When they retired, my maternal grandparents built a home with a floor-to-ceiling wall of books in its living room. It was practical, not pretentious: they were readers. They had every type of book you can imagine, from classics to travelogues to bird guides, and—I swear this is not a figment of my imagination—a single Judith Krantz novel.
(Impossible to consider my tiny, immaculate grandmother, in her navy Keds and golf socks and cardigan reading Mistral’s Daughter or whatever, but I swear there was one on a shelf. Had it been a gift, or an impulse buy? I’ll never know. There was only one.)
Visiting as a small beastie, I already loved books but could only reach the lower shelves. It tells you something about my grandparents that (1) they had a giant blackboard where we doodled and practiced our cursive and played hangman and (2) they filled those lower shelves with books I wanted to read. That’s not to say those books were kids’ books or even appropriate; they just interested me. Among them were some cartoon collections, including Walt Kelly’s Pogo comic strips.
Like a lot of the humor my grandfather most enjoyed, Pogo had an edge. In fact, it was often political commentary, though I didn’t pick up on that as an elementary schooler. The references were well over my head or before my time. I loved them even without understanding a single joke.
Pogo was densely packed with both images and words, and even though I recognized the words, the language was still somehow impenetrable. I would read and re-read panels, trying to capture the humor, or at the very least some meaning.
For me, the impenetrability was a draw. I could spend a whole afternoon with a single volume and not finish it. This was NOT true of something like, say, Garfield. (At the time I loved Garfield, and checked collections out of my school library on the regular, but each book took me about five minutes to read.)
Pogo also periodically had certain characters speak in different fonts. I was fascinated.
Only as an adult did I realize that Deacon Mushrat’s gothic lettering signaled that he was a bad guy.
From these observations, you’d be hard pressed to find any connection at all between Walt Kelly’s art and my doodles. The real magic of Pogo for me, though, was that Walt Kelly’s animals were people (if you know what I mean). They weren’t pets, or background set fillers, or careful observations of nature: they were characters, with distinct personalities and quirks. As a kid, this made absolute sense to me. And as an adult doodler, I think my animals are people too.