Nice! I wasn't even born yet ~

"We have met the enemy and he is us."

I never cease to buy old copies of his books at old book stores and never cease to believe that old copies of his books are not properly treasured.

He was the best. I have about 30 Pogo books, and jump to get the older ones when I see them. My sister and I read two of them to death - until we had to pick up the separate pages to turn them over. Many, many happy memories. As he got older, he got much more cynical and bitter. No pleasant to read, at all. But then, he got through the McCarthy era taking potshots at the whole HUAC experience ("The Jack Acid Society"). By the time he passed away,Nixon was in charge (reason enough to be bitter, I think).

Pasteup! New paper with new stuff rubber-cemented on the old paper! Pencil lines showing, and ink on top of them. The whole schmeer aligned and then photographed to make a plate. The way it used to be done. No photoshopping or Auto-tune (or whatever the visual-art equivalent of Auto-tune is). Made painstakingly by hand. And just beautiful.

Always thought that swamp would be a cool place to live.

My whole fam damily grew up on Pogo, and still comment in Pogoisms about some things. The original name of the strip was 'Bumbazine and Albert the Alligator.' Kelly retired Bumbazine early, back when Pogo still looked like a possum, saying that as the only human in the strip, he kept the animal characters from revealing their humanity.

Just to be a pedantic nitpicker, Bumbazine was never in the comic strip. He was in the comic book stories that preceded the comic strip by about 6 years. The first story was in ANIMAL COMICS and was titled "Albert Takes the Cake".

I have always been out of phase with the rest of the world. I try to hang true but I always end up more than a few sigma off plumb. I had a friend Looy once, he's gone now, who I once remarked to I was not a normal person. He smiled, laughed, and replied that he didn't know any normal people. If Pogo were Jewish, wore a pith helmet, and looked sort of like Santa, he could have been Looy.