The seventh volume of Pogo: The Complete Syndicated Comic Strips is a'comin'. Printed copies exist.
It's called Pockets Full of Pie…and how could you not love a book called Pockets Full of Pie? I like that title so much that at this very moment, the pockets in the pants I'm wearing are indeed full of pie. The right one has Chocolate Cream, the left one has French Apple, two back pockets have Lemon Custard and I just paid my cleaning lady Dora with money that was covered in meringue.
The book — which contains no actual pie, its foolish publishers having rejected my brilliant suggestion for an "extra" — will be out around November 10. We actually got this one to press well before the deadline. The first four, for reasons everyone following the series knows, were all late — in some cases, very late. Volumes 5 and 6 went to press on or about the deadline.
This one got in early and then along comes Trump's foreign import tariffs and then there was that Pandemic Thing you may have heard a little something about, screwing up both the printing and importing businesses. But Volume 7 should be shipping from Amazon by 11/10.
Rather than me, the co-editor, telling you how great this series is, I thought I'd enlist the aid of whoever wrote the longest review of the previous volume on Amazon. Well, I didn't really enlist their aid. I'm just stealing (without their permission) their review and reproducing it here. This is by someone named "Newsboy" and I swear it isn't me, nor do I know who that is. He's reviewing Vol. 6: Clean as a Weasel, which you can order here…
The Pogo collections from Fantagraphics Books continue to be the gold standard for comic strip collections. It's an incredible presentation for what many (me among them) consider one of the greatest comic strips ever. Pogo may never have inspired multiple cartoon series, it didn't have the merchandising success of Peanuts, Garfield, Bloom County or some other strips, but it had as big an impact — arguably bigger — than many strips that are more well known today.
Political humor. Funny animal humor. Jokes about the human condition (in a comic with no humans). This comic had it all. Bottom line: These comics are funny. Walt Kelly was not just a great artist. He was an incredible wordsmith, who used dialect, puns and even playing around with the font in the word balloons to make the joke work. In a review of a previous volume I compared Kelly to Mark Twain for his use of language. Honestly, that's not hyperbole.
Fantagraphics has set a standard with these books that will be hard for any publisher of classic strip collections to meet, let alone beat. The comics are reprinted at a size that never strains the eyes. The colors on the Sunday strips is perfect. The binding on the books is exactly what you want — it lays flat and no art is lost in gutter.
But what really sets this collection apart are the little things. They've included an index in every volume. There's a great introduction by a famous person who is a Pogo fan (this one is by Garfield creator Jim Davis). Each volume includes an introduction with some background on the time period and Kelly. And there is also a section, Swamp Talk, that helps explain some of the historical references (this volume wraps up a couple years before I was born, so these sections are always welcome). Beneath the pretty book jacket is an embossed cover. There's nothing they haven't thought of — even the color of each volume is a nice pastel that is different from its predecessors. On a bookshelf, it's just a good looking set of books.
If you've never read Pogo, do yourself a favor and order this volume. It's a great place to start.
Actually, I think they're all great places to start because no matter which one you pick, you're going to rush to order all the rest. You could also pre-order Pockets Full of Pie, which features a foreword by Sergio Aragonés…which shows you how hard I work to find foreword writers. Just when I needed to find one, he was sitting in my office. If he hadn't been here, I could have gone to Dora.
It also features two years of what the noted critic Newsboy considers "…one of the greatest comic strips ever." This series is just about the only thing I hard-sell on this blog and that's because I know you'll love it. And you won't love it because of anything I did except maybe to nudge you into buying it.