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.

Old Wottzizname

I really have been wanting to post more often, here on Whirled of Kelly, but between having the horrible crud and having horrible deadlines, I'm lucky to be able to do the Sunday, Kelly Sunday thing. Give me a little more time and I'll make it worth your patience.

So Grimly Grim

Sometimes the strips could feel a bit dull, kind of been-there-done-that. But true Pogophiles welcome any little bit they're not seen before, as here where we start to fill in some of the dates in our cyber collection.

The Mechanics of English

Ever-Lovin' Blue-Eyed Whirled of Kelly takes pride in offering to fans of Walt Kelly a rarity of his early work.

Some biographies mention this item, but few have shown the goods. Thanks to a great friend of this blog, OtherEric of The Digital Comic Museum, we can see Kelly at work as a journeyman cartoonist, illustrating a War Department manual: The Mechanics of English.

With so many G.I.s coming into wartime administrative positions, a professional standard had to be maintained in written communications. Sometimes the manual was fairly complex in its substance, so a few cartoons helped to liven it up and help make sense of it all.

Copyrighted 1943 by the MacMillan Company, it's interesting to see that Kelly's credited name is misspelled on the title page, but make no mistake—this is OUR Walt Kelly, demonstrating a cartoon technique that was popularized by cartooning courses of the time, but identifiable with the Kelly wit. Kelly was already drawing Pogo and Disney stuff and comic books by this point, but he chose (or was directed) to stick to basic cartooning, yet make it lively and quick.

I know a lot of you are desirous of Pogo material, and we will have plenty more of that over time, but I think it's fascinating to see an early part of the evolution of Kelly's style and wit. Besides being fans of Kelly, many of this blog's viewers are animators, cartoonists and illustrators looking for inspiration, and I hope y'all get something out of this.

I've chosen to show the work in context, with the entire page where art was utilized, so as to get a flavor of the educational content.

A millyum thanks to OtherEric for the scans, with a bit of cleanup by me.

Cartooning Treat

We have a treat for fans and students of Walt Kelly and for fans and students of cartooning in general.

Produced for the War Department, we have some rare early Kelly material— book illustrations that demonstrate the educational use of cartoons.

Coming up next.

A Certain Resolve

Well, we're now finally past that '45 years ago today' conceit that I was running. If'n I hadn't posted all that Pandemonia stuff a couple years ago, I coulda kept on doing that into 1966. But all that year is blogged and is history. So from here on, we'll be jumping around to various years.

This is about the time that 'ecology' was being taken seriously. And Kelly sure got a lot of mileage from that Christmas carol over the years.

Happy 1951, 1952, and 1953

Yes, I posted this first image last year, but it's too beauty to not pull up again.

Further below are New Year's Day strips from 1951, 1952, and 1953 — my three favorite years of Kelly art and story, not that all the other years weren't great. I know you've seen these before, so sue me (actually don't, I've got too much on my calendar as it is).

Above, yes, at that time Kelly was signing some funny little names — a different one per strip.

Stay 'tooned—cool stuff coming up in 2011.