us laugh. This strip appeared in Dell Four Color #105, Albert the Alligator and Pogo Possum. It's an unwieldy title, which Kelly mercifully shortened to just Pogo, when Pogo became star of the strip.

The story is set in Swampy Lagoon, rather than Okefenokee. Pogo and Albert, and the only human character, Bumbazine, here playing the part of "Mister Engineer," are the only characters in this strip we recognize. The others are just character actors and extras, none of them part of the regular strip a few years later. Like Michael Jackson, Pogo had his nose bobbed a few times, and his appearance changed much before his final version. This ratty-looking creature is a real possum (actually an opossum), the only North American marsupial:

Kelly had to do some work to cute up a critter like that. Albert stayed pretty much the same from the beginning, with some modifications over the years. If an alligator could be made cute, then Kelly did it.

Number 916


Two characters on a rainy day, in one act


I try not to be overly hyperbolic in my praise, but dadgum it, damn the hyperbole, full speed ahead: this Walt Kelly story is perfect. He took two characters, put them inside on a rainy day making fudge (with coal, of all things), and made a story of it. That was Kelly, though. A true comic art genius. I can even imagine it being played on stage with actors.

But back to the play-on-paper, the Off Broadway comic book version: the story is early enough in the Pogo-Albert the Alligator partnership that Albert got top billing. The comic book Pogo of this era doesn't have the rounder, more commercially cute look of the bobbed-nose mature Pogo of the comic strip. In any case, Albert is always just Albert. While he got slicker as Kelly's artwork grew more refined, even in his early appearances he is instantly recognizable.

From Albert the Alligator and Pogo Possum, Dell Four Color Comics #148, 1947.