American cartoonist, whose best-known creation Pogo made its first appearance in the late 1940s. Kelly's daily strip represented political satire in its highest form and his characterization, language, dialect, art and lettering strived for perfection.

A comic strip is like a dream...

Walter Kelly war born in Philadelphia. His father was a theatrical scenery painter and taught the boy how to draw. Kelly edited in high school the school magazine and also drew for the local paper. After graduation he worked as a journalist and cartoonist at the Bridgeport Post.

In 1935 Kelly moved to Hollywood and became an animator for Walt Disney Studios, working among others on Dumbo, Snow White, The Reluctant Dragon and Fantasia. In 1941 he returned to east and did comic book work for Western Printing & Lithographing. Editor Oskar Lebeck hired him to write and draw stories for Animal Comics, Our Gang, Fairy Tale Parade, Raggedy Ann&Andy, and Santa Claus Funnies. He created in 1943 Bumbazine and Albert the Alligator, which appeared in issue number one of Animal Comics and was the basis for Pogo, when the little boy gradually faded out of the strip. The cartoon depicted the adventures of a boy who lived in the Okefenokee Swamp in the company of his pet alligator. Later the strip was titled Albert and Pogo.

During World War II Kelly was at the Foreign Language Unit and illustrated manuals for the Army. Although his works at Western Publishing were aimed mostly for very young readers, Kelly also created such features as Seaman Sy Wheeler, and a screwball saga Pat, Patsy and Pete. In 1948 he was hired to draw political cartoons for New York Star, a new liberal and short-lived paper, where Pogo started to appear as a daily feature. The cartoon was then taken over to the New York Post and began in 1949 national syndication.

For the next six years Pogo was available simultaneously in comic books and newspapers. By 1954, Kelly's relationship with the publishing company had soured, prompting him to quit doing books and concentrate on strips. In 1952 he was named "cartoonist of the year" and two years later he was elected president of the National Cartoonist Society. Pogo started out slowly in syndication but in the late 1950s it was subscribed by almost 600 newspapers. Kelly regularly reprinted Pogo, resulting in more than three dozen paperbacks during his lifetime.

In addition to his work on Pogo, Kelly reviewed books, wrote articles and nonsense verse, illustrated books, delivered hundreds of lectures and sang some of the songs in the record 'Songs of the Pogo'. His wide influence in seen in the works of such artists as Jeff Smith (The Bone) and Cathy Hill (Mad Raccoons).

In the 1960s Kelly had health problems and he left more and more of the drawing to others. In 1969 a Pogo animated cartoon was shown on TV. Kelly died in Hollywood on October 18, 1973, of complications of diabetes.

From 1973 the strip was continued for some years by Kelly's son Stephen and his widow Selby, with the help of several assistants. A new version, titled Walt Kelly's Pogo started to run in 1989. The strip was written by Larry Doyle and drawn by Neal Sternecky. Doyle left the strip in 1991, Sternecky went solo with it until Kelly's children Pete and Carolyn took it over in 1992; it ended the next year.

"I'll tell you, son, the minority got us out-numbered!"
(Congressman Frog)

POGO: The strip depicts Okefenokee Swamp, where worms, insects, birds, reptiles, herbivores and carnivores live in more or less peacefully. Central characters are Pogo, the generous and modest little opossum, anarchistic and egoistic Albert the Alligator, Dr. Howland Owl, the bear P.T. Bridgeport, Beauregard, the retired bloodhound, the snooping turtle Churchy-la-Femme, and Porky the porcupine. The antagonism between Albert and Pogo has been seen as symbolic representation of the Ego and Id. Comparable philosophical juxtapositions has been widely used in cartoons, as in Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes or in Charles Schulz's Peanuts.

"Yep, son, we have met the enemy and he is us." (Pogo's observation upon seeing the garbage-cluttered swamp) - NOTE: "We have met the enemy, and they are ours." Dispatch from U.S. brig Niagara to General William Henry Harrison, announcing his victory at the battle of Lake Erie, September 10, 1813.

Kelly put more than six hundred named or otherwise identifiable creatures in the swamp, each with a distinct personality. His characters talked and argued constantly with a poetic language that mixed Elizabethan English, French, and black dialects. He played on words and especially on names, thus Simple J. Malarkey referred to Senator Joseph McCarthy. He mocked also such well-known figures as J. Edgar Hoover, George Wallace, Spiro Agnew, Nikita Khrushchev, Fidel Castro. Richard Nixon was Kelly's most represented figure, portrayed as Malarkey's sidekick, Indian Charlie, and later as a teapot-shaped spider named Sam. Much meaning could be derived from the way political personalities were drawn: Angew was a uniformed hyena, Khrushchev as a pig, Castro as a goat, and J. Edgar Hoover as a bulldog.

For further reading: The World Encyclopaedia of Comics, ed. by Maurice Horn (1976) 100 Years of American Newspaper Comics. ed. by Maurice Horn (1996) - Animal fables - see the classical roots in the literature: Aisopos, Krylov, La Fontaine