age 53 and still retrieving books from my parents attic. This is one of the great transformative works in the development of the concept that great books might be written using the simple elements of the strip cartoon (an idea that is not to be confused with the corrupted and now irretrievable idea of 'the graphic novel'.) Walt Kelly's intro is dated Feb 1970, so presumably the material comes from 1969 (Jan -Aug, reading from data in the strips...) But such nitpicking seems to me to belittle Kelly's achievement here; continuity strips wouldn't normally expect readers to keep track of narrative ideas for eight weeks let alone months. Of all the books collecting the Pogo daily strip, this work stands out for being through-composed and cunningly structured. With the chapter titles in place it is difficult to think other than that the author saw the book in his head while he was turning out these dailies, though there are presumably many tangents and stops, restarts and nods to topical occurences that have been pruned out of the 1969 catalogue to boil it down to such essential perfection.
And what chapter titles: Looking ahead behind by a nose; A Head in a hole and vice versa; The drive-in self service mortuary; Justice is blind, deaf and stoned; All's well that ends.(the last has long been my favourite Kelly-ism)


"One of the great stumbling blocks in history is that one day follows another".
It starts with the New Year's Day gathering of the intimate cast of characters who in their inventive and sprightly conversation arrive at a plan to rearrange the calendar.
"I don't want no month with a thirteenth day in it." says Churchy la Femme, the turtle.
"What folks gonna do from the 12th to the 14th, hold their breath?"
"When you suggests people stops breathin' for one day a month you little recks with innocent pleasures."
"But it would help fight pollution."
And by this simple means we arrive at the theme of the book.
If everybody holds their breath we can reduce pollution. The logic proceeds apace as only in Walt Kelly...
"You take a fella what's a fish, he don't breathe."
"But he do... for centuries he's been breathin' water what's contaminated with old ruubber boots, tin cans, old bedsprings, garbage delicacies an' unfrocked umbrellas."

Inevitably the business of non-breathing leads us to the cemetery:
"The way I figger it, if we get all the non-breathers to endorse not breathin' on our seance tv show..."


The look of the thing starts getting elaborate, with the specially lettered typefaces for the dialogue of Deacon Muskrat and Sarcophagus MacAbre. The villainy of this pair starts to look ineffectual after the introduction of Kelly's caricature of Spiro Agnew as a hyena (pictured on the book's cover, above), who finds it easier to try and convict Churchy after putting a long haired wig on his bald pate. Kelly's grasp of the political situation has proven to be spot-on at a time when so many other cartoonists of his generation were embarrassingly out of step, such as Al Capp and Milt Caniff. If memory serves, I had only just read this book when Kelly died in 1973, aged sixty.

The book ends after 128 pages where it started with our beloved cast back around the table, and with Kelly's greatest catchphrase of all:


I feel an enormous warmth in being reunited with this masterpiece after twenty five years of separation. I'm also curious about the atmospherics of my parents' attic, which have preserved this and other artefacts in completely perfect condition.