Background

Walter Crawford Kelly was born on August 25, 1913 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, the son of Walter Crawford Kelly, a theatrical scene painter, and Genevieve MacAnnulla. In 1915 the family moved to Bridgeport, Connecticut, where Kelly spent his youth, and where he learned to draw from his father.

Education

Kelly attended Warren Harding High School.

Career

In 1930 Kelly became a reporter and artist for the Bridgeport Post and worked briefly with the Bridgeport welfare department. In 1935 Kelly moved to California and joined Walt Disney Studios as an animator. He left in 1941 because of an impending strike and returned to the East Coast to work for the Western Printing and Lithographing Company as an illustrator of children's books.

As part of his work he created a comic book in 1943 that featured a black child named Bumbazine and his pet alligator, Albert. One of the minor characters was a "possum" named Pogo. Over the next few years Pogo emerged as the figure who would dominate all of Kelly's career. In 1948, by then a resident of Darien, Connecticut, he joined the staff of the New York Star as art director and political cartoonist. It was in the Star that the first "Pogo" comic strips appeared, creating an animal-populated world set in Georgia's Okefenokee Swamp. The language used was a southern dialect that Kelly had become interested in while serving as a civilian with the army's foreign language unit during World War II.

In January 1949 the Star ceased publication and Kelly joined the New York Post, bringing "Pogo" with him. The strip became syndicated by Post-Hall (later Publishers-Hall) Syndicate in May 1949. Kelly always retained a personal copyright--one of the few cartoonists who did. At first newspaper editors were dubious about adding a whimsical strip with talking animals to their comic pages. Their doubts evaporated, however, when "Pogo" quickly became one of the most popular comics in the nation. Collections of the strip soon came out in book form with the publication of Pogo in 1951. A second book, I Go Pogo (1952), had the "possum" running for president, resulting in a fad on university campuses of wearing "I Go Pogo" buttons. Around 1954 he moved to New York City, where he would remain the rest of his life.

Kelly's "Pogo" was a combination of slapstick, doubletalk, and puns. He said that there was a bit of himself in each of the swamp creatures and described his technique as dropping the main characters into a new situation and then trying to figure out how he would react under those circumstances. Included within the strip were inside jokes, such as drawing the faces of colleagues on minor characters or the custom of putting friends' names on the sides of the strip's ubiquitous swamp boats. Kelly claimed in 1959 that his goal with "Pogo" was "to have fun and make money at the same time. "

Not all of Kelly's work was lighthearted. Often it took on a satirical, political edge. He reflected on topical issues by drawing the faces of well-known people on new animal characters. In 1956 and 1962 he drew Nikita Khrushchev as a pig; in other years he depicted Fidel Castro as a goat, J. Edgar Hoover as a bulldog, Spiro Agnew as a hyena, and in 1968, Lyndon Johnson as a steer with vision problems. Perhaps his most famous caricature debuted in 1953 with the introduction of Simple J. Malarkey, an evil wildcat with the face of Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. Kelly was one of the few cartoonists willing to criticize McCarthy during that era. Such satirical commentary sometimes made editors anxious because what Kelly was doing was novel to the comic pages. In response he claimed that "a cartoonist is a commentator on the day's events. There is nothing outside his province. " Nevertheless, many papers decided to drop the political segments until the regular characters returned. In 1952 newspapers in Tokyo and Toronto refused to publish the Khrushchev strips. In 1968 an Alabama paper would not run strips that mocked Governor George Wallace, and a number of papers banned the series on Lyndon Johnson. Kelly protested this censorship, but often supplied alternative, nonpolitical sets of strips to replace the offending ones. Later, however, the banned material would appear in one of his books and by the early 1970's he refused to supply any more replacements. Some newspapers decided to simply move "Pogo" to the editorial page, and Kelly agreed with this policy. n addition, a number of Kelly's books used satire to examine such themes as modern science (G. O. Fizzickle Pogo, 1958), right-wing political groups (The Jack Acid Society Black Book, 1962), mindless consumerism and the trading stamp phenomenon (Pogo Puce Stamp Catalog, 1962), and the problems of pollution (Pogo: We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us, 1972).

Kelly also gave lectures, illustrated other people's books, and helped in the production of a 1961 government pamphlet that was a primer for parents regarding their children's television habits. But his genius was always identified with Pogo, "the reasonable, patient, soft-hearted, naïve, friendly little person we all think we are. " His concern was to provide humor that, he believed, was not an escape but a relief.

He was in failing health through much of 1972 and 1973 and during that time a group of younger artists brought out "Pogo" under his supervision. Finally, former strips from the 1950's had to be substituted. Kelly died in Hollywood, California. "Pogo" continued to be written by his wife and one of his sons until 1975.

Achievements

• Walter Kelly was best known for creating his most noted character "Pogo", which went to press in 1943. He published more than thirty books, including an anthology, "Ten Ever-Lovin' Blue-Eyed Years with Pogo" (1959). "Pogo" was a path-breaking strip that first introduced political and social commentary to the comics page, thus setting the stage for the editorializing strips of the 1980's and beyond. In 1952 Kelly received the Cartoonist of the Year Award from the National Cartoonist Society. In 1954 he was the first artist invited to contribute his work to the newly opened Collection of American Cartoonists at the Library of Congress. He was one of only 31 artists selected to the National Cartoon Museum's Hall of Fame. Kelly was also inducted into the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame in 1995.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Walt Kelly's Pogo Revisited: Instant Pogo / The Jack Acid Society Black Book / The Pogo Poop Book

    (The cartoon antics of Pogo the Possum and his friends in ...)

  • Equal Time for Pogo

    (A collection of Pogo comic strips from 1968, focusing on ...)

  • Pogo Puce stamp catalog

    (A collection of Walt Kelly's syndicated comic strip from ...)

  • Uncle Pogo So-So Stories

    (Kelly's third collection of Pogo cartoons is not an antho...)

  • The Jack Acid Society Black Book

    (From rear cover notes: "Pogo is best known as the Possum ...)

  • Ten Ever-Lovin' Blue Eyed Years With Pogo

    (The official history and commemoration of Pogo's first de...)

  • Pogo: We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us

    (A collection of classic Pogo comics from the 1970s.)

  • Instant Pogo: Getting Mr. Pig's Goat, A Sequel to The Jack Acid Society Black Book

    (Further adventures in Okefenokee Swamp. "Getting Mr. Pig'...)

  • The Pogo Sunday brunch

    (paperback book)

  • G.O. Fizzickle Pogo

Membership

In 1954 Kelly was elected president of the National Cartoonist Society, pledging to work for a reduction of violence in comic strips.

Connections

Kelly was married three times and had six children. He married his last wife, Selby, in 1972.

Father:

Walter Crawford Kelly

painter

Mother:

Genevieve MacAnnulla

Spouse:

Selby Kelly

References

• Encyclopedia of Southern Culture