Imaginary Worlds - Politics of the Funnies Part 1

Episode Date: January 6, 2022

Once upon a time, the funnies or the comics pages dominated newspapers – back when newspapers were the main source of information for most Americans. In those days, Walt Kelly and Al Capp were titans of the funnies. Their strips Pogo and Li’l Abner were cultural sensations. Both artists were groundbreaking in the way they incorporated satire into their fantastical worlds, back when the comics page was supposed to be an apolitical neutral zone. Even though their strips are not front and center in pop culture today, we are still feeling the ripple effects of what they accomplished. In part one, I talk with Mercer University professor Jay Black, BYU professor Kerry Soper and Harper College professor Brian Cremins about how Pogo met the enemy, and why he is us.   Link to Jay Black's book, "Walt Kelly and Pogo: The Art of the Political Swamp" Link to Kerry Soper's book, "We Go Pogo" Our ad partner is Multitude. If you’re interested in advertising on Imaginary Worlds, you can contact them here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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It's time for Tim's. You're listening to Imag in Canada for a limited time. It's time for Tim's. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky, and this is part one of a two-part episode about the comics page in the newspaper. For listeners under a certain age, it might be hard to imagine how huge newspaper comic strips used to be. The comics page, or the funny pages, or the funnies, used to be the stars of the newspaper. They drove circulation. They were read by people of all ages. They were a big part of the culture back when our culture wasn't broken up into niche demographics and information silos. back when our culture wasn't broken up into niche demographics and information silos.

And in the mid-20th century, there were a few titans of the comics page. You've probably heard of Charles Schultz, who did Peanuts, but there were two other artists that were huge. Al Kapp and Walt Kelly. Their comic strips, Lil Abner and Pogo, collectively reached about 100 million Americans, which was the majority of Americans at the time. And there are so many parallels between them. Weld, Kelly, and Al Cap knew each other well.

They ran in the same circles. Both men created strips that were set in imaginary southern towns where fantastical things happened, even though neither one of them was from the south. In fact, they both went to high school in Bridgeport, Connecticut, only four years apart from each other. They also owned the IP of their strips, which was rare at the time. And that meant they had a lot of creative freedom. So they each broke new ground by incorporating politics and satire into their comic strips. And each of them faced a reckoning in the 1960s when the culture changed. And even though their strips are not front and center in pop culture today,

we're still feeling the ripple effects of what they accomplished. In the next episode, we will get to Al Cap. But let's start with Walt Kelly. His comic strip Pogo ran from 1948 to 1975. The characters were talking animals. Alligators, porcupines, turtles, beavers, rabbits, bears, and dogs. And they all lived together in a swamp called Okefenokee. Now, first of all, you have to pronounce it right.

It's Okefenokee. You got to get that southerness to you. Okefenokee. Now, first of all, you have to pronounce it right. It's Okefenokee. You got to get that southerness to you. Okefenokee. Okefenokee. Sorry, I'm a New Englander, so there you go. Well, so was Walt Kelly. Yeah. So was Walt Kelly.

I mean, he's from Connecticut. That is Jay Black. He is a professor at Mercer University in Georgia, and he's written about Walt Kelly. He'd never been to the Okefenokee before he made it the local swamp. It wasn't until after the comic strip was a success when Waycross asked him to come down to the Okefenokee Swamp and actually see a real possum,

because he had never seen one before. Waycross is the closest city to the Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia, and the character of Pogo is a possum, although he actually looks more like a furry child. And like a child, Pogo is sweet and innocent, asking a lot of poignant questions to the other animal characters. Walt Kelly was also very playful with language. The animals spoke in a make-believe southern dialect with a few mixed-up words and malapropisms. Their dialogue balloons were sometimes in different fonts, which reflected their personalities.

