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Comic Strip Book Club #9 - Walt Kelly's Pogo · 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast

• 0:02
  Tad Eggleston: Good evening, everybody. Welcome back to the Comic Strip Book Club on 22 Panels. I'm… I'm…
• 0:09
  Tad Eggleston: I'm, joined by Chicago-area actor Sean Harkleroad and cartoonist extraordinaire and, and, comic strip just aficionado, R. Sikoriak. How you guys doing?
• 0:25
  R. Sikoryak: Good!
• 0:26
  Tad Eggleston: This month, or this month… we do this less than monthly. This time around, we're looking at Walt Kelly's Pogo, which I hadn't looked at enough, and I don't think I'd realized…
• 0:38
  Tad Eggleston: until I started diving into it, how much… it… It's, like… more Doonesbury than Garfield.
• 0:51
  Tad Eggleston: Does that make sense?
• 0:53
  R. Sikoryak: I, I…
• 0:53
  Tad Eggleston: Tad, I don't know what is like Garfield, but… Well, I only use that…
• 0:59
  R. Sikoryak: It's not Pogo.
• 1:00
  Tad Eggleston: No, no, that was the first thing that popped into my head that was just a silly animal strip, rather than…
• 1:06
  Tad Eggleston: I see. Rather than…
• 1:08
  R. Sikoryak: I see.
• 1:09
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. I'm certain I could come up with a better one… better example than… but… but, like…
• 1:16
  Tad Eggleston: And it was actually kind of interesting reading about how there were… there were two groups of people who were…
• 1:23
  Tad Eggleston: upset about pogo strips, and either one of them were…
• 1:27
  Tad Eggleston: really easy for Walt Kelly to just go, yeah, I don't care. It was the people who didn't agree with the politics, and it was the people who were like, I come to this for the funny animals, don't make me think about the real world.
• 1:41
  Tad Eggleston: And he's like, well, then why are you coming to this at all? Because I've been like this for a long time.
• 1:50
  Tad Eggleston: So, first thoughts.
• 1:54
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I have a question about how this… we've been doing this for, I don't know, 2 years now, and I'm suddenly realizing.
• 2:01
  R. Sikoryak: Who… how… Do you… do you think your… your… your listeners are…
• 2:09
  R. Sikoryak: familiar with these strips, or are we, like, presenting it fresh…
• 2:15
  R. Sikoryak: As if they've never read it.
• 2:16
  Tad Eggleston: I think it… I think it depends on the strip. I mean, I think when we talked about Calvin and Hobbes and…
• 2:22
  Tad Eggleston: And, peanuts, they were more likely to be…
• 2:26
  Tad Eggleston: familiar, I think, when we talked about Roy Crane, or even Chester Gould, not as much.
• 2:34
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah.
• 2:35
  Tad Eggleston: Pogo could go either way, and this is where I also say, Bob, thank you so much for assuming that we have listeners.
• 2:45
  R. Sikoryak: Hi, welcome. Hi, Adam. Hi, Britt. Hi, John.
• 2:49
  R. Sikoryak: Hi, everybody.
• 2:51
  R. Sikoryak: No, but the reason I… one of the reasons I ask that is because for Pogo, for me, I didn't grow up with it. I… I always…
• 2:58
  Tad Eggleston: Neither did I.
• 2:58
  R. Sikoryak: I felt I had a great, were you alive in 1972? No, I wasn't.
• 3:05
  R. Sikoryak: I mean, it didn't run in my home paper, and I always felt I had a good mix of comics in my home paper when I was reading strips in 1970, when I was 6, or 5. But,
• 3:19
  R. Sikoryak: the thing is that I only discovered it later, and in some ways, it's… I found it originally not impenetrable.
• 3:29
  R. Sikoryak: but speaking such a different language that I, didn't quite know what to make of it. So I think, in terms of, like, introducing this to people who haven't seen it before, you do kind of have to,
• 3:42
  R. Sikoryak: you do kind of have to dig in, or maybe, as you said earlier, Tad, maybe you have to read it in small doses so you can, like, let it get absorbed, rather than try to, like, cram for the… cram for the exam. Like, I…
• 3:55
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, like I did too. I think reading in small doses is good. I actually read a lot of the introductions to the various Panagraphics volumes. I enjoyed the Jake Tapper introduction, I enjoyed the,
• 4:11
  Tad Eggleston: Mark Avenir had one, and… and…
• 4:14
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, the guy that does, Mother Goose and Grimm?
• 4:19
  R. Sikoryak: Mike Peters.
• 4:20
  Sean Harklerode: Mike Peters.
• 4:22
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 4:23
  Tad Eggleston: So some of those unlocked some things for me. I think I came across one place where it, it, it…
• 4:31
  Tad Eggleston: Broke down some of the…
• 4:34
  Tad Eggleston: not quite southern language? Because that's something that I appreciate, is that there is a dialect But it isn't…
• 4:43
  Tad Eggleston: Specifically, At least to me, it didn't read as specifically a…
• 4:49
  Tad Eggleston: A given part of the country, as much as it read as
• 4:54
  Tad Eggleston: We're in an area that has a dialect, and we want anybody who has a dialect or thinks of areas to have a dialect to know that that's the type of place this is, but we're also not making fun of any one group of people, so we're kind of developing our own
• 5:11
  Tad Eggleston: Bob's nodding his head a lot for the people listening at home.
• 5:18
  Tad Eggleston: Does that make sense? Am I off-base on that?
• 5:24
  Sean Harklerode: No, I mean, I… you know, so it's supposedly in the Okefenokee Swamp.
• 5:29
  Sean Harklerode: you know, area of Georgia, but…
• 5:32
  Sean Harklerode: You know, that… the language is…
• 5:36
  Sean Harklerode: Well, there's just puns upon puns, malaprophisms, it's…
• 5:43
  Sean Harklerode: You know, it is a patois, but it's also a running joke.
• 5:47
  Tad Eggleston: Alright.
• 5:48
  Sean Harklerode: You know, just… The words that these guys use, and
• 5:54
  Sean Harklerode: you know, for some of it, I felt like they all had the same language.
• 5:59
  Sean Harklerode: But then there is some differentiation, as it, as it went on.
• 6:06
  Sean Harklerode: But, yeah, it's definitely hard, as you said, to binge. You know, reading that, it's just not conducive to reading a lot at a sitting.
• 6:17
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and I…
• 6:18
  R. Sikoryak: And not because it's, repetitive. I mean, I would say, if anything, if you look at three strips, you see how ornate the drawing is. Something very lush about the scenery, the characters are, like…
• 6:35
  R. Sikoryak: visually well rendered, and then the dialogue is… has the same qualities. He doesn't skimp…
• 6:42
  Sean Harklerode: It's too much to really take in.
• 6:45
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 6:46
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah, I, I, I agree.
• 6:49
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I think this is the first comic that we've read that I think
• 6:53
  Tad Eggleston: Was on one level designed to… you read one script that you think about until you get to the one the next day.
• 7:03
  Tad Eggleston: You know, it's not supposed to be the one that you read, and then forget about until you come back the next day. I mean, even Dick Tracy had a feel of that, because of the number of times that they would use that first panel to let you know what happened yesterday.
• 7:19
  Tad Eggleston: Right? This both often has somewhat continuing stories, But… but also, like.
• 7:28
  Tad Eggleston: there's a density to this.
• 7:31
  Tad Eggleston: it wound up being way wordier than I expected it to be, but not necessarily in a bad way. Just, just in a way that, like, I'm not used to seeing,
• 7:43
  Tad Eggleston: solo cartoonists get this… this wordy. It's… it's more like the writer gives all the words, and… and the cartoonist is like, really? Do we need that many?
• 7:54
  Sean Harklerode: Well, it's just amazing, and Bob can probably speak to this more. I mean, so you've got that dense language.
• 8:02
  Sean Harklerode: And then this ornate.
• 8:05
  Tad Eggleston: Beautiful line work.
• 8:07
  Tad Eggleston: In the same strip.
• 8:10
  Sean Harklerode: And so it's just so much on a daily basis.
• 8:14
  Sean Harklerode: you know, to go through.
• 8:18
  Sean Harklerode: And just to imagine turning it out. I mean, he had assistance, obviously.
• 8:23
  Sean Harklerode: Right.
• 8:23
  Sean Harklerode: It's just… that as a daily… if that were in your daily paper, it… you know, I wasn't reading comics in 1972.
• 8:33
  Tad Eggleston: Right. Or 1953.
• 8:35
  Sean Harklerode: Right? But, just to see that every morning in the paper, right, would be amazing.
• 8:43
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 8:44
  Tad Eggleston: And a daunting task if your name is Walt Kelly.
• 8:47
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah. We had to do another one tomorrow.
• 8:50
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I mean, I'm just… I'm looking…
• 8:52
  Tad Eggleston: At a random page, and even noticing that, like, the placement of balloons is… So… Well done.
• 9:04
  Tad Eggleston: Including things like, you know, that the owl's hat sometimes is on top of the balloon, but not on top of the letters, so that you don't affect the art, but you also don't affect the story. You know, you'll have the pipe smoke go over a balloon, not over the letters, but over the balloon line, you know.
