Whiz Kids Hoping to Revive the Wisdom and Whimsy of Pogo

Long ago, before there was any such creature as Doonesbury, there was Pogo.

He hid out on the comic pages like Puck among lumberjacks, a creature of wisdom and whimsy. He and his fellow “screetures” sent forth from Okefenokee Swamp more than two decades’ worth of shrewd political and social maxims, often couched in marshland malapropisms, the most famous of which remains: “We have met the enemy, and they is us.”

Among knee-slapper strips like “Beetle Bailey,” Pogo the possum was distinct. So was his creator, Walt Kelly, whom no less a figure than Chief Justice Warren E. Burger referred to as “that philosopher-humanist.”

From the McCarthy era to Watergate, Kelly--wielding nothing sharper than a No. 2 pencil--punctured blatherskites and mocked jiggery-pokery wherever he found it. “Don’t take life so serious,” one of his characters admonished. “It ain’t nohow permanent.”

Then, in 1973, Kelly died, and it seemed that in spite of a dozen Pogo books, his creation would be nohow permanent, too.

Leap ahead to 1988, to Larry Doyle and Neal Sternecky, two comics-loving Chicago Wunderkinder who barely had all their permanent teeth when Kelly died.

The pair, writer and artist, had cartooned together since college days at the University of Illinois, then gone on to grown-up jobs in advertising and publishing. Now they have happily ditched those for a far better offer: reviving Pogo.

“We were afraid to do this for the longest time,” son Pete Kelly says. But after family conferencing (with two ex-wives, six children and Walt Kelly’s widow, Selby), and on the strength of sample strips and eager phone calls, the team of Doyle and Sternecky was signed on to make Pogo go again.

The comic strip starts up Jan. 8 in more than 200 newspapers, including The Times.

Gaining Notoriety

Pogo redux has made a few splashes so far. Already the two have been a question on “Jeopardy!”

“I had my name mispronounced on national TV,” Sternecky says. “It’s OK,” Doyle says consolingly. “It was a Canadian.”

It is a daunting legacy for two younglings (Doyle is 30, Sternecky 27) who learned about Pogo the way they learned about George Washington: as history.

In college, Sternecky had cased used bookstores for Pogo collections; Doyle, upon discovering the strip back then, sat down with 25-year-old issues of the college paper, “going through Pogo day by day.”

For a guy who once “thought Bob Hope was really funny,” then snickered through “Saturday Night Live” while necking with his girlfriend (to her annoyance), Doyle found his horizons expanded by Pogo’s fey humor.

Pogo influenced their $5-a-week college strip “Escaped from the Zoo,” a kind of “Animal Farm” meets “Animal House.” For Sternecky, Pogo “sort of opened my mind as to how cool a comic strip could be.”

Although far less pointed than the muscular politics of “Doonesbury” and other Pogo progeny, the Kelly strip was a revelation when it began in the 1950s, rivaled only by the evanescent corn-pone wisecrackery of “Li’l Abner.”

Pogo’s nonsensical gabble from anthropomorphized skunks and ‘gators could enchant kids at the same time its trenchant satire delighted adults. Pogo ran for president in 1952, and a rally by students wearing “I Go Pogo” buttons--a play off “I Like Ike”--became a riot in Harvard Yard. Walt Kelly reportedly bailed out the arrestees.

Blatant Messages

During the McCarthy Communist-hunting hearings of the 1950s, the strip introduced one Simple J. Malarkey, an ominous bobcat investigating the swampfolk. At the height of ‘50s paranoia, a magazine learned years later, the FBI--whose director, J. Edgar Hoover, was a bulldog under Kelly’s pen--conducted a cryptanalysis of Pogo strips to see if there were any secret coded messages. They needn’t have bothered: What Pogo had to say was no secret.

In the white heat of the Bay of Pigs and Cuban missile crises, Kelly brought onstage a cigar-smoking bearded goat in fatigues, and a bemedaled, Russian-speaking hog; scholarly journals of public affairs stroked their chins over “the Pogo problem” and the international repercussions from “insulting caricatures of the head of a foreign state.”

James Beniger, a USC associate professor of communications who studies political cartoons, still uses a Pogo character--a bear who “could write things but didn’t know what he had written,” which “in the age of artificial intelligence . . . has all kinds of wonderful ramifications.”

In short, Doyle and Sternecky have to satisfy the high standards of old Pogo fans and snare a new audience that never met Pogo.

Sharing an Older Hero

“It’s frightening to me,” says Sternecky, “that virtually no one under 25 knows who Pogo is.”

“What’s frightening to me,” Doyle says, “is that I share this intense interest with 50-year-olds.”

“We’re doing it because we want to see it done right,” Sternecky says. “Our primary concern is that it be as close to the original in spirit as possible.”

So they can promise “no little sweat marks come out of people’s heads when they’re exasperated,” says Doyle, no exclamation points at the end of every remark, and no third panel of people just looking at each other before the fourth-frame gag line.

Selby Kelly will review the texts “as quality control,” Doyle says. Such as? Well, “drawing the line at endorsing Lyndon LaRouche.” Otherwise they are free-range. “Let’s put it this way: We’ve been given more freedom than perhaps we should.”

And Kelly fils is pleased with their work.

“They understand that what we have here is characters with identifiable personalities . . . a whole human microcosm. That’s good literature. And we think that’s what Pogo is--good literature.”

Doyle and Sternecky won’t be in print in time for a 1988 version of the famous garbled Pogo Christmas carols, a kind of holiday “Mairzy Doats” (“Deck us all with Boston Charlie, Walla Walla, Wash., and Kalamazoo”).

But come January in the strip, there is this old elephant, King Dutchy, who will make a farewell speech around, say, Jan. 20. . . .