And throughout the strip, the characters lived a pretty relaxed life in the swamp, hanging out, playing music, going birdwatching or fishing. And he was such a hoot. I mean, he was silly. Some of the things he did was just so darn silly. And I wish I was back then so I could get my name on the boat. Wait, how did that work? Yeah. Yeah. You never notice that, that the boat that they would use to go out

to catch fish, every boat had a different name on it. And that's how he would do shout outs to people. That's interesting. And who were the people that, who were they? Some of them were friends. Some of them were editors that he wanted to pick up the strip. There was a time when he actually said goodbye to his daughter who had died, a young daughter that died as a, I think a toddler or shortly after birth. Her name was on one of the boats. Some people who just wrote to him and said, can you put my name on a boat? He would do it. That was the kind of world that Kelly created. It was warm, inviting. His drawing style was

very influenced by Disney because Kelly actually worked at Disney as an animator for five years. When he left the studio and moved back east, he got into comic books, where he began to develop the characters that would end up in Pogo. Kelly also convinced the syndicate that distributed Pogo to give him full ownership. It's a complicated story how that happened, but it put him in a rare position among comic strip artists. If you didn't own your own IP, a syndicate could tell you to censor your material, or they could fire you and replace you with a different artist on your own strip. Kelly never had to worry about that again. So by the early 1950s, his professional life was going great.

His personal life, on the other hand, was very messy. His marriage was breaking up. He had had an affair with another woman. I think that he was just in a bad time. He started drinking heavily. He used to hang out at a pub that was located in the same building as the New York Herald. He had also done a brief stint as an editorial cartoonist at a different New York paper. So a lot of his drinking buddies were reporters. He liked talking politics with them. And I think that he just said, you know, it's my strip I'm going to do.

Now that I know that it's my strip, I'm going to do whatever I want to do with it. Now, around this time, the reporters were buzzing about this new executive order that was signed by President Eisenhower. The law banned gays and lesbians from being employed by the federal government because, in theory, the Soviet Union could seek those people out and threaten to expose them if they didn't give away state secrets. Walt Kelly was outraged. And Jay says this goes back to the way that Kelly imagined the world inside his cartoon swamp. Everybody should be equal in the swamp as well.

You know, bugs, birds, reptiles, mammals, everybody's equal in the swamp as well. Bugs, birds, reptiles, mammals, everybody's equal in the swamp. That was not happening outside of the swamp, obviously. When we have the Jim Crow laws, we have all the other things going, anti-communist crusades. Things weren't equal. I think that Walt Kelly really believed that if we had freedom of speech, then all people should have freedom of speech and thought. And so what I did in my book was I outed Churchy LeFemme. I outed a turtle. Okay. What he meant by that is that when Jay started researching his book on the politics of Walt Kelly, he looked at all the strips during this time, and they centered it around a sweet character named Churchill LeFemme, a turtle, who was being harassed by a judgmental

muskrat who was named Deacon Mushrat. The deacon dressed like an old-fashioned preacher. His dialogue was in a heavy gothic font, and he accused Churchill of all these absurd crimes which he didn't commit. The evidence at his trial was nothing but gossip and rumors. In this storyline with Churchy LeFemme, I started seeing all of this coding that I was reading for homosexuality. Although not everyone in the 50s may have gotten the subtext. sexuality. Although not everyone in the 50s may have gotten the subtext. The difference between, say, a graphic novel or a comic book and a comic strip is that you pick up the book and you can read the whole story at one time. In a comic strip, you're only looking at a story three or four panels at a time over the course of several weeks. And so each panel individually might not be

saying much about the politics or the culture, but if you put the whole storyline together, then you have the larger story. And that wasn't done until he actually did put them together in his books. But when it came to his next target, Walt Kelly realized that subtlety was not going to work. Not with this guy. I think we've got a much more serious situation now on communist infiltration of the CIA. I also discussed with the members of the committee the question of communist infiltration

of atomic and hydrogen bomb plants. Joe McCarthy is the kind of figure that is so deeply rooted in the 1950s, it used to be hard for me to understand how scary he must have seemed. But lately, I've been able to imagine what Joe McCarthy must have seemed like to Walt Kelly. Here was a popular demagogue who told a big lie. A lie that he said was supposed to protect American democracy, but it was clearly undermining everything that makes this country a democracy. Kelly hoped there would be a chorus of people rising up against this guy,

and instead he saw people with the power to speak out, keeping silent out of fear or cynicism. And the mainstream media didn't want to appear biased, so they tried to report both sides of the story, even though one side was nothing but lies and conspiracy theories. So Kelly went further than he ever had in his strip. He created an evil bobcat character called Simple J. Malarkey, who looked exactly like Joe McCarthy as a bobcat. The character accused anyone who disagreed with him of treason. And in a world of cute

