POGO Volumes 1 & 2 Gift Set: Through the Wild Blue Wonder and Bona Fide Balderdash

TWO VOLUMES in excellent condition

Collects the first 4 years of Walt Kelly's landmark comic strip including the dailies and, for the first time in color, the intial first three years of Sundays in a handsome slipcase edition. Meticulously retouched by Kellys daughter Carolyn and features historical essays by POGO historians Steve Thompson and R.C. Harvey and famous friends-of-Kelly Jimmy Breslin and Stan Freberg plus much more!

Walt Kelly started his career at age 13 in Connecticut as a cartoonist and reporter for the Bridgeport Post. In 1935, he moved to Los Angeles and joined the Walt Disney Studio, where he worked on classic animated films, including Pinocchio, Dumbo, and Fantasia. Rather than take sides in a bitter labor strike, he moved back east in 1941 and began drawing comic books.

It was during this time that Kelly created Pogo Possum. The character first appeared in Animal Comics as a secondary player in the "Albert the Alligator" feature. It didn't take long until Pogo became the comic's leading character. After WWII, Kelly became artistic director at the New York Star, where he turned Pogo into a daily strip. By late 1949, Pogo appeared in hundreds of newspapers. Until his death in 1973, Kelly produced a feature that has become widely cherished among casual readers and aficionados alike.

Kelly blended nonsense language, poetry, and political and social satire to make Pogo an essential contribution to American "intellectual" comics. As the strip progressed, it became a hilarious platform for Kelly's scathing political views in which he skewered national bogeymen like J. Edgar Hoover, Joseph McCarthy, George Wallace, and Richard Nixon. Walt Kelly started when newspaper strips shied away from politics -- Pogo was ahead of its time and ahead of later strips (such as Doonesbury and The Boondocks) that tackled political issues. Our first (of 12) volume reprints approximately the first two years of Pogo -- dailies and (for the first time) full-color Sundays.

The first volume also introduces such enduring supporting characters as Porkypine, Churchy LaFemme, Beauregard Bugleboy, Seminole Sam, Howland Owl, and many others. And for Christmas, 1949, Kelly started his tradition of regaling his readers with his infamously and gloriously mangled Christmas carols.

Special features in this sumptuous premiere volume, which is produced with the full cooperation of Kelly's heirs, include a biographical introduction by Kelly biographer Steve Thompson, an extensive section by comics historian R. C. Harvey explaining some of the more obscure current references of the time, a foreword by legendary columnist Jimmy Breslin, and more.

Pogo: Bona Fide Balderdash is the second volume in a series reprinting in its entirety the syndicated run of Walt Kelly's classic newspaper strip. It features all the strips from 1951 and 1952, which have been collected before, but in now long-out-of print books, and even there they were not as meticulously restored and reproduced as in this new series. Bona Fide Balderdash also reprints, literally for the first time ever in full color, the two full years of Sunday pages, also carefully restored and color-corrected, shot from the finest copies available. This second volume is once again edited and designed by the cartoonist's daughter, Carolyn Kelly, who is also handling much of the restoration work.

Author: Walt Kelly
Artist: Walt Kelly
Publisher: Fantagraphics, 2012 (Out of Print)
Number of pages: 688
Format: Hard Cover in Slipcase; Part Colour illustrations
Size: 12" x 10" (300mm x 250mm)
ISBN: 1606996290
Condition: NM - Near Mint
Code: POGOGIFT01