Number 1711: “But he hasn’t anything on!”

Walt Kelly’s beautifully drawn adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s original 1837 story is fairly faithful to the original. The Kelly touches and comic exaggeration are all over it, though. Andersen’s story works on several levels, but is also political satire. The author, according to some sources, was either bribed or bought off with a royal gift of jewelry so he would quit writing such fare. It worked. It was a lot easier on Andersen than some other government’s responses to satire, including banishment, or imprisonment, or even death.



From Dell’s Fairy Tale Parade #2 (1942):

After leaving Disney, Walt Kelly went on to his comics career, doing much work for Dell in the 1940s, including early versions of Pogo. Pogo became a newspaper feature in the late forties, even while Kelly was still working on the comic books. My understanding is he had a falling out with Dell in the early fifties over his objection to reprints of early Pogo strips in the Dell giant, Pogo Parade. (Despite Kelly’s problem with it, from a fan’s perspective one of the best squareback Dell giants ever published).



Kelly occasionally had things to say about comic books. These short sequences from the Pogo newspaper strip take aim at comic books of the day, under heavy criticism for content. That would not be Dell Comics, though, a publisher that mainly kept itself out of the censors’ line of fire.



Scanned from The Incompleat Pogo, published by Simon and Schuster in 1954. My thanks to friend Dave Miller for providing me with a gift of this and other early Pogo books.

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