• 9:21
  Tad Eggleston: There's such a great balance between the two.
• 9:26
  R. Sikoryak: Go ahead, Bob, I'm sorry. No, not at all, not at all. You can tell a trained
• 9:34
  R. Sikoryak: as an animator at Disney, if only… if only because of the constant motion of the characters and the constant, like, sense of design that's so prevalent in it. And he wasn't, you know, he wasn't with some…
• 9:48
  R. Sikoryak: mediocre animation studio, he was with Disney. I mean, he was working with the greats, and I'm sure it was being pushed, and pushed himself to really succeed. So it's funny that you mention… I can see why you mentioned Doonesbury in the political angle of it, but Trudeau, even at Trudeau's most…
• 10:07
  R. Sikoryak: elaborate visual sense.
• 10:10
  Tad Eggleston: I don't know.
• 10:10
  R. Sikoryak: There's noth- there's nothing like…
• 10:12
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, no.
• 10:13
  R. Sikoryak: offense in Pogo.
• 10:14
  Sean Harklerode: There's a fluidity to it.
• 10:16
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 10:17
  R. Sikoryak: Absolutely.
• 10:18
  Tad Eggleston: So, and again, this is just the same random page, so I'm gonna show to Sean and Bob, and we'll describe it well enough to the readers, because one of the reasons I wanted to read this is I know it's Jeff Smith's
• 10:31
  Tad Eggleston: favorite book, and if you look up at this panel, right up in the corner, without even reading it, doesn't it just scream the… the…
• 10:41
  Tad Eggleston: Groundhog kids?
• 10:44
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah.
• 10:44
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, that looks like a panel out of bone, only with hats.
• 10:49
  Sean Harklerode: Right.
• 10:50
  Tad Eggleston: You know, yeah, so, I mean, that would be…
• 10:57
  Tad Eggleston: of the artists most likely to be well-known by anybody listening, the art is much more…
• 11:05
  Tad Eggleston: Jeff Smith, and I mean, you… you… knowing that Kelly came first, I think even without.
• 11:11
  Sean Harklerode: having talked to Jeff, and read Jeff and whatnot, and knowing that Jeff loves Walt Kelly, I would…
• 11:17
  Tad Eggleston: I would look at Pogo and then look at Bowen and go, oh, Jeff's a big Walt Kelly fan.
• 11:24
  Tad Eggleston: You know.
• 11:25
  R. Sikoryak: Oh, no question.
• 11:26
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 11:27
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah, I mean, the characters are…
• 11:29
  Sean Harklerode: And… and the background, you know, the… the Okefenokee Swamp.
• 11:33
  Sean Harklerode: It's just like Coconcino County, you know, it's… it's its own character.
• 11:40
  Sean Harklerode: But… there, as I said, fluidity, I don't know if that's the… the… The word, but…
• 11:48
  Sean Harklerode: It seems to exist in three dimensions.
• 11:51
  Tad Eggleston: As opposed to…
• 11:53
  Sean Harklerode: you know, Bush Miller, or… Peanuts. Peanuts. Those are all… those are definitely two-dimensional, characters, I mean, renderings. Whereas this…
• 12:08
  Sean Harklerode: You could see… Albert, all of them from any angle.
• 12:13
  Sean Harklerode: And they were fully rounded, characters.
• 12:20
  Sean Harklerode: It's just… Amazing.
• 12:24
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and I mentioned… I mentioned the political, and, like, it's great to read the strips.
• 12:30
  Tad Eggleston: that Lampoon McCarthy, and in the book that Jake Tapper did the intro to, which I think was volume 6 or 7, he deliberately led you to a set of strips
• 12:45
  Tad Eggleston: That was… was when the South was shutting down schools rather than integrating them?
• 12:54
  R. Sikoryak: So, so, so essentially the storyline was…
• 12:57
  Tad Eggleston: They were… they were putting together, speakeasy schools. You want to get your learning, you know?
• 13:04
  Tad Eggleston: Show up, ask for Joe, and say…
• 13:10
  Tad Eggleston: You know, so, I mean, there was the overtly political, but then there's also…
• 13:17
  Tad Eggleston: I read a section of them where the pollster is like, I need you to go to your house, because I'm conducting a door-to-door poll, not a man-on-the-street poll.
• 13:27
  Tad Eggleston: And he's like, but I'm working. I'm fishing. I need to do… yes, but I need to do my pole properly. Well, can't you ask me the questions here? That would make it an incomplete poll, and then eventually, like, somebody else takes them to the house and answers for Pogo.
• 13:43
  Tad Eggleston: Because, oh, we're in the house, doesn't matter that it's not your house!
• 13:49
  Tad Eggleston: And it's… and it's, like, the poll on, do we rename the Groundhog's kid?
• 13:55
  Tad Eggleston: We're doing this poll for Groundhog Day. Is the Groundhog's kid's name too long?
• 14:04
  Tad Eggleston: But there's also just stuff on kindness, or… you know…
• 14:11
  Tad Eggleston: There's a world here, and politics enters the way politics…
• 14:17
  Tad Eggleston: Enters a human world, rather than
• 14:23
  Tad Eggleston: Rather than, like, in Doonesbury, where it's sometimes all of it.
• 14:27
  Tad Eggleston: Does that make sense?
• 14:31
  R. Sikoryak: Yes, but I do think that politics took over the strip more and more as it went on.
• 14:35
  Tad Eggleston: Definitely.
• 14:36
  R. Sikoryak: There's certainly…
• 14:37
  Tad Eggleston: It's certainly in eras where…
• 14:40
  Tad Eggleston: Certainly in eras where the politics… I mean, if he was working today, we'd get a ton of political strips. We might not have gotten as many of them
• 14:49
  Tad Eggleston: during the Biden years.
• 14:52
  Tad Eggleston: You know.
• 14:53
  Tad Eggleston: we would have gotten a ton of them during the… you know, I think it would depend on what was going on and how it affected people, because to me, anyway, it feels much less like politics as…
• 15:09
  Tad Eggleston: Support of one team or the other, and much more as politics as… like…
• 15:18
  Tad Eggleston: How does rounding up all the reds, and not particularly caring about who's red and…
• 15:25
  Tad Eggleston: who's not, we just gotta round up some people.
• 15:28
  Tad Eggleston: What are the implications?
• 15:30
  Tad Eggleston: 2.
• 15:31
  Tad Eggleston: my world.
• 15:33
  Tad Eggleston: you know, what are the implications to my world that we let this blow hard, or that we close these schools because… and there was even the panel that got edited by some people, where it's like, there was one of the characters making the argument, oh, no, I can't have my kid go to school, he could share an orange with a girl, and then they'd be married, and…
• 15:55
  Tad Eggleston: It didn't specifically say anything about interracial, but, like, that was the huge implication right there, was that, oh, this is about…
• 16:09
  R. Sikoryak: This was in the 60s strips? I didn't actually read that volume.
• 16:12
  Tad Eggleston: I think that was, late 50s?
• 16:18
  R. Sikoryak: Okay.
• 16:20
  Tad Eggleston: Maybe early 60s? Let me go see if I can find it.
• 16:24
  R. Sikoryak: It's not that important. Yeah. It's not that important. There's so many… there's so many references, so…
• 16:30
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 16:33
  Sean Harklerode: I… I started reading, with the first volume.
• 16:37
  Sean Harklerode: And was struck by how everything was just…
• 16:41
  Sean Harklerode: like we said with Calvin and Hobbs, started Everything seemed fully formed.
• 16:47
  Sean Harklerode: Right? But then I found that they had started
• 16:51
  Sean Harklerode: in the comics, in comic books, like, in Bell comics. So I went back and, read a few of those from Animal Comics.
• 17:03
  Sean Harklerode: And the first one, you know, Albert, it was about Albert, really.
• 17:07
  Sean Harklerode: And… and a little boy who lived, in… in the swamp.
• 17:12
  Sean Harklerode: And Pogo was sort of…
• 17:15
  Sean Harklerode: just one of the other characters, and they phased out. Walt Kelly decided he couldn't write for a human child, and so Pogo took that
• 17:24
  Sean Harklerode: Position. But, so, I was able to see some of the evolution of the character designs in the actual comic books.
• 17:37
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 17:37
  Sean Harklerode: But even that happened very quickly.
• 17:40
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah.
• 17:40
  R. Sikoryak: Yep. Hmm.
• 17:41
  Sean Harklerode: Between Issue 1 and Issue 4 were amazing, so…
• 17:48
  Tad Eggleston: I think what I wish I had for Pogo…
• 17:51
  Tad Eggleston: what I wish we had for a lot more strips than we do is kind of like, on…
• 17:57
  Tad Eggleston: Bob's recommendation, I read that, that golden peanuts… collection.
• 18:02
  R. Sikoryak: Oh, great.
• 18:02
  Tad Eggleston: Where… where it had a lot of storylines.
