Suppressing Comics: When They Didn’t All Go Pogo
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above: Before and after syndicate mandated changes.
During the 1950s, Walt Kelly created the most popular comic strip in the United States. His strip was about an opossum named Pogo and his swamp-dwelling friends. It was also the most controversial and censored of its time. Long before Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury blurred the lines between the funny pages and the editorial pages, Kelly’s mix of satiric wordplay, slapstick, and appearances by Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Nikita Khrushchev, J. Edgar Hoover, and the John Birch Society, all in animal form, stirred up the censors.
Matthew Wills offers an introduction (and a link) to
Eric Jarvis’ longer 2003 essay on the suppression of certain Pogo comic strips.
© OGPI
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