Though most people have never heard of her, Tillie the Toiler must have been the best-dressed comic strip character of all time. Created in the 1920s by Ray Westover, the strip lasted 30 years and traced Tillie's evolution from a brainless flapper to a sophisticated Lois-Lane-type working woman. But what was really unusual about Tillie was the way she dressed - or rather, WAS dressed. Quite literally, her followers designed her clothes for her. Fans were encouraged to send in sketches for the artists to develop into haute couture. If you look carefully at these images, you will see the names and addresses of the designers included with most of the ensembles. What a thrill it must have been to see your creation modelled on your favorite paper doll!
This has got to be one of the most obscure things on YouTube, and if I hadn't stumbled on it many years ago and saved it, I never would have been able to find it again. The title is a mystery, until you figure out what the initials mean. When you try to share it, a notification comes up about it being an "unlisted video" and that you should share it with care, though I had no trouble posting it. The comments are closed, so there's no help there.
I was raised on Pogo, still think it's the most brilliant comic strip ever, and I'm aware that the genius artist Walt Kelly started his career as a Disney animator (and traces of his characters' facial expressions peep out in Dumbo). So he knew animation, and though this is obviously a rough draft of something that had not yet been formally produced, you can more than see what he is getting at. The whole story is here, with the immortal punch line, "We have met the enemy and he is us" - the mystery initials of the video's title. The familiar comic strip characters are also here (all introduced at the beginning), and Kelly, incredibly, does all the voices himself.
Though this preliminary sketch features only a few frames per second, or even less, the fluidity of movement is almost unbelievable, and the facial expressions so vivid that the characters transcend the spasmodic jerkiness that made Paddy the Pelican so surreally atrocious (whether surreally is a word or not - ed). One man doing all the voices is better than the sixteen in the cringeworthy Chuck Jones special that Kelly hated so much. I honestly wonder why he agreed to work with Warner Bros. at all. I wonder, too, if this was in the works before that misguided attempt. Or was it his answer to the atrocity, the cheapening of his unique and inspired strip into a bland commercial disaster? For there was no second Pogo special, and even the first one wasn't very. Special. This one may not have made it because it was too "message-y", and might still be considered that today, as we have a million more reasons to be very afraid when it comes to the ruin of the environment. Kelly was a visionary, to be sure, and too often they fade from public view when their message becomes too uncomfortable.
June Foray as Pogo (Rocky the Flying Squirrel) grates on the nerves. I could never stand Foray as a voice artist and thought all her characters sounded exactly alike. Her lowest point was dubbing a girl character in The Twilight Zone (the last episode ever broadcast), with astonishingly bad results. Kelly gives Pogo a higher male voice with a Southern drawl, which is just right. Albert the Alligator is nothing short of brilliant. It IS Albert, cigar-chomping, outrageous, the kingpin of Okefenokee.
I remember in the Pogo strip seeing those amazing backgrounds of the swamp, and though I didn't appreciate the artistry back then, I do now. Pogo was criticized sometimes for being too talky, too smart-alecky or just too smart (gasp!), but who else could have come up with a statement like, "New-clear fizzicks ain't so new, and ain't so clear"? I rediscovered a few gifs I made from the Kelly cartoon special, the one that was never fully realized. The improbably graceful few frames per second is especially poignant here. He could never have envisioned - or maybe he could, given the dreck that was being made for TV at the end of his life - what would happen to cartoons, how they would become computerized and devoid of human feeling. How brilliant wit and quixotic story lines would be replaced by witless schlock.
This is an ancient holy relic from the swamp of my childhood: the first of many Pogo books we owned, and the best-loved/mutilated. I am not sure whose attempts at cursive writing festoon the frontispiece, nor do I know who did that awful math (probably me - I still can't add). Many of the pages are crayoned, which could have been done by my siblings. Although the colouring doesn't stay in the lines, so it could well be mine. I think that's my mother's handwriting at the top. My God.
This is fascinating! It's a kind of sketch or early draft by Walt Kelly for a Pogo animated cartoon. This had already been done, abominably, by Chuck Jones, who somehow got the rights from Kelly. The two cartooning styles didn't mix, and the results were characterizations that were just "off" in every conceivable way. June Foray voiced Pogo in a sugary little-girl voice, a cross between Rocky the Flying Squirrel and those screechy princesses she did on Fractured Fairy Tales. The animation was similarly out of whack. These creatures just weren't from Okefenokee Swamp, or anywhere else for that matter.
I don't hate Jones. Some of his stuff is brilliant, and the Grinch (the original) will never be equalled. But somehow or other, this thing didn't gel. Kelly frankly hated the result, which was aired once and shelved, but which you can still see (of course!) on YouTube.
This, though, is a treasure, a stumble-upon while dredging through an underground maze of Pogo-files. Though this isn't the final animation and only involves a few frames per second, it still has a sense of movement and grace. And it's Pogo-ish. Kelly does ALL the voices himself, which I think is a clever dig at Jones and the atrocious choices he made in voice characterizations.
