We are pleased as punch to announce that Volume One of Pogo has gone to press. We have printer's proofs and it looks sensational. Or to put it another way, it looks worthy of the great newspaper strip (some would say the greatest) created by Mr. Walt Kelly.
Some of Pogo has been reprinted before, not always in the best possible manner. Now, all of it will be republished — every daily strip and every Sunday page with the latter in color — in twelve volumes being issued by Fantagraphics Books. This is not as simple as someone saying, "Hey, let's reprint Pogo" and making a deal to do so. Much of the material does not exist in pristine, ready-to-print form and the earlier a strip is, the more likely it had to be located and painstakingly restored. That takes time, which is why the release date of this book was announced and changed, announced and changed, announced and changed, etc.
But now the first one's at the printer and subsequent volumes oughta be a lot simpler. (That sentence was hard to type with fingers crossed.)
My friend, the lovely Carolyn Kelly, lovingly supervised the loving restoration of her lovely father's lovely strip and she also did the lovely design of this lovely book and its lovely dust jacket and the lovely imprints under that lovely dust jacket. Sure sounds like a labor of love to me. Not that the contents need any help but the strips are supplemented by a foreword from writer (and friend o' Walt's) Jimmy Breslin and essays/annotations by Steve Thompson, R.C. Harvey and myself. If I were you, I'd read all that text stuff after I read the strips themselves about eleven times.
Each volume contains two years of Walt Kelly's magnum opus. Since the first year started in mid-year, there's room in the book to also include the pre-syndication Pogo strips he did for The New York Star, a short-lived newspaper for which he worked. This gives you the chance to observe from Day One and watch as it develops steadfastly from a darn good newspaper strip to something a lot better than just "darn good." Working on this collection, that was my constant thought: "Gee, it just gets better and better, doesn't it?"
That's about all I need to say about the contents. I am not sure when exactly the book will ship. Amazon is cautiously saying mid-December but it'll be well before that by at least a month or two. It'll be soon enough that you can order a copy in confidence of holding one in your hand before long. (Ignore the old cover design on the Amazon listing. The real one is above.) I'll caution you that if you buy Volume One, you're going to want Two through Twelve. I don't want to claim that Pogo was the best newspaper strip ever done. But if you want to say that, I sure won't give you an argument.