• 18:05
  Tad Eggleston: But it also had commentary, and it was… it was one part best of, but not like, let's choose the best of strips. Like, they were choosing them for a reason, and they were giving you chunks of them, and they were giving… and they were talking about the reasons that they were giving
• 18:21
  Tad Eggleston: them to you. I think that there are a lot of comic strips that would… greatly…
• 18:31
  Tad Eggleston: Benefit from having that sort of volume put out about them, where somebody is taking you on a guided tour.
• 18:40
  Tad Eggleston: Rather than just, okay, I'm gonna sit down in 1953 and hope I don't get bored before 1971.
• 18:49
  Tad Eggleston: Which, I mean, Calvin and Hobbes pulls that off for me every few years. I once actually read all of Calvin and Hobbes in one sitting. I can't think of any other…
• 19:00
  Tad Eggleston: comic strip that I… Can even imagine reading much more than, like, one thin volume.
• 19:07
  Tad Eggleston: in a sitting. Like, a year of a comic strip all in a sitting is generally…
• 19:13
  Tad Eggleston: more than I can really process.
• 19:19
  Sean Harklerode: That's a lot.
• 19:21
  Sean Harklerode: I do remember when the Bloom County paperbacks would come out, I would typically.
• 19:27
  R. Sikoryak: Try not to read them all in one sitting, but…
• 19:31
  Sean Harklerode: fail.
• 19:33
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, Bloom County, I can… I can do a lot more at once than a lot of things, too, and… and still haven't finished them. I need to read more Bloom County. I… I enjoy it. That's another thing that I think has…
• 19:46
  Tad Eggleston: some pogo roots.
• 19:48
  Sean Harklerode: Oh, very much.
• 19:49
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 19:50
  Sean Harklerode: You know, Bill the Cat running for president.
• 19:52
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 19:55
  Sean Harklerode: Would, yeah.
• 19:56
  Sean Harklerode: So… Oh, go ahead, Bob.
• 19:58
  Tad Eggleston: I was just gonna say, I didn't manage to dig up any of the Pogo Running for President comics. I know they're in here, I just didn't…
• 20:05
  Tad Eggleston: Find the weeks.
• 20:07
  Tad Eggleston: Apparently, he was a reluctant candidate, and… .
• 20:12
  R. Sikoryak: Multiple elections, yeah.
• 20:13
  Tad Eggleston: 52 and 56, I think, something like that.
• 20:19
  Tad Eggleston: So…
• 20:20
  Sean Harklerode: But I… I actually… found on the internet. I GoPogo, the movie, the… the stop-motion movie.
• 20:29
  Tad Eggleston: I did not know this thing.
• 20:31
  R. Sikoryak: Was that made when he was alive?
• 20:33
  Sean Harklerode: It was not. It was made.
• 20:34
  R. Sikoryak: Okay.
• 20:35
  Sean Harklerode: 1980.
• 20:36
  R. Sikoryak: Okay.
• 20:37
  Sean Harklerode: And Jonathan Winters plays Porcupine.
• 20:43
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 20:43
  Sean Harklerode: Vincent Price, I can't remember the name of his character.
• 20:48
  Sean Harklerode: But it's… Albert, and…
• 20:54
  Sean Harklerode: Howlin are trying to get Pogo to run for president, and then Vincent Price and the mole
• 21:00
  Sean Harklerode: Are… they're also trying to get him to run for president.
• 21:04
  Sean Harklerode: To, to serve their evil.
• 21:06
  Tad Eggleston: Stan Freeberg is the alligator?
• 21:09
  Sean Harklerode: That was Stan Freeburg? Yeah, that… I was trying to place Albert's voice. Yep.
• 21:13
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah… Nice.
• 21:16
  Sean Harklerode: So, you can find it on YouTube.
• 21:19
  Tad Eggleston: Good to know.
• 21:20
  R. Sikoryak: I was listening, because I couldn't read the strips fast enough, I was also listening to the Songs of the Pogo album that was put out during Kelly's lifetime. He wrote the lyrics and sings some of the songs.
• 21:33
  Tad Eggleston: Really?
• 21:33
  R. Sikoryak: In a big, blustery voice. And I had read that… I don't know if this will help the listeners, but, listeners.
• 21:43
  R. Sikoryak: But I had read that They Might Be Giants covered some of the songs from this record, because they appreciated the way the songs were constructed, and I thought, well, that's really interesting, because there is something, I guess, equally twisty and ornate about the way they write songs as the way Walt Kelly makes comics. If that's a…
• 22:03
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 22:04
  R. Sikoryak: coherent metaphor that anyone understands. I thought that was actually kind of enlightening.
• 22:09
  Tad Eggleston: It, it, it…
• 22:11
  Tad Eggleston: I'm gonna have to, like, go dig those up now, because I love the… and my wife also loves They Might Be Giants, so, so, like…
• 22:20
  Sean Harklerode: They're doing 3 nights at the Vic.
• 22:22
  Tad Eggleston: Are they?
• 22:23
  Sean Harklerode: in May.
• 22:25
  Tad Eggleston: That's good to know.
• 22:29
  R. Sikoryak: -
• 22:30
  Tad Eggleston: Good to know.
• 22:33
  Tad Eggleston: And yeah, I can see that. That, that, that… They're… They're sometimes deceptively, political?
• 22:44
  R. Sikoryak: And also, and also, surface… surface charm and…
• 22:48
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 22:49
  R. Sikoryak: naughtier themes underneath, maybe. Right, right. When you think about it. It's like, oh, that looks… that sounds fun! Wait, it's about suicide? What? Right.
• 22:58
  Tad Eggleston: But, like, I love their science album.
• 23:02
  Sean Harklerode: Oh.
• 23:02
  Tad Eggleston: Yay-do.
• 23:04
  R. Sikoryak: Right.
• 23:05
  Tad Eggleston: Particular… I mean, there are certain topics that I hate that we call them political, and science is one of them, right? So when they… when they can do things like take on climate change in a…
• 23:16
  Tad Eggleston: In a well, well-researched, scientific way through a silly pop song.
• 23:26
  Tad Eggleston: That's just a certain kind of… Fantastic talent.
• 23:32
  R. Sikoryak: Sure.
• 23:33
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah.
• 23:34
  Tad Eggleston: And, And it makes so much sense that that would come from our Sikoriak, because, you know.
• 23:44
  Tad Eggleston: putting the Constitution to cartoons is similar to that, in terms of, let's take this serious thing and not take away its seriousness, while also…
• 23:57
  Tad Eggleston: Making you think and lampooning the people who don't, all at once?
• 24:04
  Tad Eggleston: So there was my plug. Constitution Illustrated. Thank you, Ted.
• 24:11
  Tad Eggleston: Do we have a date yet on Declaration of Independence Illustrated? Because I'm anxiously awaiting it.
• 24:17
  R. Sikoryak: We do, but we should save that for the end of the episode when, after we get through Kelly. We have to keep talking about Pogo, we can't talk about me. We do.
• 24:26
  Tad Eggleston: I just got distracted for a minute.
• 24:29
  R. Sikoryak: I know.
• 24:29
  Sean Harklerode: I… and I don't know if either of you know much about this.
• 24:33
  Tad Eggleston: Connected in my head.
• 24:37
  Sean Harklerode: But it struck me as… why he chose, you know, because I think he lived in California.
• 24:45
  Sean Harklerode: Why you chose the Okefenokee Swamp.
• 24:49
  Sean Harklerode: For his characters and that patois.
• 24:52
  Sean Harklerode: I guess he just found it interesting, but it… Definitely not part of his…
• 24:58
  Sean Harklerode: his culture, or… or anything.
• 25:02
  Sean Harklerode: And then I found, in 1964, he was going off… I think…
• 25:11
  Sean Harklerode: one of the characters… was it Helen?
• 25:15
  Sean Harklerode: was… Working on a… Working on a… a… a campaign slogan.
• 25:26
  Sean Harklerode: And it wound up being, let's Go Mets.
• 25:31
  Sean Harklerode: I'm like, he's just drawing stuff from everywhere!
• 25:41
  Sean Harklerode: So, I don't know what to do with that, but I'm just like… it just seems like a breadth of influences and references.
• 25:50
  Sean Harklerode: To make.
• 25:52
  R. Sikoryak: Oh, for sure.
• 25:54
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm…
• 25:57
  R. Sikoryak: it's hard… I… I'm trying to think of what other strips were popular in the 50s, but this was such a big, popular strip in its day.
• 26:05
  R. Sikoryak: And it also just feels so different from most other strips. I guess in the 50s, there was still room to experiment and explore in com… in daily comic strips, but I would think even on the page, it would be really striking and feel very different from everything else that was there.
• 26:24
  R. Sikoryak: Certainly, I mean, next to Peanuts, although that was a little bit later, but even so, you think about what strips became, and how boiled down things became, by the 60s, it seems that it was still really…
• 26:38
  Sean Harklerode: kind of showing off, in a beautiful way, but really, it's kind of a very show-off Easter.
