Bard of Okefenokee

Like masters of more exalted arts, Cartoonist Walt Kelly succeeded in turning an imaginary landscape into a public preserve. With pen and wit he put together the world of Pogo, an inspired amalgam of bogs, hollow stumps, hog-jowl dialect and cheery absurdity. There, over 150 anthropomorphic critters gnawed away at the English language, baring kernels of political meaning, and carried on not-so-innocent satires of human pomposity. Phineas T. Bridgeport, the Barnum of bears, orated in billboard letters that burlesqued hucksterism everywhere. "Nuclear physics ain't so new and it ain't so clear," declared Rowland Owl, a bedraggled Perelmanesque pedant. Churchy LaFemme, a poetic turtle, reveled in alliterative aubades: "Whence that wince, my wench?" At Christmas time, Albert the cigar-smoking alligator led his Okefenokee swamp singers in newly shined carols: Deck us all with Boston Charlie/ Walla Walla, Wash, and Kalamazoo.

The presiding genius was winsome Pogo Possum, once described by his creator as "the reasonably patient, softhearted, naive, friendly little person we all think we are." Kelly himself claimed kinship with his gruff alligator; to the politicians and fat cats Kelly caricatured, the resemblance was clear. But to those who saw him away from his drawing board, joyously discussing his creatures as if they were real, Kelly displayed all the gentler traits of the possum.

Kelly, who grew up in Bridgeport, Conn., began learning his art from his father, a theatrical scene painter. He edited the high school paper and drew cartoons for it as well. After working as a reporter for the Bridgeport Post, he went to Hollywood in 1935 as an animator at Walt Disney Studios.

Go Pogo. Pogo began taking shape during World War II. Kelly served as a civilian with the Army's foreign-language unit, where he picked up a special affection for the Southern dialect that was to become the patois of Pogo. (Though Kelly began using the Okefenokee setting in cartoons in 1942, he did not visit the swamp until 1955.) In 1948 he joined the short-lived New York Star as art director, editorial adviser and political cartoonist; he also donated Pogo strips to the impoverished paper. The Star folded the following year, but Pogo survived in the New York Post.

Editors were skeptical about a whimsical, literate strip full of talking animals; comic pages then belonged to the likes of Dick Tracy and Mary Worth. But Pogo was a smash. At its peak, the strip appeared in nearly 500 papers. The self-effacing possum made a major splash on the national scene in 1952, when college students parodied the Republicans' "I Like Ike" slogan by chanting "I Go Pogo." After a national write-in campaign, Pogo gracefully conceded the election to Eisenhower. Kelly introduced an unshaven wildcat named Simple J. Malarkey, who resembled the then-rampant Joe McCarthy and abused civil liberties in Okefenokee. Nikita Khrushchev appeared as a grumpy pig. Portraits of Lyndon Johnson as a nearsighted longhorn steer, J. Edgar Hoover as a squat bulldog and Spiro Agnew as a hyena occasionally annoyed editors and readers. As a result, papers sometimes dropped the strip. Kelly professed indifference ("They usually come back"), but he sometimes prepared alternative, apolitical episodes and let his subscribers choose.

In another man, such a compromise might have seemed weak or self-serving. But Kelly, though an undeviating liberal, never viewed himself as a crusader. He was embarrassed when admirers took him or Pogo too seriously. "It is delight which causes laughter," he said, insisting that his political messages were secondary to comedy.

He enjoyed his life, his fame, his lecture audiences, his baroque drinking buddies. Jimmy Breslin tells of visiting him after the diabetic Kelly had had a leg amputated. Kelly displayed the stump as an excuse for missing an evening in the saloons. "I'll just have to wait," he said, "until it grows back." The father of six children by two marriages, Kelly retained a childlike enthusiasm for the world and its foibles until his death last week of diabetic complications at age 60. "There is talk," he once wrote, "that growing up is tough. If so, then perhaps I have not grown up at all."

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