Possum with Snob Appeal

POGO (182 pp.)--Walt Kelly--Simon & Schuster ($1).

Ever since Cartoonist George Herriman died in 1944, and Krazy Kat disappeared from the back fence of literature, the comic strips have suffered an intellectual hiatus. One syndicate was ready with Barnaby, a cheerful little psycho whose daydreams, and all the characters in them, came to life; but where Krazy Kat breathed a sort of smoky, city poetry that anyone could sniff, Barnaby and his friends mumbled social parables that a lot of well-wishers soon wearied of puzzling out.

The newest comic-strip character with intellectual appeal is a possum called Pogo. Born three years ago in the moribund New York Star* Pogo has multiplied himself with possumly precocity, and currently appears in 210 U.S. newspapers. Cartoonist Walt Kelly has now collected the best-known adventures of Pogo into a book which all but filled Santa's pouch with little marsupials. In fact, during the month of December, Pogo has been the fastest-selling book in the U.S.

Pogo is a bright-eyed, cuddly little critter, as amiably shapeless as a Teddy bear, with a head like a hairy zero, a nose like an overboiled yam. He lives somewhere in the happy absences of Georgia's vast Okefenokee swamp, with his friends. Among them: Albert, a raffish alligator who smokes cigars, courts a skunk with a French accent, and describes himself as "handsome, brilliant and modest to a fare-thee-well"; Howland Owl, a foolish old bird who crosses a "gee-ranium" plant with a yew tree, hoping to get a "yew-ranium" bush for an atom bomb; the Deacon, a muskrat so elegantly educated that he speaks mostly in Old English script.

In their pleasant nowhere, Pogo and his companions live pretty much like people everywhere--cadging cigars, holding elections, taking bird walks, chasing sea serpents, fighting duels, undergoing psychoanalysis, marching on Washington (and demanding to see the Easter Bunny).

They even have to deal with the housing problem when a formation of bats rents space in the alligator's mouth, and then refuses eviction. From all these everyday situations the bone of contention is pulled, and the hollow space stuffed with whimsy, sentiment, gags, puns, and a sprinkling of philosophy ground very small. _ Artist Kelly has the idea that, by setting everyday events against a simple background, like figures against a sheet, he can make the human elements in them stand out more clearly. Sometimes he can, and with true invention. Pogo novices should be warned, however, that 182 pages of wit & wisdom from a small rodent can be almighty surfeiting. For best effect, this sort of thing should be taken, as is customary with War and Peace, a bit at a time.

*A small band of Pogophiles prefer to say that Pogo was reborn in 1948. From 1943 until 1946, he appeared bimonthly in a comic-book format that was almost totally ignored by the intelligentsia.

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