Review of Pogo, volume 8

In the late 1980s, through 2000, the comics publisher Fantagraphics attempted to reprint all of the Pogo newspaper strips in large format, but thin, paperback books. Eleven volumes were published, which is nothing like what would have been required to reproduce the complete run of newspaper strips. Fantagraphics seems to have run out of steam. Volume 8 was published in 1997. This volume covered half of 1952 (April 11th to October 3rd of that year, to be precise), a presidential election year, and the first year that the denizens of the Okefenokee swamp got involved in politics. This proved to be red meat for Walt Kelly. The book does not include the Sunday comics, which were thematically independent of the continuous story that played out in the daily strips. In the 2010s and 2020s, Fantagraphics did this again. However, this time the books were large format hardbacks, and they did include the Sunday strips, with color. At the time of writing, eight of these books have been published, of 12 planned. If they make it to 12, that should be all of the newspaper strips, and it would be the first time any publisher succeeded in reprinting all of them. Naturally, this is not all of Pogo. Many of the books that were published during Kelly's lifetime included material that never showed up in the newspapers, as far as I can tell.<br><br>