"A true natural genius of comic art." — Mort Walker, creator of Beetle Bailey Starting in 1948, Walt Kelly's newspaper-based comic strip Pogo lampooned sociopolitical issues from the Red Scare to the environmental movement. A gifted cartoonist who began his career at Walt Disney Studios, Kelly explored the virtues and follies of human nature with a lively cast of Okefenokee Swamp critters. Kind-hearted Pogo Possum headed the crew, which included intellectual Howland Owl; exuberant Albert Alligator; poetic mud turtle Churchy LaFemme; romantic hound dog Beauregard Bugleboy; and other impish personalities. Even readers too young to appreciate the strip's satirical elements were charmed by the eccentric creatures and their offbeat wordplay. This compilation features comics from the election year of 1952, during which Pogo's neighbors encouraged the reluctant possum to run for president. Their rallying cry, "I Go Pogo," parodied Dwight D. Eisenhower's "I Like Ike" slogan and provided real-life fans with a write-in candidate. Kelly's sly humor and flair for creative language—replete with malapropisms and nonsense verse — retain their imaginative verve for comics enthusiasts of the twenty-first century.

One of the most popular comic strips of the 1950s and the first to reference politics of the day, Walt Kelly's Pogo took on Joe McCarthy before the controversial senator was a blip on Edward R. Murrow's radar. The strip's satire was so biting, it was often relegated to newspaper editorial sections at a time when artists in other media were blacklisted for far less. Pogo was the vanguard of today's political comic strips, such as Doonesbury and Pearls Before Swine, and a precursor of the modern political parody of late night television. This comprehensive biography of Kelly reveals the life of a conflicted man and unravels the symbolism and word-play of his art for modern readers. There are 241 original Pogo comic strips illustrated and 13 other Kelly artworks (as well as illustrations by other cartoonists).

Funnybooks is the story of the most popular American comic books of the 1940s and 1950s, those published under the Dell label. For a time, “Dell Comics Are Good Comics” was more than a slogan—it was a simple statement of fact. Many of the stories written and drawn by people like Carl Barks (Donald Duck, Uncle Scrooge), John Stanley (Little Lulu), and Walt Kelly (Pogo) repay reading and rereading by educated adults even today, decades after they were published as disposable entertainment for children. Such triumphs were improbable, to say the least, because midcentury comics were so widely dismissed as trash by angry parents, indignant librarians, and even many of the people who published them. It was all but miraculous that a few great cartoonists were able to look past that nearly universal scorn and grasp the artistic potential of their medium. With clarity and enthusiasm, Barrier explains what made the best stories in the Dell comic books so special. He deftly turns a complex and detailed history into an expressive narrative sure to appeal to an audience beyond scholars and historians.

The antiquarian's reference to old books features thousands of listings, including hundreds of new titles, a new Internet buying guide, a complete glossary of book-collecting terms, research resources, information on dealers, and advice on buying, selling, and maintaining fragile acquisitions. Original.

When eleven-year-old Nelson's beloved older sister goes missing, he is devastated. She's his only friend and means the world to him. Then his parents join the search and leave Nelson in the care of his crazy uncle Pogo, a plumber who is working at St. Paul's Cathedral in London. There in a dusty crypt Nelson stumbles across an ancient machine that accidentally extracts the so-called seven deadly sins from his soul. The machine turns them into ugly, cantankerous, and embarrassing creatures who follow him everywhere. But there is more to these monsters than meets the eye, and in this off-the-wall debut novel about making friends and taking courage, Nelson finds that these strange newcomers are just the companions he needs for a quest across the globe to rescue his big sister.

The Man in the Moon has dropped down to earth for a visit. Over the hedge, a rabbit in trousers is having a pipe with his evening paper. Elsewhere, Alice is passing through a looking glass, Dorothy riding a tornado to Oz, and Jack climbing a beanstalk to heaven. To enter the world of children's literature is to journey to a realm where the miraculous and the mundane exist side by side, a world that is at once recognizable and real--and enchanted. Many books have probed the myths and meanings of children's stories, but Goldthwaite's Natural History is the first exclusively to survey the magic that lies at the heart of the literature. From the dish that ran away with the spoon to the antics of Brer Rabbit and Dr. Seuss's Cat in the Hat, Goldthwaite celebrates the craft, the invention, and the inspired silliness that fix these tales in our minds from childhood and leave us in a state of wondering to know how these things can be. Covering the three centuries from the fairy tales of Charles Perrault to Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, he gathers together all the major imaginative works of America, Britain, and Europe to show how the nursery rhyme, the fairy tale, and the beast fable have evolved into modern nonsense verse and fantasy. Throughout, he sheds important new light on such stock characters as the fool and the fairy godmother and on the sources of authors as diverse as Carlo Collodi, Lewis Carroll, and Beatrix Potter. His bold claims will inspire some readers and outrage others. He hails Pinocchio, for example, as the greatest of all children's books, but he views C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia as a parable that is not only murderously misogynistic, but deeply blasphemous as well. Fresh, incisive, and utterly original, this rich literary history will be required reading for anyone who cares about children's books and their enduring influence on how we come to see the world.