BIRTHDAY GREETINGS TO MR. KELLY

Today is Walt Kelly's 100th birthday!!!

We Kelly fans may be somewhat finite in number, but infinite in appreciation of Kelly's outstanding cartooning career!

Please make your way over to view a labor of love, a tasty tribute, a chestful of cheer:

Delineated Life: Celebrating Walt Kelly and His Work

It's not a biography, it's not a checklist, it's not comprehensive of all his work. It's a birthday tribute! Let me know what you think of it.

Use your controls to get the zine to full screen, and then click on the bottom right or left to flip the pages forward or backward. Click once on any given page to enlarge it for better readability and click once again on the page to revert to the double spreads. I hope you like it! 

Celebrating Creativity

This is a reminder that this Sunday, August 25, is Walt Kelly's 100th Birthday, and our new zine, Delineated Life, will be rolling out its tribute issue, entirely dedicated to Kelly.

I say that so confidently and calmly, even though I only have a couple of days left to pull it all together and get it up online as I'm way working on other deadlines. Oy.

Pictorial Arts Journal is the papa publication of Delineated Life, so it's proudly presenting this promotional 'poster' to remind you to check in on Sunday.

Welcome to the Beginning

Greetings Friends-in-Kelly! Normally I try to post a Pogo Sunday strip on Sundays, but this is my last hectic week to finish up the Walt Kelly tribute number of Delineated Life, a zine that celebrates artists and their work. The page count has risen too high for practicality, so I've made an editorial cut to some pages that I had planned for the issue. This is one cut of two, and the second one hopefully will be posted later this week.

And NEXT WEEK, will be Walt Kelly's 100th birthday, even though he left us 40 years ago. If I don't have catastrophic interference before then, we'll be providing a link on that date to view, free of charge, the Kelly tribute issue, chock full of Kelly goodness. Much of the material you may have seen before, but much of it is in a new context, so you'll probably enjoy seeing it all again. For some of you maybe the material will be brand new for you, in which case, "YAY".

The scans below came to us from Mark Fuller Dillon (way back in February) and I relaid them out to a condensed format. It's the booklet from the 1965 'Great Society' era that made its message easier to tolerate due to Kelly's lovely character renderings. This publication is available here and there on the net, but still a big thank you to Mark for scanning and taking the initiative to send it over here to share with the Whirled of Kelly. Sorry I didn't have time to post the scans at full size. Mark offers to send full-res scans of these pages to you for the asking. You can reach Mark at: 

markfullerdillon@gmail.com         

I like the "learn by asking" page.

Be here next week to celebrate! Your presence is necessary, but no presents are necessary. LLK!

The Gumbo Birthright

Silliness ala Kelly.

 March 12, 1972

This detail deserves a closer look. Long Live Kelly!

The Wealthy Gumbeaux Family Birthright

1973 was a harsh year for Walt Kelly, having suffered a painful illness that only got worse until he left us permanently in October of that year. Many of the published strips were reruns and pastiches of old ones, and there was a run where the strip was just a pale shadow of its former self, before collapsing into other people's hands.

But yet we've seen that some of these '73 strips are still invitingly written and drawn. I am uncertain of the provenance of strips from that year, but these last few feel right and proper and this opening panel is some of the old Sunday fancery, what with a shrugging tree and coal-carrying-critter, seeming like part of a lovely last hurrah.

March 5, 1972

Update: Well call me a potato and poke me in the eye, I totally misread the copyright date and didn't bother looking at previous posts to catch myself. Craig caught my mistake and you can ignore my blathering above. I would delete the post and start over, but that wouldn't be fair to Craig and his comment. Though I did change the date above to the corrECT 1972 date. Thanks Craig!