By Shaenon K. Garrity
This week I finally added
Ten Ever-Lovin' Blue-Eyed Years With Pogo to the Garrity-Farago Reference Library, a.k.a. the massive wobbly pile of comics in our taco-truck-sized apartment.
Pogo is one of the rare classic comic strips that's always been available in reprints, albeit not in any comprehensive or organized way. Fantagraphics is currently gearing up for another stab at a
Complete Pogo series, but until then you can drop into any used bookstore, anywhere in the country, and pick up old Simon & Schuster paperbacks on the cheap.
Incompleat Pogo, Impollutable Pogo, Potluck Pogo, Pogo Sunday Brunch, Prehysterical Pogo... There's no way to tell what you'll get between each set of covers-strips from the '40s? Strips from the '70s? Comic books? Nursery rhymes? An illustrated
Alice in Wonderland?-but you can always get something, no problem.
Ten Ever-Lovin' Blue-Eyed Years is the one nigh-essential volume, featuring highlights from the first decade of strips alongside essays by Walt Kelly. I have a weakness for comic-strip collections with creator commentary, but the
Pogo notes are especially helpful for those of us who were educated by the public school system and can't remember, off the tops of our heads, all the major news events of 1953. When the new Fantagraphics
Pogo collections start rolling off the press, I'll be there, but I also like to be prepared should I ever need to explain the origin of Miss "Sis" Boom Bah or snag a pithy observation on Armistice Day.
I love comic strips, even though the daily strip is among the most limiting of artistic formats. I like to think of a comic strip as something like haiku, a single moment or observation captured in ink. Hopefully funnier, though.
Comic strips, even more than comics in general, strike me as the perfect medium for the dedicated loser. Drawing a daily strip means plugging constantly away at a neverending story, thousands upon thousands of pages long, which may, if you're very, very lucky, succeed in making a few people chuckle briefly around a mouthful of bagel. The effort-to-payoff ratio is absurdly skewed. Most of the strip cartoonists I've met seem to have a fatalistic attitude about it. They're more even-tempered than comic-book artists, who always seem shocked not to be hailed as the new Great American Graphic Novelist. Comic strippers know they're never going to be hailed as the Great American anything. The best they can hope for is a licensed coffee mug.
All comic-strip aficionados know the story of Popeye: how E.C. Segar drew
Thimble Theater for ten years-ten years!-before the one-eyed sailor appeared and took over the strip, sweeping aside all of the original cast except for hero Castor Oyl's sister Olive. The thing is, it's not the only case of a comic strip running for a full decade before hitting upon a successful formula. The same thing happened with
Alley Oop: after ten years of drawing a caveman strip, V.T. Hamlin hashed things out with his editor and changed it to a
time-traveling caveman strip, which ended up being the version people liked. That's the kind of business this is: you can do something every day for ten years and still not get it right. The upside: if you're still a loser after ten years of trying, there's hope.
There's a level, I suspect, on which a comic-strip artist can never feel like a winner. The greatest of them all was capable, while sitting atop uncounted millions of dollars, one of the biggest licensing empires on the planet, massive critical acclaim, and the adulation of billions of readers worldwide, of saying in all seriousness, "Most of us are much more acquainted with losing than we are with winning." It could be said of Charles Schulz, without hyperbole, that he was loved by literally all the world. But he was still a loser. Loserdom was bred in the bone.
I haven't yet started
Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography, the new book by David Michaelis. The copy in the Garrity-Farago Research Library is currently checked out by Mr. Farago. From what I've been able to glean from reviews and the Internets, it tells in detail what most of us already knew: Schulz was a brilliant, generous, frequently miserable man, a self-diagnosed hard-luck case. This is far from unusual in comics. The new PBS American Masters special on Schulz shows
For Better or for Worse creator Lynn Johnston recalling an incident in which her young daughter returned home after a day of being bullied at school and asked her mother, "When does it get better?" Johnston answered, "It doesn't." Who thinks like that? A cartoonist.
But drawing a daily strip is such a pleasure, if you've got the right fussily creative, obsessive-compulsive personality. The PBS special closes with an interview from near the end of Schulz's life, when he announced his retirement from
Peanuts. Schulz's Midwestern restraint cracks and his voice breaks with tears as he says, "All of a sudden, I thought, you know, that poor guy, he never had the chance to kick the football."
"I think he realized he was talking about himself ," Michaelis says in the special. "He never let himself kick the football." Well, yes. But I think he also realized that he would never have the chance to draw the football again. As much heartache as
Peanuts may have caused the eternally melancholy Schulz, he couldn't imagine anything sadder than not drawing it.
Haiku, perhaps because of its brevity of form, often ends up being about brevity itself, the brevity of life and beauty and joy. The Japanese call it
mono no aware, the idea that mortal things are beautiful precisely because of their mortality, and art that captures that delicate, fleeting sweetness is highly prized. 1953 is long gone. But the
Pogo strips are beautiful little things.
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#3: Amethyst, Princess of GemworldShaenon K. Garrity is a manga editor at Viz Media and is best known for her webcomics Narbonic and Skin Horse.
All the Comics in the World is © Shaenon K. Garrity, 2008
