Word: pogo
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Pogo, Walt Kelly's pseudo-sophisticated comic strip, spoke a kind of Pig-Russian and bore an unmistakable resemblance to Nikita Khrushchev. He even talked like Khrushchev. "You forget prominent Russian proverb!" he confided to his companion, a bearded, cigar-smoking goat with a remarkable resemblance to Fidel Castro: "The shortage will be divided among the peasants." The goat broke out lunch-cigars and sugar ("One thing my country got like the dickens! Is sugar! y tabacos!")-and the two settled down to a dialectical argument in dialect...
Three Canadian newspapers-the Toronto, Ont., Globe and Mail, the Kingston, Ont., Whig-Standard and the Regina, Sask., Leader-Post-dropped the pig-goat sequence. (As a substitute the Globe and Mail reprised a Pogo swampland series from the 1940s.) In the U.S., the Toledo Blade temporarily killed Kelly. And in Tokyo, the English language Asahi Evening News, having run the sequence for 11 days, agreed to drop the rest of it after a protest from the Soviet embassy...
...Pogo has always struck me as the voice of common decency and all the bleeding heart stuff that the Deacon warns us about. He always triumphs in the swamp, because, unlike the world, it is composed of mostly decent people, like Hound, Porcupine, and that indomitable, unquenchable, American boob, Albert the Alligator (who "leads a life of noisy desperation"). For all the politics and satire that appear in Pogo, the swamp is really a wonderfully apolitical sort of place. Politics, the booted and shifted movements, are left to a few moral hoodlums and bullies like Mole...
...What shapes the boundaries of the idyl is a distrust of all the official frauds and postures that keep the real world together, all the speeches and slogans and generals and college songs and national anthems and figures like the Minute Man and Senators. The termite walking along with Pogo states Okefenokee's view of matters pithily--"It'll be a long time afore they get all the bugs out of the gummint...
...characters in Pogo--and they are the best developed and most consistent in any comic strip--lobby in The Black Book for an idyl and a humorous view of life; just as the characters in other common strips lobby, with terrible earnestness, for their own interests. You know, Buz Sawyer for the Navy, Steve Canyon for the Air Force, Little Orphan Annie for the Jack Acids and Goldwatery cranks. With the Black Book to hearten it, the Pogo lobby will continue to support...