One Small Score for Two Brown Eyes

Jesse Walker | October 19, 2004

John Crowley, one of my favorite novelists, has written a thoughtful appreciation of Pogo, arguably the greatest American comic strip.

Comments

|10.19.04 @ 1:01PM|#

Great post - Thanks, it makes my day. An appreciation of Kelly's Pogo is crucial to sane development.

|10.19.04 @ 1:32PM|#

Crockett Johndon's _Barnaby_ was the greatest American comic strip.

Jesse Walker|10.19.04 @ 1:47PM|#

Ron: Barnaby is definitely up there. Did you ever read the sequence in which Barnaby's fairy godfather gets elected to Congress? Fookin brilliant.

But Pogo's even better.

|10.19.04 @ 3:19PM|#

Gorgon, the dog that discovers he can talk ``Good grief, I can talk!'' and soon launches into page-long shaggy dog stories, is my favorite. He had a small part in O'Malley's election campaign, substituting G.G Vest's Eulogy of the Dog for the big radio speech.

Anyway I liked it as a small kid in the collections, and here it is, still good. Pogo I never understood. I mean, why it was entertaining. It seems like mostly trite ironies.

|10.19.04 @ 3:40PM|#

Had I begun reading Pogo when I was as old as I am today, I might have a different opinion, but Al Capp gets my vote as number 1.
Best currently, general category, is Lynn Johnston, the Canadian. Best in political satire category is Berkeley Breathed.

Jesse Walker|10.19.04 @ 4:14PM|#

Ron: Are you sure you're thinking about Pogo? I'm sure every strip has at least occasionally offered its readers a trite irony, but Pogo was more a place for baroque absurdity.

|10.19.04 @ 6:15PM|#

Friends would occasionally point Pogo out and say how great it was. I could never see it. Sort of, um, okay. On the other hand, I knew a guy who said that he'd never gotten a single Far Side cartoon. That's right down my alley. Humor is not a single thing.

Is it my lack of cynicism? Cynicism is a political position in a democracy, one way to avoid compromising yourself, one way to react to inevitable failures. More of a fix-it attitude is more appealing to me.

|10.20.04 @ 9:26AM|#

When you said "two brown-eyes", I thought you meant Kerry and Bush!