Wednesday, August 16, 2017

Go Away, You Frighten Your Children!

 As noted by famed illustrator James Montgomery Flagg, "cartoonists make people see things!"

My favorite cartoonist, Walt Kelly, died over 40 years ago, yet he left us this Pogo story, as if in a time capsule to look at now, as a moral tale for our American society.






9 comments:

  1. Merci pour tous ces partages !

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  2. Thank you! These could not be more timely!

    Decades ago, when I was young and stupid (I'm not young anymore), I remember a friend of mine in school declaring, "Your parents are weird!"

    Among their many idiosyncrasies, they had a wonderful collection of Pogo books, from which in part I learned to read. I remember this story from The Pogo Poop Book, and it helped shape me from an early age. Yes, I understood at the tender age or 6 or 7, hatred and the uniforms of hatred will scare the children. Even though still a child, I understood there was no excuse for hatred.

    I am grateful every day for the weirdness of my parents.

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  3. And "great gibber of goblins" is just fun to say!
    I especially have always liked the false-teeth goblin.

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  4. Kelly did something kind of amazing here. He could have made the father's ghost suit just as empty in reality as it was in the child's dream. Instead he put a real human bean (or some kinda person) in there who was capable of being appalled at himself. Maybe a gentle reminder to the rest of us not to be bigoted about the bigots?

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  5. Thom Hartmann had on his radio program the founder of the organization Life After Hate (dot org), himself a former neo-Nazi. He made the point that we can't attack the person inside the hood, if we hope to redeem them.

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  6. The Kluck Klams is not even a top Walt Kelly masterpiece.
    But it is one of the deepest, picturesque, most political, most poetical, with the greatest language and wording, and continuity-cutof all of human art ever.
    Don't know all human art, but some. But this must be.
    A true stunning uplifting wonder by all means. I think on this everybody with some sense and a pinch of sensibility will wholeheartedly agree.
    Thanks, Thom.

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  7. Oddly enough, this is the third time today I've run across the 'Kluck Klams' today, hunting for different things and then arriving here for a dose of Kelly's sweet irony.

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    Replies
    1. I saw where a lot of people downloaded these pages from this site and shared it a number of places. For what it's worth, these are my scans.

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  8. These are literally wonderful.
    I don't need to download them. But all the same, that's really and truly great, thanks a lot, Thom.

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