Goom Goom Goom

Here's a little update about this arc: I'm calling this the Mythillogical Beasts arc, for reasons that you'll see soon enough. But a trait of Kelly's storylines was that they didn't begin and end with precision. Bits and pieces might stray over a few weeks, and before you know it, we're caught up in a new arc that wanders on.

My point being is that I peeked ahead a bit and realized this arc will run more than 13 Sundays . . . maybe more like 18. Again, it's all fun stuff, so no one's going to suffer here. The color confusion dies down after a few Sundays and then it's almost normal.

I had an email come in from Don that had a theory about the 'off-colors':

I think the strange colors on the Pogo page you posted today result from the work having been done by a color-blind person.

Notice the preponderance of blue and yellow. These are the colors that people with varying degrees of red-green blindness can still see. (Blindness to the blue-yellow axis is very rare.)

As to why Walt Kelly would accept these results - perhaps he was too ill to feel like arguing.

That's certainly a possibility. And it's humorous to think how someone with color-blindness could be put in the position of being in charge of colors.

But as you'll see, in posts to come, the colors change in strangeness that make you think that someone's just not paying attention. The oddest detail is Churchy's two-tone head and beak. But overall the colors are lively, the art is great and the story is fun. So I'll shut up for now about this chromatic anomaly.

Enjoy the show!

Skibrous and Skattle-Minded

Here we start a 13 Sunday arc from 1971, a time when Kelly was ill, yet still producing high quality work. But there's one peculiar trait to this arc—namely that the coloring is as odd as I've ever seen in the Pogo Sundays, starting with this strip and continuing into the 9th week of the arc. You'll notice that especially with Churchy and Howland.

I've tried to reason out the reason, but I'm still flummoxed. I've thought that maybe the pressmen were drunk (but for nine weeks?). I've thought that maybe Kelly had new assistance from someone who was not familiar with the strip's characters, and developed color guides that were made up on the spot. And, of course, I thought perhaps Kelly's illness prevented him from seeing colors as usual as he prepared the color guides.

But I don't know that he normally would perform that duty, and have to lean toward an assistant's culpability, since pressmen usually are loyal in following directives.

Whatever the reason, Kelly's artwork is still spot-on, and as you'll see as we get further into the arc, he brings in funny and unusual elements, making this a high quality arc. His style has that later period look, certainly, but still solid.

To thank you for your patience in the lately slow schedule of posts, I plan to post this arc 2 or three times a week, so that we won't drag it out for a real-time 13 weeks. Do come back every few days, because despite the really odd coloring, this IS a fun arc, as you'll see.