Under the Bamboozle Bush

Here's the news from Mark Evanier, who if anyone knows the reality of things, it should be him. In his words:

Coming Soon…For Real!

Published Wednesday, June 21, 2017 at 1:21 AM

As readers of this blog are aware, my lovely friend Carolyn Kelly left us on April 9. She fought cancer until the end but there came a day when I knew she knew she wasn't going to survive. It was when she said to me, "If I don't make it, will you make sure the Pogoseries is completed, just the way we planned it?" I promised her it would be.

I also promised we would maintain the same high standards she had set for the project, which was the most important non-medical thing she ever tackled in her life. Understand please that by "important," I mean important to her. The series, which is reprinting her father's classic newspaper strip in full, may also be important to you but I didn't promise you it would be finished. I promised her. Either way, there will be no more delays.

Volume 4 will be out well before Christmas of this year. It will include a remembrance of her, a foreword by Neil Gaiman and some of the most brilliant cartooning ever done. Here's the cover…

Honor One Big Lovin' Cousin!

Sorry to keep running late on postings, things are even busier around here than most ever before! 

Once again, we can compare the original Sunday tear sheet with the S&S b&w reprint book to see how editing was done, taking out panels, cropping, etc. Notably the last two panels of the Sunday excised from the book, presumably not wanting to be seasonal in the book, but here seen as a lovely and cheery heart warm. Looks more and more for these gnomes being Cajun.

Vive le bon soir! Vive le merry! Vive le Christmas! 

VIVE LE WALT KELLY!

December 21, 1952

Snoor Snumma Coco Unna Wim Bimble

More stuff to compare and think about Gnomic ways.

December 14, 1952

A Wierdity!

Now we come to one of my topmost favorite Kelly Sunday strips, the holy grail of my childhood, then seen only in black and white in the 'Pogo Sunday Book'. Color makes it so much more fun for me, looking like a page from the best comic book of all time. Imagine Sunday comic sections ever looking this great!

I was, and still am, such a geek for stuff like this. 

 December 7, 1952

Included here are the equivalent pages from the book just so you can compare how the panels were edited, doing some expanding.

I SWAN!

Well now we've reached a point in Pogo continuity that was a HIGH point of my childhood, having seen some of this reprinted in Pogo's Sunday Punch in black & white and edited somewhat, cutting panels, adding panels, changing formats of panels. 

For me, it was WHAM! I was de-LIGHTED to see this fantasy element of human bean gnomes suddenly appear in the swamp. But now all these years later I see this great panel below and realize that it was not in the Simon & Schuster book! And the lovely tree in the first panel of this week's strip was truncated, and now we see the almost watercolor effect as well.

What a cool little episode this was, an early forewarner of Prehysterical Pogo in the mid 1960s. I've included a couple of pages from the S&S book to show comparisons of panel edits.

Happy Sunday, Kelly Sunday!

November 30, 1952