• 26:45
  R. Sikoryak: just throwing in new characters and bringing all these references in. I am curious about how he got to the…
• 26:51
  R. Sikoryak: he got to the swamps, how that… how that… where that came from. If that's a crazy cat kind of thing, like, where can I create a collection of animals that we hang out? Did he just like drawing those beautiful trees all the time? I don't know exactly. Or maybe it was just the alligator as a character, and that… and that led him down there. I'm not sure.
• 27:17
  R. Sikoryak: Too bad we couldn't get Jake Tapper here. He could have helped us with some of these details.
• 27:24
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I sometimes think that I… well, not sometimes recently, as I've built some relationship with Fanagraphics, I feel like I should start seeing if they can help me find an expert sometimes for the comic strip.
• 27:41
  Tad Eggleston: You know, so that'll be one that I consider for next time.
• 27:45
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah.
• 27:46
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. And.
• 27:48
  R. Sikoryak: Jake's probably busy, but in any case…
• 27:50
  Tad Eggleston: I mean…
• 27:52
  Sean Harklerode: Got a lot.
• 27:52
  Tad Eggleston: But he might want to slum it.
• 27:54
  R. Sikoryak: Sure.
• 27:54
  Tad Eggleston: We shouldn't rule it out.
• 27:56
  Sean Harklerode: No, no, I'm not ruling anything out. Does he still do his, like, Sunday Funnies?
• 28:02
  Tad Eggleston: You know, because he was doing some political cartooning.
• 28:05
  Tad Eggleston: Lizzy?
• 28:07
  R. Sikoryak: I know he has, I have not seen them. I try to avoid social media, but I know he… I know he does that.
• 28:15
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 28:18
  Tad Eggleston: Aye, aye.
• 28:20
  Tad Eggleston: Have also not been around social media as much lately.
• 28:23
  R. Sikoryak: Has this comic stumped us? We seem very quiet this time.
• 28:26
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah.
• 28:27
  Tad Eggleston: I don't, I don't.
• 28:27
  R. Sikoryak: On some levels? Were we not ready? Do we have to do this again next time?
• 28:33
  R. Sikoryak: Do you have to go home and think about it for a while? I don't know. Because I definitely, I definitely was like, I hope you all can cover for me, because I, I'm still trying to piecing it together.
• 28:43
  Sean Harklerode: I was coming…
• 28:44
  Tad Eggleston: I had a level of that.
• 28:46
  Sean Harklerode: You were gonna give us all the info, Bob, really.
• 28:50
  R. Sikoryak: Well, Sean, even thinking about the research you did about where the strip was set seemed, very pertinent and good, so I…
• 28:58
  Sean Harklerode: Thanks. You all have, you all have…
• 29:01
  R. Sikoryak: You all come up with stuff.
• 29:04
  Tad Eggleston: Try.
• 29:05
  R. Sikoryak: But, yeah, I don't know.
• 29:10
  Sean Harklerode: No, I mean…
• 29:14
  Sean Harklerode: I think we're flowing… I mean, I think all we really have to say, it sounds like, is like, wow, this trip is really good!
• 29:22
  Tad Eggleston: Yes, this is… this is feeling like… like the Chris Farley episode of… of the comic strip club. Remember that time where you went to the Okie Folkie Swamp? And… and that was awesome.
• 29:41
  Tad Eggleston: But…
• 29:43
  Sean Harklerode: I mean, one thing that I was really interested in, if you don't know, you don't know, but…
• 29:48
  Sean Harklerode: you know, the most famous pogo strip, I think.
• 29:54
  Sean Harklerode: Or that, you know, has the most…
• 29:57
  Sean Harklerode: sort of reverberations is Earth Day 1971. We have met the enemy, and he is us.
• 30:05
  Sean Harklerode: And…
• 30:06
  Sean Harklerode: I don't know that they've gotten that far in the reprints, so I didn't… I read, you know, that strip.
• 30:14
  Sean Harklerode: But, or at least I couldn't find, you know, any samples online, so, but I.
• 30:24
  R. Sikoryak: So, what?
• 30:25
  R. Sikoryak: I was just gonna say, that definitely, like, made an impact. There were posters based on that, and I do remember seeing the strip reprinted. I mean, if you're… if you need a sample strip, that's a perfect one to… to put in a book, and I… I think that may have been one of the first strips I saw, honestly, because that was one of the few that is not so topical as to be, un…
• 30:47
  R. Sikoryak: you can unpack it, even if you don't know who Lyndon Lee Johnson is.
• 30:54
  R. Sikoryak: For instance. So… yeah.
• 30:59
  R. Sikoryak: I… one of the reasons I got quiet is I was trying to see if I could find a…
• 31:05
  Tad Eggleston: a list… of… What else was on your average…
• 31:17
  Tad Eggleston: comic strip page in the 50s, because I know that we're kind of hitting…
• 31:22
  Tad Eggleston: Not the end, but the end of the heyday of… the Adventure Strip.
• 31:28
  Tad Eggleston: And… I don't know if we've gone full into the era of the much more kid-oriented…
• 31:40
  Tad Eggleston: Funny pages rather than comic pages.
• 31:45
  Tad Eggleston: This is just one of the places where I don't know my history well enough. So I'm trying to figure out, as we talk, like, how did…
• 31:56
  Tad Eggleston: And it looks like we did still have a lot of, like, adventure strips going. And then we had things like Mandrake the Magician…
• 32:05
  Tad Eggleston: or Barney Google and Snuffy Smith.
• 32:10
  Tad Eggleston: So I guess, I guess what I'm saying is, I don't know if at this point.
• 32:16
  Tad Eggleston: There were other examples of things that were in that… Middle road between… the Funny Strip?
• 32:28
  Tad Eggleston: And the serious adventure… Punch him out, shoot him… whatever strip.
• 32:41
  Tad Eggleston: I don't know.
• 32:43
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, there's some…
• 32:44
  Sean Harklerode: Right?
• 32:45
  Tad Eggleston: What?
• 32:46
  Sean Harklerode: Or commentary strips, you know, what… Commentary strips, yeah. How many comics really commented on politics?
• 32:53
  Tad Eggleston: No, in fact, I mean, that was another thing that I read that he had issues with. There were a lot of papers that wanted to move him…
• 33:01
  Tad Eggleston: To the editorial page, rather than the… the… comics page.
• 33:07
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah.
• 33:09
  Sean Harklerode: When I grew up, Doonesbury was on our… was on the commentary page, not the comics page.
• 33:14
  Tad Eggleston: Was it?
• 33:15
  Sean Harklerode: In, Charlotte. Yeah.
• 33:17
  Tad Eggleston: In the Tribune, it was on the comics page.
• 33:24
  Tad Eggleston: So… Yeah.
• 33:27
  Tad Eggleston: How about you, Bob? Where were the… Where was Doonsbury for you?
• 33:33
  Tad Eggleston: Do you remember?
• 33:35
  R. Sikoryak: Did my paper have that either?
• 33:37
  R. Sikoryak: I mean, I'm… again, I'm thinking, like, early 70s, like, that was the peak of when I was… Right. I mean, as a little kid, as I was reading those strips, so I don't remember if they had Dunesper yet. But I…
• 33:48
  R. Sikoryak: But certainly, it ended up on the editorial page frequently.
• 33:53
  R. Sikoryak: And he probably didn't care for it either, although I don't remember him remarking on it specifically. I would imagine that would have been a little frustrating to just be relegated to the side, rather than let the characters live, because they do have lives, which I, you know, Pogo wouldn't make sense
• 34:10
  R. Sikoryak: on an editorial page, either. I mean, this… the characters have… have their own integrity and aren't mouthpieces. I mean, it's funny, Tad, you didn't say… we haven't talked about Mallard Fillmore yet.
• 34:23
  R. Sikoryak: But there's a strip where you've got a… you've got a cartoon character who exists solely to make political points, whereas we don't really get the inner life of Mallard, but we do… we do get a sense of the… of the,
• 34:41
  R. Sikoryak: of the day-to-day existences of all the animals in Poco.
• 34:46
  R. Sikoryak: I'm only bringing up Mallard Fillmore as a joke.
• 34:49
  Tad Eggleston: No, I don't even know Mallard Phillips.
• 34:51
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah, no, I…
• 34:51
  Tad Eggleston: I had to…
• 34:52
  R. Sikoryak: That's not… oh, okay, then… Sorry, I'm too deep.
• 34:56
  Tad Eggleston: Gotcha.
• 34:56
  R. Sikoryak: Great.
• 34:57
  Tad Eggleston: That's why I don't know him. I would probably read…
• 35:01
  Tad Eggleston: A week's worth of panels and go, yeah, done.
• 35:03
  Sean Harklerode: Is that still going on?
• 35:05
  R. Sikoryak: It is, it is.
• 35:07
  Tad Eggleston: look like it.
• 35:08
  R. Sikoryak: But it was marketed as, oh, here's the right-wing response to Doonesbury, but it's much more of a political strip, even than Doonesbury, because it's much more about… it's strictly about that. And I can see why readers at Pogo would be like, oh, but I like the Sunday pages where they're playing baseball, or they're on the water, and they're fishing, versus the, you know, McCarthy shows up in a hood, in a white hood.
