The Feiffer is a bit diffident about nearly everything in Feiffer's (very own) life and career; the prose material provided with the strips in the Kelly (including Jimmy Breslin's preface) is not exactly fawning, but certainly helps trace Kelly's not altogether different path (Kelly was a little better at making friends with some of his bosses). Pogo and Sick, Sick, Sick have been my favorite newspaper strips so far...and picking up these books on big discounts didn't hurt my feelings (the memoir from a collapsing Borders, the strip collection on pre-order from Amazon).
Jules Feiffer film links: "Munro" and Little Murders
Feiffer's The Explainers and Kelly's Impollutable Pogo
Brian Arnold has brought to my attention, at least, the webposting of the disappointing but interesting Chuck Jones/Walt Kelly anti-collaboration for television here.
8 comments:
POGO looks awfully familiar — I'm quite certain I've seen it often in used bookstores. Wonder why I never picked it up. Not long ago I bought a BEANO comic-book for the first time. The POGO art definitely looks more exciting. Never heard of SICK, SICK SICK.
Prashant, the Pogo was just published, so you haven't seen it in used book stores, though you may have seen some other Pogo collection.
Todd, your text cuts off in mid - on, wait, I changed the screen zoom and it's there. You beat me to it on that one, I wrote a review, using a lot of text from Macleans' Canadian, and it's in the queue to go up, probably Monday instead of a New Arrivals, since it's the only incoming. I've had a chance to thumb through bits of it, some appears to have come from one or another of the Pogo books I've accumulated over the years, it will be great to have a set by chronology. I just hope they don't take years and years between installments. This one took 4 years to produce, I'd settle for 18 months or less from here on out, now that they have the sources and process down. Beautiful book. It's tempting to go to the back section and just read the Sundays, in color, but I'll mix it up.
I stand corrected, Richard. It's likely I mistook POGO for something else that I thought looked similar. A case of jumping the gun, no doubt.
Prashant, POGO collections go back (as this book points out) to 1952, in multiple formats from Simon & Schuster and a few from Pocket Books (dunno if anyone reprinted them in the Commonwealth or if you might well've just seen the US editions), so you could've seen any number of used/older copies. Certainly, I first read POGO in collections, at about the time Kelly died (and the strip, as this book also notes, was continued but to very few papers for another two years).
SICK SICK SICK wasn't really Feiffer's title for his strip, but that's what THE VILLAGE VOICE and perhaps also THE WASHINGTON POST called it for a while (the POST was the most prominent daily paper to carry the weekly strip, for a couple of decades, and where I usually read the new strips).
Well, Rick, I got the book a day before you did, but mine is more a mention than a review...I'll look forward to your post.
and let me point out that I typo'd that first sentence, it was supposed to say THIS Pogo was just published... to make that clear.
Most of the comics we get in the subcontinent now are US editions with notable exceptions like reprints of COMMANDO (D.C. Thomson & Co. Ltd, UK). Early comics from the US have nearly vanished and what we get in new bookstores these days are compendiums, mostly from the DC & Marvel stable, priced between $15 and $20. Is that reasonable? I'm hoping to lay my hands on an older copy of POGO and when I do, I'll let you know. I'm curious.
Well, POGO did have a parallel existence in "comic books" magazines and as a newspaper comic strip, though as far as I know, only the newspaper strip has been collected (though Walt Kelly was also one of the first to publish original "graphic novels" in book form without prior appearance in a periodical...not as early as, say, Lynd Ward and the pioneers of the form, but Kelly beat even Will Eisner--whom, coincidentally, Jules Feiffer began his professional comics career assisting--into creating graphic novels pretty much as we understand them today.
Those fat collections of DC, Marvel and some other comics cost about that much in the US, too. Fair, certainly, if you like the contents of a given collection.
Todd, don't expect great things from my post on the Pogo. It's a commentary beginning with my introduction to Pogo books, then a large block of copped text from Macleans, followed by a sentence or two. I have yet to even read the entire introductory material of the book! I'm trying to finish a new short story collection, and several other things and the Pogo sits to one side earning longing looks from me as I type this and read other things.
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