The Return of Pogo : (and not a moment too soon) : The Complete Pogo Comics<i> , edited by Mark Burstein, Eclipse Books, Forestville, Calif. (20 volumes: $8.95 each, paper; 40 pp.). : </i> : The Complete Pogo<i> , edited by Kim Thompson, Fantagraphics Books, Seattle, Wash. ($9.95; 80 pp.)</i> .

“All them notes I made,” sighs Captain Churchy La Femme, “is sorta ho mog enated. Mostly I got a mess of Bs, a few gravy speckles an’ a couple sammy colons.”

Churchy is ruefully studying his notes for the top-secret B-bomb--to the naked human eye, an ordinary shoe box full of honeybees. The secret data are recorded in jam, on pieces of bread, so they’ll be easier to eat if the lab is invaded by a foreign power.

Could this be anything but a comic strip?

Churchy La Femme is one of about 100 characters in the classic comic strip “Pogo,” Walt Kelly’s graphic-narrative masterwork, which ran in up to 600 American newspapers from 1947 to 1973, when Kelly died at the age of 60.

“Pogo” was a “funny animal” comic strip, if you want to get technical about it; the pivotal characters were a turtle (Churchy), an owl (Howland), an alligator (Albert) and a ‘possum (Pogo his ownself). There was nothing cuddly or Disneyish about these critters; the characterizations are too rich for whimsy. The nominal setting was a Deep Southern never-never land, although the chicken-fried accents and the laconic tall-tale comedy style owe a lot more to Mark Twain than to Al Capp.

The continuous sheer length of the storyline in a comic strip allows a practitioner touched with genius, as Kelly was, to spin off into unparalleled realms of pure silliness. And the duo of Churchy La Femme and his best pal and mentor Howland Owl were perhaps Kelly’s most reliable boneheads, in large part because of their impervious pretentions. They liked to think of themselves as the leading intellectuals, inventors and entrepreneurs of Georgia’s Okefenokee Swamp, where the strip’s desultory adventures unfurled.

Crackpot inventions and inventive hucksterism are recurrent plot elements. A smooth-talking fox named Seminole Sam sells bottles of plain water packaged as “a lifegiving elixir . . . Add soap and it’s a fine cleanser. Put in carrots and a bone and it becomes soup. If you thirst, it quenches.” Churchy La Femme’s bespectacled (and therefore brainy?) pal Howland Owl follows suit, peddling boxes of ordinary “DIRT, the housewife’s friend. You can’t do housework without it.”

The one “Pogo” catch-phrase almost everybody knows (even if they can’t place the source) is the wistful canard, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” And because the social jibes were important to the man himself, it’s worth pointing out that Kelly was topical even in the early 1950s, when “all but one or two of (Kelly’s) contemporaries were quaking in terror,” as Jules Pfeiffer phrased it. Kelly was the first American strip cartoonist to tweak a recognizable public figure, when Joe McCarthy turned up as the menacing hillbilly carnivore Simple J. Malarkey on June 1, 1953.

Later “Pogo” lampoons (Lyndon Johnson as a longhorn, Spiro Agnew as a hyena) were not as startling. But when I was a 10-year-old “Pogo” freak it wasn’t the political satire that drew me back again and again to the early paperback collections of his work. It still isn’t.

I’ve been rereading a lot of Walt Kelly lately, on the occasion of two concurrent major reprint efforts, and from here his Pogo Possum, Howland Owl, Churchy La Femme and Albert Alligator look like eternal fictional prototypes, eidetic creations. It’s the universality of the strip, not its famous topicality, that will keep it “current” into the 21st Century and beyond.

Norman Hale’s recent sly monograph “All Natural Pogo” focuses upon a distinctive feature of the very early swamp universe: its “delightfully ‘natural’ attitude toward the idea of animals eating each other. . . . The animals treat the issue as a standard joke, talking about how delicious they are, arguing about who tastes better,” etc. In his early appearences, Albert, especially, was inclined to devour anything handy: wax fruit, rubber dog bones, whole families of mice or bats, jars full of tadpoles and, on one memorable occasion, Pogo himself, along with the trick birthday cake he was hiding in. (Don’t ask.)

“You cannibobble!” someone always hollers, as another improbable object (or one of their chums) vanishes into Albert’s innards. But as Hale observes, “Albert’s problem isn’t malice, but a mere inability to control his hunger.” The apotheosis of this odd motif, a 1950 strip sequence with a disturbing subtext of lynch-mob violence, has Albert falsely accused of devouring a local “pup dog” and standing trial in a rigged courtroom. So even the most “animalistic” traits have all-too-human implications.

Four volumes of reprints of the earliest known form of “Pogo,” a series of comic-book stories launched in 1943, already have appeared from Eclipse Books, with 20 more on the way. The more familiar daily “Pogo” comic strip soon will be reprinted in its entirety by Fantagraphics Books. (The early years of “Pogo” strips were reprinted once before, in large-format paperbacks, by the Fireside wing of Kelly’s original publisher, Simon & Schuster.)