This little fragment has an environmental message which was far ahead of its time. Kelly only lived to be 60 due to grossly-neglected diabetes which caused him to go blind and lose a leg. Considering all this, these preliminary sketches are remarkable. They're some of the last creations of a dying man.
Think of how it would have been! Just picture it. It would have been like being right inside those Sunday colour comics with all our quirky old friends. But it was never to be.
There aren't many Pogophiles left in the world. I think most of Walt Kelly's cartoons went out of print a long time ago, though he makes brief appearances on the internet. But just sort of scattered around.
I was raised on Pogo. I may even have a raggy old Pogo comic book left somewhere, its cover torn off, with pencil-printing and scribbling all over it from four little kids learning to write at different times. For some reason, certain books became scribblers for us. (Scribblers being, for my American readers, things you scribble into). We also had a Pogo hard-cover book, a real luxury, which included many of the early scribble-books in one luxurious volume. It never had a cover on it in my memory. And then there was a weird and wonderful record album called Songs of the Pogo, which you can listen to right now if you want to:
As with the rest of Pogo, the songs were written in a smart-assed double-talk that no one could decipher. It wasn't meant to be deciphered, as it was just too twisty-turny and pun-laden to be understandable (and yet, there was meaning in it too).
Just off the top of my head:
I was stirring up a stirrup cup
In a stolen sterling stein
When I chanced upon a ladle
Who was once my valentine:
"O wence that wince, my wench?" quoth I,
She blushed and said, "Oh, sir -
Old Daddy isn't stirring since my Mama's been in stir."
I made an attempt to transcribe a few more of these, and I just couldn't do it. Maybe they aren't meant to be written down, but only heard.
As a kid, I was by far the youngest, a full thirteen years younger than my eldest sister. That means I was, in essence, surrounded by adults. They all seemed to know what Pogo meant, what the words were all about. I had no idea. In fact, the older I got, the less sense they made.
No one ever explained any of this to me. It was like Ernie Kovacs (one of my very first memories), completely incomprehensible to me, though I was sure the adults knew what it was all about - and that I SHOULD know, but was just too slow and dense to pick it up. So I dared not ask.
When they went and put me in something called a Major Work Class in Grade 5 (in essence, for kids with abnormally high IQs), I was completely shocked. Up until that point, I had known all my siblings were smart, but assumed that I wasn't.
Pogo is stashed pretty far back in my mind, though I did find a nice Pogo for President sign during the horrors of the election. Then today I found a bonanza: a story called NO, which I'd never seen before, though I do remember hearing an odd recording of it which was an add-on to a CD re-release of Songs of the Pogo.
I first discovered some individual panels from NO on Google, but I never thought I'd find it all. Today it appeared on somebody's blog, all 28 pages of it, and the pages were all the same size! So I was quickly able to make one of my little gif slideshows out of it, which you see at the top. As far as copyright and all that, what the hell can you do? EVERYTHING is on Pinterest and other "shared "sites now, and it is impossible to find the provenance of anything. It can't be done. Everything on Facebook is shared. I am easily able to "embed" Facebook videos on my blog, because there is an "embed" setting that allows you to. . . embed. If they didn't WANT you to embed, why would it even be there?
Everything belongs to everyone. Is this Communism in action?
So anyway, I made a giffy thing with the whole story (at the top, did I say that?), though of course the problem is the speed of it. Like all of Kelly's stuff, it's very talky, and this increases as the story wears on. This is about as slow as these gifs go, so the large amount of text at the end might be tricky. But the thing goes around and repeats endlessly, and there are page numbers at the bottom which are a help. (Page numbers are heaven to me, as are indexes. Sometimes I wish fiction had indexes.)
Should I now make PicMix bling-pictures of these? Not sure how I'd do it, but who knows. If I can bling Hilda, maybe I can bling Pogo.
ARCHAELOGICAL DIG DEPARTMENT: dig this! These are just a few images from the brown, crumbling Pogo book I still have on my bookshelf. It was published in 1951, three years before I was born. The first one is a scan of a "thing" that looks like a chunk of papyrus or mummy-wrapping. Was it ever rectangular? It's hard to believe. There is some serious mathematics going on here, whatever it means, and someone has written something that looks like Pagor in primitive cursive.
For those who are not familiar with Kelly-esque
linguistic arabesques, here's a sample page of it.
I had forgotten, if I ever knew, that "someone" coloured in some of these pages. The same thing happened to my lovely Wesley Dennis pen-and-ink drawings in my copy of Misty of Chincoteague. (Come to think of it, it wasn't even my copy. My brother Walt owned it and passed it down to Arthur, who passed it down to me. Nothing was mine when I was a kid: in every picture I can find, I am wearing boys' clothing that has been handed down twice.) The colouring is bad enough that this might be my handiwork. Howland Owl looks pretty scribbly. But then. . . isn't scribbling what it's all about?
Incredibly, the first title I considered for this blog was Scribble Scribble. Then it was Margaret Gunning's House of Dreams: intentionally sappy and Barbie-ish, but I changed it when some bitch pronounced my blog "embarrassing". But that was after my piece about how nasty Lloyd Dykk was, which didn't go down well with people after he died.
I honestly think, to this day, that he would have found it entertaining.
