POGO: Bona Fide Balderdash is Fantagraphics’ second collection of Walt Kelly’s classic comic strip (V1 review here). This includes the usual whimsical adventures: an attempted trip to Mars, Owl getting stuck on Albert Alligator’s head, communist cowbirds, a poetry contest and Pogo running away from home in what turns into a Little Orphan Annie parody. The standout story is Pogo winding up running for president (the ’52 election)—I don’t know if he was the first comic strip character to do it but it’s easy to see this foreshadows later attempts by Howard the Duck (as on Gene Colan’s cover below) and Bloom County’s Bill the Cat [update: my friend Ross Bagby says an 1830s character, John Donkey, has the honor of being first]. Fantagraphics has done amazing work getting strips like this into permanent form.
A little thing that struck me reading this is that the swamp community’s resident hottie is Mam’selle Hepzibah, a sexy skunk. Given that skunks aren’t usually associated with irresistible charm, was this inspired by Warner Brothers’ Pepe Le Pew?
CAPTAIN HENRY AND THE GRAVEYARD OF TIME by Mike Mignola and Bruce Zick opens with Witchfinder Edward Grey helping the Whittier family (whose descendants have a couple of run-ins with Hellboy) exorcise their grandfather’s ghost, which culminates in sending Captain Winston Henry into the afterlife via super-science to drive grandad out. Henry ends up in the eponymous realm of shattered time machines, strange monsters and an eccentric time traveler (their machine looks like Zick modeled it on George Pal’s Time Machine). A fun spinoff of the Hellboy-verse.
SPARE ME (Summersweet Island Book Six) by Tara Sivec starts with a great meet cute as the Wild Female Lead, frustrated at waiting in a looooong line for pizza, kisses the Nerdy Male Lead and shrieks that yes, of course she’ll marry him, which gets them rushed to the head of the line for free pizza so they can go off and celebrate. No big, she’ll never have to see him again — oops, turns out he’s her brother’s buddy and the guy she’s supposed to be rooming in for the summer.
Unfortunately the FMC (female main character) doesn’t do anything terribly wild after that. It’s all bland conversations, small-town quirky charm (I assume a lot of that is reintroducing the cast from earlier books in the series) and one of my least favorite tropes, My Best Friend’s Sister Is Off-Limits—seriously, giving a woman’s brother veto power is just ridiculous (one of my online friends calls it “a serious Flowers in the Attic vibe”). It’s nice to see the male lead win over the FMC by being thoughtful and considerate but the romance wasn’t at all my style.
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