Russell's POGO Christmas

I know I should have posted this earlier than today, but I have been swamped (as in Okefenokee swamped) and besides, I was still reading one of my presents discussed below, so....cut me some slack. :-) 

This Christmas, a little before and a little after, I was lucky to get a few POGO items. One was, of course, the second volume of Fantagraphics' Complete Syndicated Comic Strip collections, POGO: Bona Fide Balderdash. This hard-cover book features all of the comic strips from January 1951 to December 1952. I have read most of the daily strips in Fantagraphics' previous collections, but the Sunday Color Strips are all brand-new to me, so they are quite the treat. These are all wonderfully entertaining comedy skits, and I mourn the loss of this type of quality on the comic book page. Garfield et al have absolutely nothing on Pogo! 

About a week before Christmas my wife and I went on one of our numerous antique mall treasure hunts, and I actually found my "missing" Pogo P&G cups from 1969! I had already found four of the six cups and all of the figurines, but the Churcy and Albert cups had eluded me! Now I have them all, and they sit on my table watching over me (truth be told, ignoring me) as I write this. I still love them. As soon as I saw them I grabbed them up and thought, "Yes! I remember these...Churchy was on white and Albert was on yellow! I had always wondered why Albert (whose color includes yellow), hadn't been put on white, too!" It was like a tactile memory. 

And lastly, thanks to my brother-in-law I got Walt Kelly: The Life and Art of the Creator of Pogo by Thomas Andrae & Carsten Laqua. It sounds staid and boring but it is actually a series of well-written and heavily illustrated articles on such topics as Kelly at Disney, The First Strips, Walt's Wordplay, Politics, and Animation. I could not, literally, put it down. I'll write a review of it here pretty soon, I promise. (If I was to make any New Years' resolutions, it would be to do more work on the POGO DAY part of this blog...!)

Hope you had a POGO-filled holiday season, too! If not, stay here through the year and I promise a POGO filled 2013!!