• 35:32
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 35:34
  Tad Eggleston: I, I didn't, I didn't manage to…
• 35:36
  R. Sikoryak: Were the Sunday pages less likely to be political?
• 35:40
  R. Sikoryak: It seems like it, yeah.
• 35:41
  Tad Eggleston: That's what it felt like in the…
• 35:43
  R. Sikoryak: That's my impression.
• 35:43
  Tad Eggleston: that I read, but I didn't… didn't manage to get deep enough.
• 35:47
  Tad Eggleston: To have… have a feel-feel.
• 35:50
  R. Sikoryak: It seems that they were keeping them separate. If it's anything like most comic strips, they would have had to print the Sunday strips ahead of time as well, because of the coloring, or prepare them for print. So that also meant he couldn't be as topical as he could be for the dailies, and it did seem… I was reading somewhere that he was really trying to push his deadlines for the dailies so he could be as topical as possible.
• 36:16
  Tad Eggleston: And that makes sense.
• 36:17
  R. Sikoryak: It might not even been impossible in the Sundays, let alone just, like, let people have a day off.
• 36:23
  Tad Eggleston: What!
• 36:25
  Tad Eggleston: Lives for cartoonists? Actually, that is a comment that I have, like, there is…
• 36:35
  Tad Eggleston: Particularly given the… the quality of this strip.
• 36:39
  Tad Eggleston: And the daily nature, but also how clearly, well-read and worldly and up-to-date on current events and history.
• 36:50
  Tad Eggleston: Walt Kelly is, I'm just sitting there going, when did he have time for all of this?
• 36:56
  Tad Eggleston: And his kids seemed to like him, too, because they continued the strip. So, like, how?
• 37:05
  R. Sikoryak: Sean, you said that he had assistance, and I'm vaguely aware of that, but do you have any more details on that?
• 37:11
  Sean Harklerode: I had read… so yeah, they kept the strip going… Until 1975, after his death.
• 37:20
  R. Sikoryak: Right.
• 37:21
  Sean Harklerode: And then… brought it back for, like, I think the LA Times brought it back in 89.
• 37:31
  Sean Harklerode: But let's see if I can find the names.
• 37:34
  R. Sikoryak: I don't think the people who brought it up back in 89 were involved earlier. That was Larry Doyle, who's a comedy writer of some note, and an artist.
• 37:42
  R. Sikoryak: who I don't think was involved in the earlier incarnation.
• 37:47
  Sean Harklerode: Okay.
• 37:48
  R. Sikoryak: I think… I could be wrong, but that's my impression.
• 37:53
  Sean Harklerode: So, I had read that, like, he had two assistants, and they kept it with the family going.
• 37:59
  Sean Harklerode: For a couple of years.
• 38:01
  Sean Harklerode: so, I guess he… had… Diabetes.
• 38:10
  Sean Harklerode: And, so couldn't keep up with with the strip.
• 38:17
  Sean Harklerode: And so, in 1972, they started… they would do reprints
• 38:25
  Sean Harklerode: And it was reprinted artwork, but they would change the, the text.
• 38:34
  Sean Harklerode: You know, and then kept that going. So, it was George Ward, And, Henry Shikuma?
• 38:43
  R. Sikoryak: Hmm.
• 38:44
  Sean Harklerode: and, oh, Selby… so as Selby Kelly began to draw the strip, from, Christmas 1973.
• 38:57
  Sean Harklerode: And then Walt's son, Steven, wrote.
• 39:01
  Sean Harklerode: Until 1975.
• 39:04
  Sean Harklerode: Selby was his second wife.
• 39:08
  Sean Harklerode: is a widow. Decided to discontinue the strip because newspaper had shrunk it, to the point where it was not easily read.
• 39:18
  Sean Harklerode: Which, as we know, was Burke Breathen's, you know, bet noir throughout the 80s as well.
• 39:28
  Tad Eggleston: Actually, I just saw a, a, a little…
• 39:32
  Tad Eggleston: Apparently, in the Calvin and Hobbes 10th anniversary book, cartoonist Bill Watterson listed Pogo as one of his three greatest influences on Calvin and Hobbes, with Peanuts and Crazy Cat. So that just makes me happy, because we've talked about all four of those books.
• 39:46
  Sean Harklerode: More so than Calvin Orha's.
• 39:58
  Tad Eggleston: Ehhhh I didn't know about the singing until now.
• 40:04
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I gotta look up that album.
• 40:06
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah, that's a whole other thing, yeah.
• 40:08
  R. Sikoryak: And I know, I know there was an animated special that he did voices for that was earlier. I don't think he ended up liking the special, but
• 40:17
  R. Sikoryak: But there was a… there was a special made by Chuck Jones, so those of you who know Chuck Jones is will also… Chuck Jones? You can definitely see why they thought there would be an affinity there, although I… I don't recall why the special was not
• 40:33
  R. Sikoryak: deemed a success, but that's a whole other story. We're talking about comic strips here.
• 40:38
  Tad Eggleston: Actually, I did have… I had a question for you, Bob, because you… you…
• 40:45
  Tad Eggleston: What's the word that you like to use for, for how you, you.
• 40:50
  R. Sikoryak: rip off.
• 40:51
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, I was gonna say pastiche, or… or… homage.
• 40:56
  R. Sikoryak: Charity, I'm fine with any names, anything.
• 40:59
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, but, but, so, so, I mean…
• 41:04
  Tad Eggleston: You have a lot of experience putting yourself into other artists'
• 41:11
  Tad Eggleston: Selves, and figuring out how to make a strip the way they would.
• 41:16
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, we talked about being struck by the way
• 41:23
  Tad Eggleston: Pogo is more detailed, and… and… and more words, and more… whatever. I noticed more different fonts, you know.
• 41:32
  R. Sikoryak: Yes.
• 41:33
  Tad Eggleston: What's it like to, to ape a pogo strip?
• 41:37
  R. Sikoryak: I did… I did do it once, many years ago, and… and I have to look at it again, because as I'm reading the strips again now, I'm like, I don't know how I got anywhere near this language. It's just so… it's so particular and specific, and he just has such an ear for…
• 41:53
  R. Sikoryak: these… these voices, and that's… I don't think that's my skill at all, but I only had to do it for a page, and I was riffing on a number of different things. It was… it was a topical strip, actually, and you know, whenever I do these things.
• 42:08
  R. Sikoryak: you… you… I find that I just have to look at as many examples as possible, and…
• 42:15
  R. Sikoryak: I think I only did… I think it was only… mine was only about 10 panels, thank God. If I had to do it any longer, it would have been much, much harder.
• 42:23
  R. Sikoryak: But, as Sean mentioned, the characters are so lively, and there is this sense of…
• 42:31
  R. Sikoryak: full movement in all of them. So it is… it is tricky to try to replicate that.
• 42:39
  R. Sikoryak: with any ease, and I'm sure… and even you see the development from his earliest strips to his later strips, which is why I asked about assistance, because when you talk about the lettering, and you talk about the rendering of the backgrounds and things, I do wonder, like, how much those assistance helped
• 42:57
  R. Sikoryak: Kind of keep all that stuff at such a high level.
• 43:01
  R. Sikoryak: of quality, because even doing the lettering, I remember, was a real pain. I don't think I… I don't think I made a font, or found a font, I think I actually hand-lettered it, and that was… that was pretty tricky. And I… I kind of hesitate to look at it again, because I'm gonna be like, oh no, this doesn't look good at all.
• 43:20
  Tad Eggleston: And now I desperately want to see it, just…
• 43:22
  R. Sikoryak: I'll show it to you. It appeared… but like Pogo itself, it appeared 20 years ago, it was talking about a Gone with the Wind parody that had come out, and no one would understand the strip I wrote, because it was referring to this thing that was in the news for a week.
• 43:39
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, it, it was…
• 43:43
  R. Sikoryak: Much like the Strip, impenetrable, you know, decades later.
• 43:49
  R. Sikoryak: But, I mean.
• 43:50
  Tad Eggleston: It's…
• 43:50
  R. Sikoryak: It's such… it's such a pleasure to try to draw like that, because it's just… it's so invite… it's such an inviting-looking strip. And…
• 43:59
  R. Sikoryak: yeah, I… even if you don't want to read it, you could just stare at it and really get a lot out of it, a lot of joy out of it. Because there's a lot of… there's a lot of anger in the writing, because there's so many things in politics that clearly infuriate Walt Kelly, but the surface is always so sweet appearing if you're not looking too hard at the villains who show up.
• 44:23
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and not the least of which, and I like the dichotomy between the sweet-looking thing, is it seems like the thing that angers him the most in politics is just…
• 44:34
  Tad Eggleston: The thing that angers most of us who pay enough attention to politics to be angered by the politics rather than the result, which is how much of it is just ridiculous. And if we stopped, listened, and thought for a couple of minutes, we'd go, no, that's not how it works.
• 44:54
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah.
• 44:55
  Tad Eggleston: But, but instead we go, oh, my guy said it!
