What do the Spirit and Pogo have in common?

Other than both being not in reruns (while several lesser strips are), they were the two of my father's favorite strips.

My father passed away this Sunday and I am not really up to clicking through recent strips to try to come up with snark or some kind of unifying theme.

A big part of my love of comics comes from my father. He bought me a lot of Peanuts collections — the good stuff, from before Snoopy took over the strip — and saving the daily comics and the Mini Page from the Bergen Record for me was a daily ritual for him.

My father gave me a few Pogo collections from the 50s. Of course I'll never part with them, and I have managed to replace most of the contents with less sentimentally valuable editions for regular reading. He used to love quoting Pogo ("Deck the Halls with Boston Charlie!") and spent quite a bit of time explaining many of the topical jokes (Hugh J. Malarkey was Senator McCarthy, Bewitched, Bothered and Bemildred were a riff on a popular song...) to me.

Walt Kelly's influence on comics is difficult to quantify - he was inducted into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame in 1995 and is one of only a few inductees into the National Cartoon Museum. I think his influence on Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes and Jeff Smith's Bone is pretty obvious. (Smith has been very open about Kelly's influence on his work, and I bet if Watterson gave interviews he might too.)


When one of my aunts gave me a hardcover edition of Jules Feiffer's The Great Comic Book Heroes (it's my understanding it's worth trying to get an original hardcover because the newer editions do not contain all of the reprints, BTW.) my father was thrilled to see the full color Spirit story from the great Will Eisner. When I shared his enthusiasm he used some of his military connections to get me issues of the U.S. Army's PS Magazine, which contained more of Eisner's work. (This was before Eisner released his landmark graphic novels.) From these I started to see (before I even realized it) how comics could be more than gag-a-day or people pounding the crap out of each other.

I don't think I have to spend a lot of time talking about how influential Will Eisner has been.

I owe my father a lot - too much to reckon, let alone recount in a brief blog post. But at a time like this it's nice to think about the laughs we shared over the comics and the effort he made to introduce me to some of the different and more technical aspects of the medium.

I miss you Dad.