Keskustelujen arkisto

ON THE GREAT LANDFILL DEBATE:

Even if you COULD find pieces of Barks art in some California landfill -- and
Dwight Decker's anecdote suggests that such a task is, indeed, akin to
finding a needle in a haystack -- you would have to be one heck of a
committed Duck fan to actually keep the booty in your collection. Just
imagine the stench!

ON WALT KELLY (EIRIK KROGH VISTED):
Other people will no doubt echo the following, but here goes anyway:

Walt Kelly is best known for his long-running newspaper comic strip POGO, an
outgrowth of some of his Dell/Western Publishing comic-book work. He worked
as an animator at the Disney Studio for several years in the late 30's and
early 40's, toiling on "Pinocchio," "Dumbo," and "Fantasia," before leaving
the studio in 1941 to enter the field of comic books. He worked for
Dell/Western for a decade before leaving in 1952 to devote all of his
energies to his newspaper strip.

Kelly did many covers for WALT DISNEY'S COMICS AND STORIES in the 1940's, as
well as the occasional interior feature. His best-known Disney stories are
probably his GREMLINS series, the adaptation of the movie "The Three
Caballeros," and a Pinocchio parody called "Donocchio." He also worked on
Warner Brothers characters (Bugs Bunny et al.) and MGM characters ("Our
Gang"), as well as a host of other "funny animal"-type comics.

I don't know a lot about Kelly's non-Disney comic-book work (as opposed to
the POGO newspaper strip), but a good deal of his Disney work, including
covers, has been reprinted during the past 10 years by either Gladstone or
Disney Comics.

Christopher E. Barat
(Email removed)
Homepage http://members.aol.com/cebarat/home.htm
"POVERTY IS THE PITS!" -- Uncle Scrooge, "DuckTales" episode "Down and out in
Duckburg"

Eirik Krogh Visted:

> noticed that the cover was done by
>someone named Walt Kelly. I'm sure I've heard his name somewhere before,
>maybe in connection with something else ?

This puzzles me. Is it possible that you never heard of <POGO> one of the
most delicious (I wonder whether I can use this word...) comic strips ever?
The possum (? my dictionary doesn't have the English word for the Italian
<opossum>) living in Okefenokee swamp with his strange friends Churchy La
Femme and Albert and...?

Is that because you are too young? Because you live in Sweden?

Pogo is absolutely to be known. I like MUCH LESS Walt Kelly's work when he
worked for Disney. Try Pogo and you'll never leave it...

... provided you get a decent translation of course! ;-)

Marco

...happy that next month Friday 13th will fall on Friday, so there's nothing
to worry about!

Wasn't there a Don Rosa online chat last night ? Could someone please post
a complete transcript ?

Eirik Krogh Visted =20
-- intellektuell r=E5ne =20

(Email removed) =20
http://home.sn.no/~evisted
=09

In a message dated 97-05-18 16:16:36 EDT, you write:

<< I just read Comics and Stories #605, and noticed that the cover was done
by
someone named Walt Kelly. I'm sure I've heard his name somewhere before,
maybe in connection with something else ? Anyway, can somebody tell me who
this guy is ?

>>

Walt Kelly (1913-1973)
Disney animator 1935-1941
Western (Dell) comic book writer and Illustrator 1942-1952
creator of Newspaper strip Pogo 1949-1972

A true genus. The Will Rodgers of the 1950s and 1960s.
I Go Pogo!
Pogo for President!
As Maine go, so go Pogo!

Pogo was a true cultural icon of it's time, a mixture of political commentary
and beautiful funny animal drawing and whimsey.
Friday the 13th came on a Tuesday this month.

Steven Rowe

EIRIK:

Here's some bio data on Walt Kelly of the *POGO* fame, transcribed from
Barrier and Williams' "A Smithsonian Book of Comic-Book Comics", 1981.

