Paper’s Prohibition of Political Pogo

It is late October in The Year of Our Lord 1968, a Presidential Election year.

The election is two weeks away and Walt Kelly, as is his wont, has decided to satirize American politics. Kelly’s subject is third party outlier George Wallace, most famous for his performance of blocking a schoolhouse door in 1963 to defend the practice of segregation in Alabama education. The short sequence begins on Thursday October 24 and Friday October 25 with Chicken Little (Wallace) entering the panel.

The two strips ran in The Newport News (Virginia) Daily Press. (Saturday’s comic wasn’t about Chicken Little.)

Whoops. The editor or publisher noticed, or were informed of, the political nature and topic of the strips and checked to see what was coming up. “No, no, no, that will not do,” they said.

In the next week major party candidates Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon join as The Tweedle Twins.

And so when the sequence returned to the Pogo comic strip on Monday October 28, 1968 it did not return to The Daily Press. Instead readers of the Newport News newspaper saw an editorial explanation of why they were not seeing Pogo in the comic strip’s space on the comics page:

“POGO” is temporarily discontinued due to the fact that the artist, Walter Kelly, has departed from the comic field to devote his artistic talents to the field of national politics. The Daily Press believes that the place for editorial comment on the presidential candidates should be assigned to the editorial page and not the comic page. The releases received for the next few days are considered in bad taste and do not merit use at all in the columns of this newspaper. When Mr. Kelly returns to the comic field the feature “Pogo” will be resumed. – The EDITORS.

Digression – – –

By the way The Daily Press had been running Pogo since 1954. They knew of Kelly’s comic strip peccadilloes. And earlier in 1968 when alternative “bunny strips” were offered to objecting editors The Daily Press ran the original political strips.

But Walt, now upset that editors buying the strip were protesting its contents, was no longer offering replacements telling the papers to “Print it or drop it.”

End of Digression.

Below we present the Daily Press notice combined with the same day Pogo strips from The Napa Register.

On October 30 The Daily Press’ letters page carried two objections to the absence of Pogo.

Also on Wednesday the 30th the editors must have gotten the proof sheets for the following week’s Pogo strips because on Thursday the 31st the editorial message filling the comic’s space changed. It now read:

GOOD NEWS Pogo Returns Monday

On the first Monday of November and the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November Walt Kelly has gotten rid of the politicians and presents some generic election commentary (and laments that the Eugene McCarthy movement is over). And Pogo returns to The Daily Press.

But The Daily Press did not emerge unscathed from their action. On November 6 and November 7, 1968 they asked for reader input, asking if they were wrong in suspending Pogo for the week before. Admitting:

Scores of readers and POGO fans called in or wrote in protest. There were about a dozen subscription cancellations which surprised us since we thought there were oodles of other good reading material in the Daily Press.

They even published the six previously unpublished daily Pogo strips with the poll!

Ten days later the poll results overwhelmingly told the editors they were wrong.

Pogo: The Complete Syndicated Comic Strips are available from Fantagraphics and the above strips, with some luck, will be released in Volume 10 by the next presidential cycle. Which is not a knock – I appreciate that they are endeavoring to publish the complete Pogo comic strip while making minimal, if any, profit from the effort.

Pogo © OGPI