Paul Di Filippo and others have been bitten by the Pogo bug recently, sharing this animated cartoon and this Claymation version adapted from Walt Kelly’s classic comic strip.

For those who aren’t old enough or whose memories aren’t long enough, Pogo was yesterday’s Bloom County, though I’m not sure that’s truly a sufficient comparison as far as Pogo’s whimsy and satire are concerned. I guess Pogo truly stands alone.

Back when I was attending Brooklyn’s South Shore High School, I became friendly with artist Bill Kresse, thanks to a school trip to the New York Daily News. He introduced me to other staff cartoonists at the paper, and ended up inviting me to a few National Cartoonist Society banquets, which was Valhalla to a young fan.

One of the many cartoonists I met thanks to Kresse was George Ward, who was Walt Kelly’s assistant on Pogo.

When I headed off to college, some of those cartoonists drew going-away illustrations for me, including Ward, who certainly proved with this image why Kelly trusted him to draw many of the strip’s Sunday pages entirely on his own.

I sure miss Pogo. It would have been great to have seen what Walt Kelly would have made of the current administration. “We have met the enemy and he is us,” indeed!