Pogo: We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us

I have probably mentioned several times in this blog how much of a fan I am of Walt Kelly and his comic creation Pogo. I'm not sure how much many young readers would understand a great deal of the humor of the strip nowadays. It was very much a strip rooted in the 1950's, 1960's and 1970's. Much of the political humor is based in the McCarthy era and unless you're studying that time period in a history class, I'm not sure how much a young reader would understand the jokes.

Berke Breathed's Bloom County can be seen the same way. Another favorite strip of mine that is very rooted in the 1980's politics and pop culture.

However, it's Kelly's artwork (and Breathed's as well) that transcends time.

A great deal due to the fact that Kelly started out as an artist at Walt Disney from January 6, 1936 to September 12, 1941. And looking at his designs for Pogo Possum and many of his friends in the Okefenokee Swamp, you can definitely see the Disney influence. Mostly in the way he draws the eyes on his character. That was very Disney. He actually contributed to animations like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia, Dumbo and The Reluctant Dragon.

Ah, well, it's no use prevaricating about the bush. Getting to my initial story (which includes the image above) I had recently gone on a little day trip with Sydney up to Concord MA when I found out my Thursday night class had been canceled due to the weather. We ended up poking around some really great shops one of which was this really cute little book shop called The Barrow Book Store. It was a neat little place with that great smell of used books in the air.

Well, as we were poking around I happened to see in the art and humor section a copy of We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us sitting there on the shelf. My eyes instantly lit up. You can ask Sydney and she will attest to this.

This book is rare to say the least!! If you want to see how rare it is, log onto Amazon.com and you will see the cheapest copy you can get of it starts out at $26.95!!

AND HERE IT WAS SELLING FOR $8!!!!

So naturally I had to get it!!

For those unfamiliar with that phrase coined by Pogo, it was originally for an anti-pollution campaign started by Walt Kelly for the first Earth Day.


Later Kelly had planned on doing it as a short animation with partner and future wife Selby Daley. Kelly had been greatly dissatisfied with Chuck Jones's treatment of his characters in A Pogo Special Birthday Special. Kelly had actually contributed voices for some of the characters as well as some of the story. However, he had mentioned that the story he had written had been completely altered.

I admit to be someone who really liked the special (being an admirer of both Kelly and Jones). And to be fair to Chuck Jones, he got the characters of Pogo closer to the look and the feel of the strip than many comic strips turned animation like Heathcliff or Dennis the Menace in the 1980's.

Kelly actually started doing most of the animation himself. A great deal of the time from his bed since he was very sick at the time. Kelly even recorded many of the voices as well for the animation.

The cartoon ultimately went unfinished due to Kelly's ill heath. However, most of the storyboard was used as the basis for the first half of the book version. With the second half being a collection of Kelly's daily Pogo strips that came out at that time.

The 1960's to the 1970's are probably some of Kelly's best artwork. Not only with his own characters but also with many of his caricatures. Likenesses J. Edgar Hoover, Spiro Agnew and George Mitchell all appear in the volume.

If you're ever able to obtain a copy of it, I highly recommend you pick it up. It's a great book and a portal into a bygone time. And probably some of Kelly's finest work to date in my opinion!!

Bud Sagendorf

Nobody ever really got Popeye just right after EC Segar died. But Bud Sagendorf got it pretty close. But to be fair to any artists who followed Segar, I don't think that Segar himself would have been able to get Popeye right either even if he had lived. There was a lot going against both Popeye and Segar himself.

Namely the ever ominous form of William Randolph Hearst. According to the book Popeye: The First Fifty Years, Bud Sagendorf who had been Segar's assistant on the Popeye strips for many years recounts how Hearst demanded: "Popeye is loved by the children of America... Stop his swearing... Stop his brutality... Make him respectable".

Segar was furious and was quoted in saying "The fun will be gone. There's nothing funny about a sissy sailor!"

What makes all this worse, W.R. Hearst was a complete hypocrite. One one hand here he was acting like some shining night for morality and decency in America. He was also the person who started the smear campaign against marijuana.

But on the other hand, he was having an opened affair with actress Marion Davies while married to his wife Millicent.

So, a foul-mouthed sailor who occasionally punched a horse and people smoking marijuana for recreational use was highly immoral. But cheating on your wife is completely fine.

Not that I endorse the legalization of marijuana in any way. I'm just saying it smacks of hypocrisy to me. However, what Hearst doesn't mention is the fact that his campaign demonizing marijuana has really nothing to do with a moral issue. But the fact that people smoking it for recreational use cut into the hemp crop which he used to make his newspapers with.

Again, someone in power who is no better than a schoolyard bully. But I digress...



Nobody has really captured the spirit of the original Popeye strips since Segar's death in 1938. However, Bud Sangedorf's long run with the character is a definite close second.

The stories in Sangedorf's strips don't have that charm of the Segar strips. Segar was the master of creating these ongoing stories that borderline surreal. But those years as Segar's assistant do help him out with his approach to the character. The stories in the Sagendorf Popeye are more along the lines of the one-liner gags that newspaper strips have fallen into over the years.

Most comic strips seem to fall into the same formula. First Panel: setting up the joke. Second (and occasionally Third) Panel: Filler. Third (and occasionally Fourth) Panel: The Punchline.

And for the most part, even though it wasn't the same Popeye as Segar's, Sagendorf remained truer to the character than any of the animations created by Famous Studio, King Feature and Hanna-Barbera. Although, HB seemed to use a very watered-down version of Sagendorf's Popeye for their Saturday Morning Cartoon series.

I have a fondness for Sagendorf's character design for Popeye and the Thimble Theater cast primarily because that was my first introduction to the one-eyed (and thanks to the crappy Famous Studio character design occasionally two-eyed) sailor.

It was Sagendorf's character design of Popeye that adorned my lunchbox in kindergarten. I was constantly trying to copy the images on that lunchbox when I would draw Popeye, Olive, Wimpy and Bluto (sometimes called Brutus).


There is a great book I picked up at Worcester's one and only Pop Culture Emporium That's Entertainment called Popeye: The First Fifty Years. It's not a bad book loaded with Sagendorf's interpretations of Popeye and the rest of the cast as well as a few of Segar's original strips.

If you happen to find yourself an inexpensive copy I highly recommend you pick it up. It's particularly good if you have a child who loves to draw. The will have a great time trying to draw the characters in the book.