talking animals, Simple J. Malarkey was genuinely scary. But Joe McCarthy was not offended. Joe McCarthy liked seeing himself in his strip every day. He would send Roy Cohn out to get the newspaper every day so he could read the pogo. But his supporters were not so thrilled, right? No, no. Indeed, a lot of editors first started moving the comic strip into the editorial page. Walt Kelly was not the first artist to use this strip to say something political, but he did it in a way that changed the culture of the comics page. For example, a decade earlier, Harold Gray, the creator of Little Orphan Annie,

had a storyline where Annie exposed corruption in the War Department. Gray was not a big fan of FDR. A newspaper in Louisville pulled the strip, saying that editorializing should be labeled as such, and not, quote, smuggled into the comic strips in the guise of entertainment. Harold Gray apologized and didn't publish the rest of that storyline, but he still tried to find other subversive ways

to critique Roosevelt indirectly in the strip. So when Walt Kelly basically put Joe McCarthy into his strip and built an entire storyline around that character so we can mock him, that was a big deal. If this happened today, there'd be an instant backlash, complaints on Twitter that Pogo went woke, that was a big deal. If this happened today, there'd be an instant backlash. Complaints on Twitter that Pogo went woke, or that Kelly's out of his depth talking about politics. Stick to the cute animals. And that did happen in an analog style, but Kelly stood his ground.

Kerry Soper is a professor at BYU who has written about the way that Kelly used politics. Cooper is a professor at BYU who has written about the way that Kelly used politics. He says back then there was a lot of money behind the idea that the funny pages were supposed to be a neutral zone, an oasis of family fun in the middle of a newspaper full of politics. The syndicates who, you know, sold the strips across the country to daily newspapers in every small town, every big town, sold them as, you know, exceptionally safe and, you know, even bland and generic and pleasing everyone. They were constantly testing strips according to popularity polls. Local editors were super squeamish about introducing any comics that might rile up their readers. And so anything that was off color, kind of inappropriate in terms of innuendo, sexuality, things like that, that was off limits. And then anything experimental, aesthetically experimental or politically challenging, satirical, was also considered sort of poisonous to the medium. satirical was also considered sort of poisonous to the medium.

So it sounds like it's similar to where the TV networks were. Like when All in the Family debuted, it was so shocking because there was this unwritten rule that a TV show's got to play as well in Vermont as it does in Alabama. Yeah, think of the Smothers Brothers too, right? The way they, in the 60s, started to push against those strictures in the TV world. But Kelly's doing it like a full decade earlier in an even more conservative medium, right? And Kelly was just getting started. He turned more politicians into animal characters. He tried to be an equal opportunity offender, making fun of Democrats, Republicans, and world leaders. He even went after communists,

but his approach was lighter and more highbrow. He made fun of their thinking by having these bird characters speak in the absurd language of Soviet propaganda. He also went after the ultra-conservative John Birch Society and the Ku Klux Klan. Where he goes after the Kuk Clams, which is the KKK. Brian Cremins is a professor at Harper College who's also written about Pogo. There's a little kid, I don't remember what kind of animal the kid is, whose parents are making him wear a sheet.

And Pogo, being the wise child, comforts the child who's not understanding the racism, the evil of its parents. And this child lives in an old broken down plantation house. And so Pogo has to intervene and basically save this child from these two racist cuck clam parents. He has to explain to them, well, what they're trying to teach you to do is wrong. It's not morally right. Editors were not happy, especially in the South where Pogo was popular. And Jay Black says even though Kelly owned his strip, he did worry about pissing too many people off.

He didn't like it when newspapers would move Pogo to the editorial page. It was important for him to stay on the comics page. So he came up with a plan. He actually did two strips for the same day, one with the political strips and one with what we call the bunny strips, which, you know, had cute bunnies and the bunnies. It was all just like dad jokes, just silly pun humor to satisfy them so that they wouldn't stop the strip. But then didn't he get tired of the bunny strips after a while? Oh, he sure did. He stopped doing sometime in the 1960s.

And Cary Soper says, well, Kelly eventually regretted having ever done the bunny strips. Yeah, he regretted it. He felt like he'd been kind of pressured into doing that and he wished he could have just not made that accommodation but in the end he was willing to do it because you know he's like a businessman he's trying to be professional about it giving them options I think he was constantly dealing with that like he had to do a lot of public relations work to settle editors down but he was also really charming and a great kind of salesman or businessman in terms of winning people over and visiting newspaper offices.