• 44:58
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah.
• 44:59
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. So…
• 45:00
  Sean Harklerode: That's… so I was in… again, this is 1964,
• 45:08
  Sean Harklerode: So this would be August 24th, 1964.
• 45:12
  Sean Harklerode: it's, Albert and Pogo.
• 45:20
  Sean Harklerode: And Albert is, is filling out his, his,
• 45:26
  Sean Harklerode: platform. It starts off, we stand firmly opposed to the menace of
• 45:32
  Sean Harklerode: then U fills in the blank.
• 45:35
  Sean Harklerode: Well, I don't know no menaces. Besides, I'm more for stuff than against.
• 45:42
  Sean Harklerode: kind of politowockel dumb coffery is that? Don't you know it's better to be against something than for something? Then you get all the againsters to go with you.
• 45:54
  Sean Harklerode: Which… Explains a lot!
• 45:57
  Tad Eggleston: It does.
• 45:58
  Sean Harklerode: That's where we're at.
• 45:59
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. Right? Maybe that's where we've always been.
• 46:02
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah.
• 46:03
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, it's certainly a recurring theme in American politics. It's much easier to say, we don't like this, stop it, but, like, nobody wants to think about or talk about or anything in terms of, okay, we stopped that, what next?
• 46:21
  Tad Eggleston: Having it go away, temporarily, Is not actually a solution.
• 46:29
  R. Sikoryak: Right.
• 46:30
  Tad Eggleston: You know…
• 46:30
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah, I mean, you know, look, it is…
• 46:33
  Sean Harklerode: a… a truism, if you're reading Mark Twain, or you're reading comic strips.
• 46:40
  Sean Harklerode: The same things repeat over and over throughout our history, right?
• 46:47
  Sean Harklerode: That's… that's because we don't have enough speakeasy schools.
• 46:50
  Sean Harklerode: Right.
• 46:55
  Tad Eggleston: I, I,
• 46:59
  Tad Eggleston: I feel like this is a strip that I know I'm gonna wind up spending more time with.
• 47:05
  Tad Eggleston: Even after we're done recording.
• 47:08
  Tad Eggleston: I get the feeling that the two of you have seen things that you hadn't seen before, so I'm gonna say that, like, well, we shouldn't necessarily set a date to revisit Walt Kelly… yet.
• 47:22
  Tad Eggleston: we should definitely know that at some point, it will be worth talking about Walt Kelly again, particularly if any of us, like.
• 47:30
  Tad Eggleston: has some sort of epiphany, you know, said off to the others, hey guys, I just read this section!
• 47:39
  Sean Harklerode: Well, I'm here does a month… does an annual panel at, at… What?
• 47:44
  Sean Harklerode: Mark Evanier does an annual panel at Comic-Con, so…
• 47:49
  Tad Eggleston: on Walt Kelly?
• 47:50
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah.
• 47:51
  R. Sikoryak: Really?
• 47:52
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. I did not know.
• 47:54
  Tad Eggleston: Well, now we know next year. Yeah, now we know one expert to go after. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 48:02
  R. Sikoryak: That's great. At the San Diego Comic-Con?
• 48:05
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah.
• 48:06
  R. Sikoryak: Interesting. At least the past several years, and I'm…
• 48:09
  Sean Harklerode: I'm assuming it's in, you know, conjunction with the Phantographics.
• 48:13
  Sean Harklerode: And I…
• 48:15
  R. Sikoryak: Oh, that makes sense.
• 48:16
  Sean Harklerode: believe I believe, you know, he…
• 48:20
  Sean Harklerode: I don't know if he assisted Kelly, or… I think he knows he's in with the family.
• 48:29
  R. Sikoryak: Oh, that's great!
• 48:30
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah, family, friends.
• 48:32
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, what I just… I was just flipping through the… the…
• 48:36
  Tad Eggleston: Wikipedia, and I noticed, and this caught my attention, and I kind of want to find them.
• 48:42
  Tad Eggleston: In the revival, it was originally Larry Doyle and Neil Sternicki, But then Larry Doyle left.
• 48:50
  Tad Eggleston: After, like, 2 years. And then Sternicky left a year after that.
• 48:57
  Tad Eggleston: But it continued… for… Another year and a half, with… Walt's son, Peter, Writing the comic, and his…
• 49:14
  Tad Eggleston: daughter, Carolyn drawing it.
• 49:18
  Tad Eggleston: Is what it looks like. So I'm kind of curious as to what…
• 49:23
  Tad Eggleston: What your kid's doing it 20 years after you stop doing it looks like.
• 49:29
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 49:29
  R. Sikoryak: That's a good question.
• 49:31
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no.
• 49:33
  Sean Harklerode: Oh, is this the Larry Doyle? Was he… did he work on The Simpsons?
• 49:37
  R. Sikoryak: Very possibly. I feel like I see his name in lots of classic comic.
• 49:42
  Tad Eggleston: I love you, Beth Cooper.
• 49:44
  Sean Harklerode: I love you, Beth, too, right?
• 49:46
  Tad Eggleston: Looney Tunes back in action.
• 49:50
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, and he was an editor at First Comics.
• 49:55
  R. Sikoryak: There was one… there was one quote from Kelly that I wanted to bring up, because I've been thinking about it since I saw it. He… there's an anecdote of him talking to his father, and his father saying, you can only communicate through…
• 50:08
  R. Sikoryak: The best way to communicate is through visuals, because people remember visuals. He said, whenever you try to talk to people, they misunderstand you. Like, language is the worst way to communicate to people.
• 50:19
  R. Sikoryak: And I feel like that totally comes through in the strip, because all of the characters have a point of view that they're trying to get across, and all the other characters are very suspicious of that point of view.
• 50:29
  R. Sikoryak: And at first, I was like, well, he's got such a facility for language, but he's also understanding that language
• 50:36
  R. Sikoryak: Is a way to obfuscate rather than to communicate.
• 50:40
  Tad Eggleston: Absolutely can be.
• 50:41
  R. Sikoryak: At least in the way his characters interact.
• 50:44
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean…
• 50:46
  Tad Eggleston: it's something I think about a lot, because language can be used to obfuscate. Language, even when it's not meant to be obso… you know, the message sent and the message received can be completely different. You know, communication is very much a learned skill, and it's a… it's not,
• 51:08
  Tad Eggleston: It's not one that you can ever stop learning, because you master communication with one audience doesn't mean you're a master of communication
• 51:17
  Tad Eggleston: with a different audience. Being a master of communication with one person doesn't make you a master of communication with a different person.
• 51:28
  R. Sikoryak: Right, right. The characters in Pogo do not code switch well, so…
• 51:32
  Tad Eggleston: Right, right.
• 51:34
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. I hadn't even thought about that aspect of it. Now I'm gonna be reading it Even differently.
• 51:42
  R. Sikoryak: It was interesting that he related that anecdote from his father, and then it was like, well, clearly this…
• 51:48
  Tad Eggleston: Sunk in for him. Yeah. Right. Right.
• 51:51
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and, like, again, I mean, this is one of the problems with binging, is you can only do what you can find digitally, at least for me.
• 52:02
  Tad Eggleston: And, like, I'm seeing that there were some collections That we're more…
• 52:11
  Tad Eggleston: put together as collections around a theme or whatnot in the past, but that's… that's like, you gotta go dig them out of the used bookstores, or… or go to Libro, or… or…
• 52:25
  Tad Eggleston: Whatnot, and… and…
• 52:27
  Tad Eggleston: By the time I started reading Pogo for this episode, it was waaaay too late to do that.
• 52:36
  Tad Eggleston: Which might be a f-.
• 52:38
  R. Sikoryak: Another one of the flaws in my, like, 8 book clubs a month plan, but…
• 52:46
  R. Sikoryak: You know, I think it's great that… that these strips are being reprinted in their entirety, but like you said earlier, Tad, there's something to a single collection that can help guide you through these things that would be very useful for the… for the…
• 53:01
  R. Sikoryak: for the casual fan, or even the fan who never heard of Pogo before, it would be… it would be much easier to, help them through it a little bit. And it doesn't just go for Pogo, it goes for any strip. Right, right.
• 53:14
  Sean Harklerode: There's 24 years of POCO.
• 53:16
  R. Sikoryak: It's a lot.
• 53:17
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah.
• 53:18
  R. Sikoryak: So.
• 53:20
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 53:21
  R. Sikoryak: These are…
• 53:21
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, again, I… I am a big fan of…
• 53:26
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, and this is true of peanuts, this is…
• 53:30
  Tad Eggleston: Even somewhat true of Calvin and Hobbes, I think you could make a one-volume Calvin of Hobbes book that would make everybody want to get the rest of them.
• 53:39
  R. Sikoryak: Right.
• 53:40
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 53:41
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I wonder that you don't have more of them, because it just… it becomes such a…
• 53:51
  Tad Eggleston: introduction point?