<<Kelly was born August 25, 1913, in Philadelphia, but his family had moved
to Bridgeport, Connecticut, within two years. Kelly on occasion described
his father as a painter of theatrical scenery, but that seems doubtful,
particularly as the profession of a citizen of Bridgeport in the 1930s. In
any case, Walt contributed drawings to his high school newspaper (which he
also edited) and yearbook. On graduation, he went to work for the Bridgeport
Post.

By 1935, Walt Kelly had been hired by the Walt Disney Studios, where he
animated parts of Fantasia and Dumbo. In 1941, Kelly moved to New York,
where he worked for Western Printing and Lithographing Company on Dell comic
books, chiefly Animal Comics and Our Gang. (My note: He also drew a number
of wonderful covers for WDC&S during the 1940s).

For the former he created a feature that was probably derived to some extent
from the Uncle Remus stories. At first it had no continuing title but it
centered around a comically ravenous alligator named Albert and a black
youngster named Bumbazine who visited with Albert and the animals in a
southern swamp. The swamp's anthropomorphic inhabitants included a Pogo
Possum whose role became gradually more prominent as Bumbazine's waned.

During WW II, Kelly worked as a civilian employee for the Army, contributing
drawings to language manuals. He continued to work for Western Printing,
too, contributing to comic books like Raggedy Ann and Andy, Santa Claus
Funnies, and Easter with Mother Goose--along with Animal Comics and Our
Gang--well into the postwar years. The charming illustrated parodies of
standard nursery rhymes and nursery tales that were later featured in
Kelly's books were first tried out in Raggedy Ann and Andy and other comic
books.

In 1949, Kelly became art editor for the idealistic enterprise known as the
New York Star, a newspaper for which he did editorial cartoons and spot
drawings, and for which he revived Pogo in a daily comic strip. When the
Star died, Pogo was taken over by the New York Post and its Post-Hall
Syndicate, then by Field Enterprises. The success of that strip was rapid
and book collections of Pogo strips quickly followed. Kelly remained the
stewart of the strip until his death on October 18, 1973.>>

Finally, I should add that Fantagraphics has published 5 volumes of Pogo
Comic strips in the last 4 years or so in b & w.

Archontis Pantsios

Dik Kruyt mentioned that he read somewhere in a newsgroup about the
following website:

http://www.dra.nl/~duck/index.html

On this site you can read the backside gags of the Dutch Donald Duck
weekly. It's in Dutch, but you can admire Mau Heymans' art...
(I haven't looked at the site myself yet, since it requires a browser that
can handle frames.)

--Harry.

Here's another anecdote showing that (at least in a dry environment)
many materials can last for a long time in a landfill. Some years
ago someone digging in the California desert uncovered statues,
towers, walls, and other artifacts that made it seem as if they were
excavating the remnants of a long-lost civilization, certainly unlike
anything known ever to have existed in Southern California. But no,
what they were digging up was in fact pieces of the "Babylon" set
from D.W. Griffith's silent film masterpiece "Intolerance". The
studio had junked that stuff by burying it after the movie was
finished. Decades later, it hadn't decayed (in spite of so much
of its being made of lumber and other "perishable" materials).

[Incidentally, you will recall that Hollywood wasn't always so wasteful
of its old sets. The set from "King of Kings" (I think it was) was
re-used as the walled village set in "King Kong", and then they set
fire to it to film its destruction as the burning of Atlanta in "Gone
with the Wind"! Let's therefore hope that Western Publishing went the
route of disposing of their art by burying it rather than burning it!]

This would seem to be a logical premise for a Scrooge story. Owing
to a boom in the price of comic art, Scrooge decides to turn his
prospecting skills to conducting archaeology in the landfill. However,
the Evil Empire that published the comics has booby-trapped their
dump site, and to retrieve the art Scrooge and Donald have to lift
up a statue whose shifting weight then releases a giant boulder which
they must outrun. Deja vu for the ducks! Of course, the story would
be called "Raiders of the Lost Barks".

Wilmer Rivers