Or he's drawing sketches for editors, signing original cartoons, giving them away, courting people in person. And I think that helped keep the papers on board and it kept people in his camp. He also had an interesting way of building his fan base. He had a running joke every four years where Pogo would run for president. It was a way of making fun of the shallowness of real-life campaigns.

His slogan, I Go Pogo, was a parody of I Like Ike. He had political rallies for Pogo in was a parody of I Like Ike. He had political rallies for Pogo in the real world as PR stunts. And they were such a hit on college campuses. When Kelly came to speak at Harvard, 1,600 students came out, and it turned into mayhem with many of the students getting arrested. But that enthusiasm did not spill over to the next generation of college students. He got frustrated in the 60s. He was still doing the college tours, at least in the early 60s,

but he expressed privately behind the scenes that he felt like he was out of touch and that he couldn't connect with them as well. He didn't understand what their interests were. So clearly he was feeling like the countercultural movement was leaving him behind a little bit. Here was the big break, I think. He was content to kind of engage in that coded, indirect kind of pushback or satire. But I think by the end of the 60s, college students had an appetite for more direct rebellion or confrontation, that they didn't have a taste anymore for that kind of oblique approach. Today, when Kerry Soper teaches Pogo in college, he always asks the students if they've ever heard of Pogo, and they usually just look at him blankly. It's kind of sad, isn't it? I ask college students, none of them have ever heard of him.

And I mean, when you consider that there was like basically a decade and a half of Pogo mania, where everyday newspaper readers just lived with Pogo every day, it seems sad that it's faded so completely from the cultural memory. Although, not entirely. As Kelly's stardom began to fade and his health began to decline in the early 1970s, he had one more trick up his sleeve, a second act that would become a bigger

legacy than the strip itself. That's after the break. that? Mmm, vanilla and shea. That's Old Spice Total Body Deodorant. 24-7 freshness from pits to privates with daily use. It's so gentle. We've never smelled so good. Shop Old Spice Total Body Deodorant now. This episode is brought to you by Secret. Secret Deodorant gives you 72 hours of clinically proven odor protection, free of aluminum, parabens, dyes, talc, and baking soda. It's made with pH-balancing minerals and crafted with skin-conditioning oils. So whether you're going for a run or just running late, do what life throws your way and smell like you didn't. Find Secret at your nearest Walmart or Shoppers Drug Mart today. Pogo mania may have gripped the country for a while, but it was no match for Peanuts mania.

Now, at the start of the 60s, Peanuts and Pogo were equally famous. But where Pogo is kind of forgotten today, Peanuts lives on, mostly through merchandising, TV specials, and the musical You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, which is still performed around the country. Even Little Orphan Annie is better known today as a musical than a comic strip. Walt Kelly tried to make something like that happen. In 1956, he put out a record of pogo-related songs. There was also an animated TV special in 1969.

But Kelly hated the way it turned out. How come Porcupine's so all fired up about Valentine's Day? Well, you see, Porky's a Norfolk, so he don't know when his birthday is. The thing that allowed Kelly to be so gutsy with Pogo is that he owned the strip, but that also made him a bit of a control freak. He was ambivalent about merchandising and TV specials because so much of it was out of his hands. He wanted to be in control of everything about his characters. Again, Jay Black. He did not allow any kind of stuffed animals or anything like that because he did not like the ones he saw when he was in Disney. Again, Jay Black. that promoted the TV special. Walt Kelly actually did the clay versions of all of the dolls that they would give out with the products.

Although it's not just merchandising and TV specials that gave Peanuts a long lifespan, the existential angst of Charlie Brown and his friends will always be relatable. And Peanuts is mostly free from the politics of its time. But Brian Kremens wants to make the case for the way that Pogo incorporated politics into its regular storylines.

Kelly shows us that there's no bifurcation there, that the personal is part of that imaginative political landscape, that it's all mashed together, that having only one or the other isn't enough. And I think with Kelly, there's a fullness and a richness to the life of that strip

that I personally don't find in Peanuts. As much as I like it, and as much as I respect that achievement of Charles Schultz, I've always, especially the older I get, the more I found Kelly to be interesting and vital. You know, like I feel like someone's actually telling me not only about the world that they inhabited, but they're also telling me about how they interface with that world. So it's not just about their internal world by itself, bracketed off somewhere.