• 53:55
  Tad Eggleston: You know, it's like, when you discover a new…
• 53:59
  Tad Eggleston: musical artist, or a new genre of music that's like, oh, this is cool, like…
• 54:07
  Tad Eggleston: Particularly if it's an old genre, like, when you discover jazz in the 1990s, rather than…
• 54:15
  Tad Eggleston: the 1930s, it's really nice to have a blue note con… compilation.
• 54:23
  Tad Eggleston: Right? It's really… it's really nice to have the Verve Jazz Series, where you can, you know, where you've gone from your compilation to, oh, these artists I like more, so I'm gonna go get
• 54:37
  Tad Eggleston: the carefully curated discs of their best stuff, and now, now that I've learned more, now I start going and looking for specific, specific albums, or I go, oh, Nina Simone, everything she does, doesn't matter, I wanna hear it, I'm gonna love it, right?
• 54:58
  Tad Eggleston: But… But it's a much more guided learning experience, and, like, I'm curious…
• 55:06
  Tad Eggleston: as I look through, you know, because there are a couple that seem to be…
• 55:10
  Tad Eggleston: Scholarly editions or whatnot.
• 55:15
  Tad Eggleston: I wonder, like, there's a POGO… POGO files for POGA files.
• 55:21
  Tad Eggleston: There's a Pogipedia, We Go Pogo, Walt Kelly, Politics and American Satire.
• 55:32
  Tad Eggleston: You know, I wonder if any of these… these books would wind up Being a better jumping-off point.
• 55:45
  R. Sikoryak: if any of them are even in print, I mean.
• 55:47
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and that's always the challenge.
• 55:49
  R. Sikoryak: The book I have from many years ago was a book that Walt Kelly put out.
• 55:55
  Tad Eggleston: Blue-Eyed Years with Pogo.
• 55:56
  R. Sikoryak: in the… in around 1960, yeah, about the first 10 years of Pogo, so it's his commentary with selected strips, and it's… it's still a lot. Right! But it's nice to sort of have it…
• 56:07
  Tad Eggleston: But at least you have a roadmap through it.
• 56:10
  R. Sikoryak: Absolutely.
• 56:11
  Tad Eggleston: just…
• 56:12
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 56:13
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, because that was the other thing that slowed me down. Sometimes I'd have to go, okay.
• 56:19
  Tad Eggleston: I need to go look up this date in history.
• 56:22
  R. Sikoryak: Right, right.
• 56:24
  Tad Eggleston: kind of figure out the depth of what's… because I've got ideas, but I feel like there's something that I'm missing here, whereas if you've got the…
• 56:34
  Tad Eggleston: Damn.
• 56:35
  Tad Eggleston: I'm just gonna pitch this to Phantographics.
• 56:39
  R. Sikoryak: Well, I'm sure the economics of doing, different versions of the same material is probably not great. Although they can keep doing it with peanuts, but.
• 56:49
  Tad Eggleston: Alright.
• 56:50
  R. Sikoryak: But lesser-known strips aren't gonna…
• 56:52
  Sean Harklerode: Hi.
• 56:52
  Tad Eggleston: Well, but it, I mean, I guess, I guess my only, my only argument towards that is that…
• 57:00
  Tad Eggleston: I think that it can work as one porn…
• 57:04
  Tad Eggleston: Item to sell, and one part… .
• 57:10
  R. Sikoryak: Promotion.
• 57:10
  Tad Eggleston: promotion, you know? Like, because publishers like Phantographics, they'll… I mean, like, you go to Phanographics' website, and they have the list of titles coming soon, and they've got the list of titles coming back into print.
• 57:25
  Tad Eggleston: Very soon. Like, we're gonna have more of this in July. So they don't keep them, necessarily, in constant…
• 57:31
  Tad Eggleston: print runs, even when they're not officially taking them out of print. If you were to keep a given volume that was a roadmap.
• 57:40
  Tad Eggleston: in print, It could be… Used as a tool to make people more interested in buying.
• 57:50
  Tad Eggleston: the other volumes when they come into print, or knowing, okay, maybe I don't want volumes 1 through 4 of Pogo, but I need 5 and 6. You know,
• 58:02
  Tad Eggleston: Or, I'm a completist, and I need 5 and 6, so I need to get 1 through 4 and 7 as well. Right.
• 58:10
  Tad Eggleston: You know?
• 58:12
  Tad Eggleston: Whereas if you just picked up one, you never got to 5 and 6.
• 58:19
  Sean Harklerode: This is just my weird brain working.
• 58:21
  Tad Eggleston: And it's not as much directly about Pogo.
• 58:23
  Sean Harklerode: Well, I mean… You know, there was the famous, like, 1969 or 70, whenever the… the…
• 58:30
  Sean Harklerode: famous case files of Dick Tracy, you know, where they reprinted, you know, the brow and several other stories.
• 58:37
  Tad Eggleston: I got that when we did the tracing.
• 58:40
  Sean Harklerode: And my upcoming opus, you know, Garfield.
• 58:45
  Sean Harklerode: all lasagna all the time. Sure.
• 58:50
  Sean Harklerode: No Odie, it's just lasagna.
• 58:54
  Tad Eggleston: Just lasagna.
• 58:56
  Tad Eggleston: Are… are those… are those strips different enough to, to make it worth it?
• 59:02
  R. Sikoryak: It's Garfield, it's gonna be fine.
• 59:04
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 59:05
  Tad Eggleston: See, see, I guess I'm in the minority of this crowd, in that I never fully got Garfield.
• 59:11
  Tad Eggleston: I would skip over him some days.
• 59:17
  R. Sikoryak: I don't know there's a lot to get.
• 59:21
  Sean Harklerode: I mean, it works when it works.
• 59:23
  Sean Harklerode: Right?
• 59:25
  Tad Eggleston: So… But, yeah.
• 59:30
  Tad Eggleston: Any ideas on what to do next?
• 59:33
  Sean Harklerode: You really don't want to talk about Pogo anymore.
• 59:35
  Tad Eggleston: No, I just… I don't… I'll happily.
• 59:38
  R. Sikoryak: I won't…
• 59:38
  Tad Eggleston: No, no, no, no.
• 59:40
  R. Sikoryak: I'm talking about.
• 59:41
  Tad Eggleston: I just don't know that we're succeeding at talking about pogo anymore.
• 59:45
  Sean Harklerode: Right.
• 59:46
  Tad Eggleston: You know, you brought it up earlier, and I think we managed to get another half an hour worth of
• 59:51
  Tad Eggleston: Probably, Better listening than the 20 minutes before you brought it up.
• 59:57
  R. Sikoryak: Tad, you have to put out special episodes that have the highlights of the episodes, rather than make people listen to the whole one. They have to just listen to the parts that are good, and if they like those enough, they can go back and listen to those.
• 1:00:09
  Tad Eggleston: You have actually defined why I don't have listeners yet. I haven't given them that… that good on-ramp.
• 1:00:19
  Tad Eggleston: As soon as I have time to edit it.
• 1:00:24
  Tad Eggleston: I'll put together the best of the comic book book club.
• 1:00:33
  Tad Eggleston: No, I just don't have anything more to say about Pogo, and I wish I did. Like I said, I, like…
• 1:00:41
  R. Sikoryak: Fine, I'm teasing.
• 1:00:42
  Tad Eggleston: I enjoy… no, I know. I… but I enjoyed what I… this is not one of those cases where I sit back and I go, I don't… I don't get what people…
• 1:00:52
  Tad Eggleston: love about this. I get it, I just haven't…
• 1:00:58
  Tad Eggleston: A, I didn't give myself enough time to absorb it. B,
• 1:01:02
  Tad Eggleston: I don't think I was in the right… I mean, it, it, like…
• 1:01:06
  Tad Eggleston: I think it turned out Pogo was not the right book for the first two weeks of 2026.
• 1:01:14
  Tad Eggleston: If that makes sense?
• 1:01:18
  Sean Harklerode: Not that there's a lot going on.
• 1:01:20
  Tad Eggleston: No, nothing going on in the world.
• 1:01:23
  Tad Eggleston: Or to friends of mine in Minneapolis.
• 1:01:29
  Sean Harklerode: Maybe we could use… maybe we could use Walt Kelly in Pogo right now.
• 1:01:33
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, we could. We definitely could.
• 1:01:38
  Sean Harklerode: Sorry.
• 1:01:40
  Tad Eggleston: But I did… Oh!
• 1:01:44
  Tad Eggleston: We, we met, we met the enemy, and it's just us.
• 1:01:47
  Tad Eggleston: He is a success.
• 1:01:51
  Tad Eggleston: I did discover that the, I was just saying that the We Go Pogo, Walt Kelly Politics, and American Satire is from the University of Press, and I don't know if it's…
• 1:02:02
  Tad Eggleston: Easy to find in print, but it is on JSTOR.
• 1:02:07
  Tad Eggleston: So, you know, that's the advantage sometimes of, of…
• 1:02:12
  Sean Harklerode: Is that like J-Date?
• 1:02:12
  Tad Eggleston: books.
• 1:02:16
  Tad Eggleston: No.
• 1:02:17
  Sean Harklerode: Oh, no.
