Now here’s some awesome news…Fantagraphics has announced plans to release The Complete Pogo, a series of 12 volumes starting in October of 2007. Format-wise it will closely resemble their Complete Peanuts series (which by the way, you should be reading…the volumes have gotten past the early, quirky stuff, and are now hitting Schultz’s best decade).
This is great news. I absolutely adore Pogo, but much like Peanuts, there’s never been a really good way to read the whole thing. I had a couple of scattered volumes from both Fantagraphics and Eclipse, but nothing chronological, and certainly nothing complete.
As a strip, Pogo is up there with Peanuts. It’s funny, exceptionally well drawn, and unusually socially relevant (or at least, as much as a strip about talking animals in a swamp can be).
Hopefully they’ll get a good bunch of people to write introductions for the 12 volumes. The Peanuts books have had some great ones so far (Walter Cronkite, Matt Groening, Jonathan Franzen) and the next volume has none other than Bill Melendez (the producer of all those animated Peanuts specials) lined up. And if we’re lucky, at least one of them will be by historian R. C. Harvey, who has written about Walt Kelly/Pogo on numerous occaisions.
This is great, great news. I can’t wait for October.