And it's not only about the political world that they're trying to dismantle and critique, but it's a fusion of those two things. And I think that's a rare, I think that's a really rare accomplishment in any kind of art form. And here is where Walt Kelly becomes relevant again and pushes himself towards the center of conversation where the personal and the political are deeply intertwined. It happened very late in his career. In 1970, he was asked to create a poster to promote the first Earth Day. I remember seeing this poster as a teenager. It was hanging on the back of a classroom door. And by that point in the 1980s, this poster was very old and faded.

And by that point in the 1980s, this poster was very old and faded. And I remember my teacher was very happy to explain to me what it meant for a comic strip character to make a bold statement about the environment. And I remember looking at that poster and seeing Pogo for the first time. This furry little character holding a stick, like he's trying to pick up all the litter on the ground. But in front of him is an overwhelming, disgusting mess of garbage piled up beneath these beautiful trees and floating out in the water like a landfill. The expression on Pogo's face is at a loss. The disaster in front of him is more than he can handle. And on the poster it says, we have met the enemy and he is us. That also became part of a storyline in the strip. And the phrase itself is a riff off a famous historical quote from the War

of 1812. One of the commanders on the American side says, we have met the enemy and they are ours, which was a patriotic message of triumph against invading forces. But Kelly knew that great empires are often not toppled from the outside. They collapse from within. So he inverted the phrase, and he had been using it since he went after Joe McCarthy. We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us was also the title of an animated special he was working on before he died in 1973. And it was the title of the last book of strips that he published. He tells us this in the last title of the last book. It's almost like the period at the end of the sentence.

This is what I was doing because I think that that was the running theme, that we're the enemy. So if we're the enemy, what does that mean? There's collective action that's needed. Because if all we have is that interior world of Schultz, that leaves us in our own little enclaves and our own little bubbles, as people like to say today. And so we need to have that reaching out. Brian thinks that Kelly's interest in the environment was very personal. The strip had always been about the natural world and how much the characters enjoyed living in this beautiful swamp. But it wasn't really a swamp. Walt Kelly spent most of his life in Connecticut. He had hardly ever been to the South. Brian lived in the South for a while,

but he is from Connecticut and he still lives there. And when Brian first looked at Pogo, he knew right away that the landscape Kelly was drawing was not the Okefenokee Swamp. It was the marshlands outside of Bridgeport where Kelly grew up. Those backdrops are always there. And I don't know if someone is drawing the backgrounds of a strip like that that carefully with that much lushness and that much attention to detail, then there must be some kind of connection to a sense of responsibility for that landscape, which I think is part of his consciousness, even when he was a child, the sense of mutual aid, of responsibility in a city like Bridgeport, you know, an immigrant city, a city of migrants and immigrants.

And I think that drawing that world, even if it was partly a world of his imagination in such careful detail, gave him a sense of connection, even more so with where he had come from, so that by the time he gets towards the end of his life and that industrial economy of Connecticut that he knew of was collapsing, those things were no longer there. And I think that was part of his social consciousness to say, not only was this trouble for the working person, but it was also he could see the scars that were being left behind in the state of Connecticut itself. As a cartoonist, he was a big influence on Gary Trudeau, who created Doonesbury. In fact, after Kelly died, a lot of newspapers replaced Pogo with Doonesbury. And Doonesbury inspired a whole new bunch of comic strip artists who wanted to reflect the real world.

Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes, was also a huge fan of Walt Kelly. And so was Jim Henson, who said that Pogo was a big influence on the Muppets. And even though Kelly worked hard to avoid being put on the editorial page, in recent years, I've seen a lot of editorial cartoonists using the phrase, we've met the enemy and he is us. In fact, sometimes they will actually draw the character of Pogo saying that phrase in a modern context. Pogo saying that phrase in a modern context. Now, if an artist has a similar worldview to us, we tend to reward them for speaking out. We praise them for using their fictional worlds to comment on the real world and try to make it a better place. But what if you find yourself

as the target of satire? What if someone says we have met the enemy and he is us, and the enemy that they're referring to is you, or the movement you belong to? That happened to Dennis Kitchen in 1966. He opened the newspaper to look at his favorite comic strip, Little Abner by Al Capp. It was pretty obvious he had a chip in his shoulder

about students who were protesting the Vietnam War. And I was one of those students, so I started taking it personally. In the next episode, the career of Al Kapp is very similar to Walt Kelly's until Kapp goes in a very different direction. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Carrie Soper, Brian Cremins, and Jay Black. I have links to all of their books in the show notes.

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