• 1:02:24
  Tad Eggleston: What I can't figure out is whether it'll give you the whole thing, or if it just gives you synopsis of each title.
• 1:02:30
  Tad Eggleston: Or each chapter, rather.
• 1:02:33
  Tad Eggleston: You know, I'll figure it out later.
• 1:02:35
  Tad Eggleston: Damn.
• 1:02:42
  Tad Eggleston: I'm sorry, I just… I went brain-dead all of a sudden.
• 1:02:45
  Sean Harklerode: That's…
• 1:02:45
  R. Sikoryak: okay.
• 1:02:46
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah.
• 1:02:47
  Tad Eggleston: I went brain dead all of a sudden.
• 1:02:48
  R. Sikoryak: It's the era, it's the era for that, I think. Or not the era, it's the mood of the world.
• 1:02:56
  Tad Eggleston: moment.
• 1:02:57
  R. Sikoryak: At the moment.
• 1:02:59
  R. Sikoryak: I'm gonna go…
• 1:03:01
  R. Sikoryak: I'm gonna go re-read… well, not re-read, I'm going to read all the intros of the… of the Phantographics collections, because I do think that would… Yeah.
• 1:03:11
  Tad Eggleston: No, I think I'm definitely gonna do that.
• 1:03:12
  R. Sikoryak: to get, to get a good overview of it, because I… I do… I… as much as I really like seeing books in their original presentation, so, like this, 10 Years of Pogo that Walt Kelly put out, I really enjoyed because it did sort of give that summary, but it also
• 1:03:30
  R. Sikoryak: It was still while he was doing it, so having someone able to look at the totality even, a little bit… a little wider lens… Right. … would be nice to… to…
• 1:03:40
  R. Sikoryak: To… to get a… to get a handle on this.
• 1:03:43
  Tad Eggleston: Now, that one's not cheap right now.
• 1:03:46
  R. Sikoryak: Which one? The one, the 10 years?
• 1:03:47
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, wait a minute, no, there's another one. I've stumbled on these in bookstores. The first one I saw was $95, but then I'm seeing one for… well, no, that's out of stock for $20.
• 1:04:03
  R. Sikoryak: I have it out of stock for $5. But in any case, yeah, the Pogo has been… I mean, that's the other issue, I think. When I was looking for pogo books years ago, there was… there were not many that were affordable or available.
• 1:04:18
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:04:18
  R. Sikoryak: So… God bless Fanagraphics yet again.
• 1:04:23
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah, I have the first two Fantic graphics.
• 1:04:26
  Sean Harklerode: that's about it.
• 1:04:29
  R. Sikoryak: Well, they're also available digitally, so that's always nice.
• 1:04:32
  Tad Eggleston: this.
• 1:04:33
  R. Sikoryak: Cool, well…
• 1:04:37
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, the paperback is only $9.41 on the Bad River site.
• 1:04:41
  Tad Eggleston: Which means that it can probably be found at a reasonable price at a different site.
• 1:04:47
  R. Sikoryak: Okay.
• 1:04:50
  R. Sikoryak: I'll take your word for that. Yeah.
• 1:04:57
  R. Sikoryak: Well, I recommend the album, I was listening to that today. Yeah, no, I've got that bookmarked now.
• 1:05:02
  Tad Eggleston: Me too.
• 1:05:03
  R. Sikoryak: Available on Baincan.
• 1:05:05
  Tad Eggleston: logo. Yeah. It's on… oh, it's on Bandcamp, too?
• 1:05:08
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah, I guess it was re-released recently. I first found it on YouTube, it's available. It's out there, it's out there. I'm sure it's streaming, too.
• 1:05:17
  R. Sikoryak: So… You'll find it.
• 1:05:19
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I, I'd already found it on, on, on,
• 1:05:24
  Tad Eggleston: on YouTube, but, like, if it's on Bandcamp in a way that I can… I can pay somebody that… that deserves to be paid.
• 1:05:33
  Tad Eggleston: You know…
• 1:05:35
  Tad Eggleston: That's a worth… I am in favor of getting money into the hands of people who provide us with, like, art.
• 1:05:45
  Tad Eggleston: It just seems like a thing that one should do if they want more art.
• 1:05:53
  Tad Eggleston: You know…
• 1:05:54
  R. Sikoryak: That's fair. I think that's fair.
• 1:05:58
  Tad Eggleston: I've been listening to Cameron Crowe's
• 1:06:02
  Tad Eggleston: autobiography, and he talks about how there was a huge group of people that were, like, about free music in the 80s, er, the 60s and 70s, and the first time he talked to Jerry Garcia, he, like, asked him about it, he's like.
• 1:06:15
  Sean Harklerode: Fuck no, man, I worked really hard to be able to do this.
• 1:06:21
  Tad Eggleston: I need to eat!
• 1:06:29
  Tad Eggleston: So yeah.
• 1:06:31
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:06:33
  Tad Eggleston: Definitely more pogo to dug into, but I don't think we should do pogo next, because I need time to digest it.
• 1:06:40
  R. Sikoryak: I think we need to choose something.
• 1:06:42
  Tad Eggleston: Else.
• 1:06:43
  Tad Eggleston: to talk about.
• 1:06:45
  Tad Eggleston: The next time we meet, in 3 months, 6 months, whatever it winds up being.
• 1:06:50
  Tad Eggleston: 4 months.
• 1:06:51
  Sean Harklerode: Five and a half months. I think we talked about something last time, and I can't remember what it was.
• 1:06:59
  Tad Eggleston: I think we've tossed out the idea of, for better or worse.
• 1:07:03
  Sean Harklerode: Yes, I think that was it.
• 1:07:05
  Tad Eggleston: I was looking at comic strips earlier, and…
• 1:07:13
  Tad Eggleston: We're the ones that caught my.
• 1:07:15
  Sean Harklerode: For my birthday last week, I got the Mort Walker Beetle Bailey 75 Years of Smiles, so I…
• 1:07:21
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, Beetle Bailey would be a…
• 1:07:26
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and for that matter, a book that I very much want to read, and we could do along with that.
• 1:07:34
  Tad Eggleston: is… Mort Walker's Lexicon of Comicana.
• 1:07:42
  R. Sikoryak: Great.
• 1:07:43
  Tad Eggleston: and New York Review of Books just put that out. So, like, I would absolutely not… object to…
• 1:07:53
  Tad Eggleston: To having a reason to make myself buy that.
• 1:08:07
  Tad Eggleston: Sure.
• 1:08:08
  Sean Harklerode: I hadn't heard of that.
• 1:08:10
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, it came out last year, too. 75 years would be… Beetle Bailey…
• 1:08:20
  Tad Eggleston: That has the advantage of being that retrospective.
• 1:08:25
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I would be totally down for that.
• 1:08:28
  Tad Eggleston: If you guys wanna… Wanna say we kind of center… center on those two.
• 1:08:35
  Tad Eggleston: and see…
• 1:08:39
  R. Sikoryak: Sure. See where it goes.
• 1:08:40
  Tad Eggleston: And right now, we'll assume 3 months from now, but I'm certain we'll,
• 1:08:46
  Tad Eggleston: discuss that more as we go. So, for… for R. Sikoriak, and for Sean Hoggerwood… oh, yeah, we were gonna talk about, you've got a date for,
• 1:08:55
  Tad Eggleston: for… for… Declaration of Independence Illustrated, we gotta plug it.
• 1:09:01
  R. Sikoryak: Yes, it's coming out in June, and it's a… it's gonna be… it's a two-sided book, which means one side is the Declaration of Independence, and the other side is the Emancipation Proclamation.
• 1:09:10
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, nice!
• 1:09:11
  R. Sikoryak: So the title of the book is, Declaration slash Emancipation Illustrated.
• 1:09:17
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, very cool.
• 1:09:19
  Tad Eggleston: Though, I do have to say that if you're coming out in June, you're…
• 1:09:23
  Tad Eggleston: missing the boat a little bit, because, like, a July 4th release would make a lot of sense.
• 1:09:30
  R. Sikoryak: Well, I think June 30th is close enough.
• 1:09:32
  Tad Eggleston: That's fair. That's fair. In fact, it's probably the closest…
• 1:09:37
  Tad Eggleston: It's the closest Tuesday, Wednesday before… The 4th, so… okay.
• 1:09:42
  Sean Harklerode: can pack it.
• 1:09:43
  Tad Eggleston: But you just said June, so I didn't know it was the 30th yet. Fair enough, fair enough.
• 1:09:49
  Tad Eggleston: So, for our Sikoriak, for Shinehaga Road, this has been the Comic Strip Club on 22 Panels, where we… we did our best to discuss Pogo, and we'll do better with it next time, because… because Walt Kelly deserves our admiration, and… and somehow…
• 1:10:08
  Tad Eggleston: Just none of us found the proper amount of time,
• 1:10:12
  Tad Eggleston: Or at least I didn't find the proper amount of time. I don't actually want to throw…
• 1:10:16
  Tad Eggleston: Bob or Sean under the bus, but for 22 panels, we will see you after the next page.