New readers, for whom very few of the topical issues of the ‘50s and ‘60s are still pressing, will miss very little. What is finally important in “Pogo” is what is important in top-notch work in any narrative medium: plot, humor, atmosphere, suspense and, especially, character. Despite their animal exteriors, the behavior of the swamp citizens is always true to human life.

For many, the great revelation of the Eclipse comic-book reprints will be the presence of occasional humans in the earliest “Pogo” stories. The most significant of these was a small boy named Bumbazine, a Deep-South Christopher Robin figure who was the sane centerpiece of the wild episodes of farce, the ballast role later assumed by Pogo Possum himself. According to Kelly, “Bumbazine was dropped because, being human, he was not as believable as the animals.”

Even the characters don’t always seem to buy themselves as animals. When a pompous bloodhound named Beauregard B. Bugleboy starts copping a “noble dog” attitude, it’s as if he’s self-consciously trying to live up to a highfallutin’ doggy reputation. It doesn’t seem to come to him “naturally” at all.

But then, personality often seems rather arbitrary in the Okefenokee. Once you squeeze a swamp critter into a disguise, it’s remarkably easy to convince him that he is that person. Witness the three bat brothers, Bewitched, Bothered and Be-Mildred, who don’t know how their three names are going to be distributed on a given day until they see which of three pairs of variously checked pants they happen to have on. The names go with the pants, not the individuals.

Like the great P. G. Wodehouse characters, Kelly’s are fundamentally creatures of leisure, making up their own lives as they go along. Their adventures have a playful, associational looseness. The basic structural principle is a chain-link sequence of misconceptions. These mental and linguistic confusions often seem more real to the characters than the evidence of their own senses.

When Pogo first took up residence in Georgia’s Okefenokee Swamp, in the comic-book stories, the animals spoke with thick Southern accents that Kelly (a Connecticut Yankee) mostly cooked up out of whole cloth. By the time the strip had hit its stride around 1950, the swamp critters spoke an elaborate invented dialect, now only dimly related to Dixie, that was an integral component of their drollity. Vintage Pogo-ese locutions such as “They done perpetrated a baldfaced hornswaggle” were Kelly’s comic bread and butter.

That sort of softened, flexible “langridge” implies a state of mind in which ideas, too, have lost a lot of their solidity. A little knowledge goes a long way in the swamp because it keeps evolving. “Now, Dr. Turtle,” whispers scienterrific genius Howland Owl. “You see a gee -ranium plant an’ a little baby yew tree. S’pose I crosses these kids. What then?” After a moment of glum wonderment, Churchy experiences a brainstorm: “I knows! I knows! You crosses ‘em and you gets to the other side!” Owl is appalled: “How ree -diculost! If you cross these, you gits a yew-ranium bush!”

Quoting big chunks of Kelly’s dialogue is usually a pointless exercise, because his humor always hinges upon his crack panel-to-panel timing and his pin-point touch with facial expression, as much as upon the words. Kelly was a Disney animator before he turned to comics (he worked on the cute mouse in “Dumbo” and the dancing hippos in “Fantasia”), and commentators have plausibly suggested that animation taught him to imagine his characters in three dimensions and to think of them as ham actors giving tasty performances.

As “Pogo” fan and latter-day great cartoonist Bill Watterson (of “Calvin and Hobbes”) put it in a piece for the Comics Journal: “I get a kick out of loving details like the back of a bear’s neck bulging out over his collar, or a character’s cheeks squishing up when he puts his head in his hands. This stuff . . . brings life to the drawings. These animals have flesh and blood solidity.”

This solidity helps to account for the startling breadth of Kelly’s emotional range. The enduring quality of the aforementioned Simple J. Malarkey episode, in fact, is not its political courage but its plain scariness. A chill wind whistles through the swamp.

Watterson: “Pogo’s swamp had true evil in it. . . . I remember my surprise as a kid reading the sequence where Molester Mole, hardly a sympathetic character in his own right, runs into the swamp to flee a tarred, but not yet feathered, Malarkey. The swamp water is thick and black, and the twisted, vine-covered trees are so dense that no light comes in from above. Malarkey, with only the whites of his eyes showing through the tar, wades in after (Molester) with an ax. Suddenly the mole was quite unlike anything I’d ever encountered in a comic strip before.”

Apparently Kelly vacillated early in his career between comic strips and editorial cartoons, and continued to hover until “Pogo” took off and devoured all his free time. By all reports, Kelly thought of himself as a New York newspaperman of the old school, and relished the hard-drinking, cigar-chomping life style. When Chuck Jones animated the “Pogo” crew for TV in the late ‘60s, Kelly himself supplied blow-hard Albert’s pushy baritone. It’s possible that in the back of Kelly’s mind editorial cartooning was always the more serious, grown-up, newspapery choice, and that he felt he was doing “Pogo” a favor by elevating it a bit, incorporating editorial elements.

I think Kelly was a stronger satirist when his targets were less specific. The smug jargon of his two Stalinist cowbirds, for example, “employing a functional obscuration of political extrinsicalism,” has come back to haunt us in the P. C. blather of Marxist academicians.

Another way to say it is that Kelly’s work was truer when he wasn’t copying real life but intuiting from it. As discomfiting as it may have been for him, Walt Kelly was an artist, not a journalist. And “Pogo” proves it.