Pogo and the Jack Acid Society

Hunting up Pogo on line last week, I came across a mention that in the early 1960's, Walt Kelly had satirized the John Birch Society in a series about the "Jack Acid Society." I had never seen that series, and was curious to find any other mention of it.

I found a site where someone had posted scans of several pages of a Pogo book where Pogo and Churchy fall in with (and eventually out the window of) the Jack Acid Society. It's mostly the zany madcap humor typical of the strip: thousands of monkeys at typewriters are producing pages of gibberish which the leaders of the Society treasure as profound literature; the real powers behind the group keep deposing the nominal figureheads of the Society at their whim.

On page 5, the incumbent leader of the Jack Acid Society is a chicken -- a chick, really -- named Prince Pompadoodle.

In some panels, he reminds me a little of Newt Gingrich. He may, I suppose, have been a caricature of a real John Bircher; Kelly certainly liked to de-anthropomorphize real people for his cartoon.

Before long in the story line, Pompadoodle is imprisoned within a bass drum and replaced with the unassuming Pogo. But Walt Kelly apparently liked Prince Pompadoodle's name, and brought the character back in 1968. By then, Pompadoodle had matured a bit, growing tail feathers, a southern accent, and a marked resemblance to Alabama Governor George Wallace.

As far as I know, Walt Kelly never found an excuse to revisit the character as a roosterfication of French President Georges Pompidou.

This Week's Sneak Peek

We're hopping into the wayback machine for this week's Q Syndicate cartoon. So dust off your waistcoat and britches, powder your wig and get ready to hold some truths self-evident.

Q Toon: Ante Up

Buried beneath the news of the Republican brawl for president, the U.S. Conference of Mayors last week came out in favor of marriage equality for gay and lesbian couples. 80 mayors -- Republicans, Democrats, and Bloombergs -- announced an initiative dubbed "Mayors for the Freedom to Marry." The move fell short of getting unanimous support -- mayors of Dallas and (Republican convention host) Indianapolis were two of the dissenters -- but was nevertheless overwhelmingly approved.

Some quotes from the mayors:

"Marriage for gay couples has made my city of Boston a much better place to live." -- Boston Mayor Thomas Menino

“Allowing loving and committed couples to join in marriage has benefits not just for couples and their families, but also for society.” -- San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders

"For me, the question is not if marriage equality will come to all 50 states. The question is when, and with America’s mayors standing up for what is right in their cities, I believe that day will come sooner than most people think." -- New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg

“I’ve often said in L.A. that it doesn’t matter who your father is ... and hopefully soon, it won’t matter if you have two of them.” -- Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa

Romney, a la Kelly

Since this caricature of Mitt Romney is pretty much a rip-off of a Walt Kelly cartoon, I'm not putting it up on the AAEC site. But it's something I wanted to draw, and I'm posting it here anyway -- which, I suppose makes this a Bergetoons Exclusive. Count yourself among a privileged few!

If you recognize the name Walt Kelly, it's probably as the cartoonist who created Pogo, a daily comic strip about an unassuming possum and a huge cast of animal characters who inhabited the Okefenokee swamp. Actually, the cartoon first appeared in book form in 1941 before moving to newspapers when Kelly was hired as editorial cartoonist of the New York Star in 1948.

Kelly drew a series of cartoons depicting the 1948 Republican presidential nominee with a cash register for a body. One such cartoon depicted Dewey placidly scooting along railroad tracks as two of the other three major candidates race to catch up to him. Kelly drew incumbent President Truman running blindfolded, alongside Progressive candidate Henry Wallace, who is encumbered by "168 gross of old boomerangs." Another cartoon showed the three candidates jealously sporting identical women's hats. (Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond is missing from these cartoons, I suppose, because as a strictly southern candidate, he wasn't a significant factor in New York.)

The Star folded a few months after Kelly started work there, and Kelly's editorial cartoons disappeared along with it. Pogo survived to be picked up by Post-Hall syndicate. Kelly still worked politics into his comic strip: a wildcat named Simple J. Malarkey appeared in 1953 as an obvious caricature of Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy. J. Edgar Hoover showed up as a secretive, suspicious bulldog, and Vice President Spiro Agnew was a self-important hyena. Those are but the best examples out of many. Mitt's father, George Romney, made a brief appearance as a wind-up toy who sticks his foot in Pogo's mouth.

After Kelly's death in 1973, his widow, Selby Kelly, and son Stephen continued drawing for a couple of years. But the ever-shrinking size of newspaper comic space (which was still bigger in 1975 than it is today) was ill-suited for the densely drawn and wordy comic strip -- not to mention the lettering: there were characters who spoke in Gothic lettering, ornate script, or other flashy fonts. I have read that the Los Angeles Times revived the strip for a while starting in 1989, but that didn't last long, apparently.

Pogo remains one of my all-time favorite comic strips. Walt Kelly's uncanny ability to transmogrify politicians and issues into goats, spiders and wilder creatures, and his ability to entertain without sacrificing his message, are an inspiration to any editorial cartoonist who aspires to draw more than just didactic talking heads.

This week's sneak peek

So much for the "Battle of the Harbaugh Brothers" story line. And even the "Revenge of the Surviving Harbaugh Brother" story line got trashed..

It's going to take more than a couple of weeks to get worked up over the "Eli Gets to Play in His Brother's Sandbox" story line.

And this week's cartoon has nothing to do with any of that.

Git Along, Now, Rick Perry

Rick Perry announced today that he was dropping out of the GOP presidential race. After some frightfully bad moments in the candidate debates, and one loopy campaign appearance, the Texas governor sank from Party Darling to Late Night Punch Line. And finally, like former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman before him, he had fallen behind Steven Colbert in the South Carolina polls, so he had to admit that it was time to go.

But before he rides off into the sunset, here's a caricature of the feller, Texas swagger and all. (But curiously unarmed.)

Q Toon: Troy Mayor Daniels

Tea Partisan Janice Daniels has only been mayor of Troy, Michigan since November, but she has quickly come to the attention of national LGBT groups for her vociferous antigay bigotry.

It started with a post on her Facebook page back in June, saying, "I think I am going to throw away my I Love New York carrying bag now that queers can get married there." After the post blew up in her face in December, she apologized for the language, but not the sentiment, reiterating her opposition to marriage equality for same-sex couples.

In an attempt at further damage control, she met with a gay-straight alliance (GSA) group at the Troy high school. The damage, however, spiraled further out of control:

According to [Troy High School senior Skye] Curtis and others who attended the meeting – including GSA member Zach Kilgore and lesbian couple Amy and Tina Weber – Daniels, while discussing mental health and suicide among members of the LGBT community, at one point suggested putting together a panel of psychologists to show that homosexuality is dangerous to your mental health.

Mayor Daniels has denied that she made such comments. She has also so far refused to release recordings her staff made of the meeting, so we are left to wonder whether or not she indeed knows how to watch what she says.

And perhaps it's a good thing if she doesn't. As the Detroit Free Press opined in a strongly worded editorial:

The most peculiar thing about bigots is that they never figure the term applies to them. Or they're smart enough to know that, at least in polite society, prejudice is like nose-picking. So prejudice in 2012 is the art of veiled references and coded language. ... It's a reason to be thankful for someone like Troy Mayor Janice Daniels, who wears her own irrational biases like a fashion accessory of which she is especially proud. She's a throwback who makes it distressingly clear how elusive tolerance still is. ... 

[I]t's better for residents in Troy to hear what she's really thinking, and see how she's representing them publicly. Elections have consequences, and Daniels' embarrassing run so far as mayor of Oakland County's largest city is a good reminder of how swiftly those consequences can materialize.