Comic strips

Online Column Looks Back at Censorship in Walt Kelly’s ‘Pogo’

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Daily Cartoonist Staff September 10, 2018 1 minute 0 comments

A site called JSTOR (a site that reports to mix news and academics) has posted a piece called “The Most Controversial Comic Strip” on the legacy of censorship in comics and found in Walt Kelly’s “Pogo.”

From the piece:

As a Cold War liberal, Kelly also satirized communists by portraying two beatnik cowbirds as fellow-travellers constantly revising the party line “from the Boss.” There was also an appearance by Khrushchev himself as a pig in pirate gear. In this case, it was foreign papers who protested. Jarvis notes that “controversial political satire on the comics page was not, by itself, objectionable as long as it fit into the anticommunist consensus of the Cold War.”