Comics publisher
Fantagraphics announced today that it will begin publishing a comprehensive collection of Walt Kelly's hugely influential strip Pogo in October. Each book in the projected 12-volume series will be designed by cartoonist Jeff Smith (Bone). Created by Kelly in the late 1940s, Pogo ran for nearly 30 years and followed the adventures of the titular possum and his various animal friends and antagonists in the Okefenokee swamp, using a combination of slapstick, puns, malapropisms and political satire to comment on current events and the wider human condition. It's perhaps most well-remembered for Kelly's aphorism "we have met the enemy and he is us." Kelly was cited as a major inspiration by the creators of Doonesbury, Calvin & Hobbes, and the Muppets, among others. Fantagraphics previously published an 11-volume Pogo series in the 1990s, but the new collection will be the first time the entire run of Kelly's work will have been reissued. Pogo joins the the company's critically praised earlier complete collections of seminal American comic strips like Krazy Kat, Peanuts, Popeye, and Dennis the Menace.