Showing posts with label Walt Kelly. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Walt Kelly. Show all posts

Sunday, February 19, 2023

Fill Your Easter Basket with JOY!

Back in the 1940s and 50s, comic book companies produced a prodigious number of holiday annuals and one-shots.

For example, a multitude of Christmas-themed comic books flooded America's magazine racks every November and December!
(In fact, a large part of our popular Cool Christmas collection is based on them.)
But, did you know that several publishers also did Easter-oriented books?
And, that noted comics illustrators including Walt Kelly (Pogo) and Harrison Cady (Peter Rabbit) contributed art to them?
Believing that there's always room for more classic comics collectibles, we at Atomic Kommie Comics™ offer a line of goodies entitled Exciting Easter!
Yes, it's eggs, bunnies, chicks, and other fuzzy animals galore digitally-restored and remastered from Baby Boomer-era classic comics covers on baby bibs, infant creepers / onesies, toddler and kid t-shirts, greeting cards, mugs, nursery clocks (like the one above) and a plethora of kool kollectibles!
They make great Easter basket stuffers! (And they won't rot your kids' teeth like marshmallow chicks or chocolate bunnies!)
So click over and see what's in our basket!

Monday, December 19, 2022

Monday Madness CHRISTMAS WITH MOTHER GOOSE "Little Boy Blue and Little Girl Green

Here's another early example of a "mash-up"...
...putting existing nursery rhyme characters into a Christmas setting to create new tales!
Written and illustrated by Walt (Pogo) Kelly, this never-reprinted tale from the final Christmas with Mother Goose anthology (Dell's Four Color #253 [1949]) adds new characters that didn't exist in the nursery rhyme.
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Monday, December 12, 2022

Monday Madness CHRISTMAS WITH MOTHER GOOSE "3 Blind Mice and a Christmas Deed"

Sometimes Walt (Pogo) Kelly combined several nursery rhyme or fairy tale characters...
...into something totally-new, like this never-reprinted story from Dell's Four Color Comics: Christmas with Mother Goose #172 (1947)!
Interesting how the mice reference the actual Mother Hubbard nursery rhyme!
"Meta" before it was "meta", eh?

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Monday, December 5, 2022

Monday Madness CHRISTMAS WITH MOTHER GOOSE "Christmas Problem of the Woman in the Shoe"

We presented a Yuletide story of the classic Old Woman Who Lives in a Shoe HERE...
...but it wasn't Walt (Pogo) Kelly's first visit to the unique domicile filled with children!
Written and illustrated by Kelly, this never-reprinted story from Dell's Four Color Comics: Christmas with Mother Goose #90 (1945) was Walt's first take on the concept!
Which one do you think is better?
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Monday, November 28, 2022

Monday Madness CHRISTMAS WITH MOTHER GOOSE "Christmas in the Shoe"

Walt (Pogo) Kelly was Dell's go-to creator for light-hearted kids' stories...
...as this tale from Dell's Four Color Comics #201: Christmas with Mother Goose (1948) amply demonstrates!
Kelly was expert at doing sequels to classic fairy tales, often inserting them into situations never conceived of by the original storytellers, yet making them "feel" totally-natural, as if they were "lost" stories by the original creators!
BTW, this was not the only time Kelly put the characters in a Christmas tale!
You'll see the other one next week!
Note: this was reprinted once, in a magazine, Western/Golden's Christmas Annual #8 (1975), 
This is the only issue which included comics.
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Monday, November 21, 2022

Monday Madness CHRISTMAS WITH MOTHER GOOSE "Tale of Chip-Chop and His Christmas Good Deed"

Besides shoehorning existing fairy tale and nursery rhyme characters into holiday-themes tales...

...Walt (Pogo) Kelly occasionally did stories featuring totally-new characters and situations!
Sadly, this never-reprinted story from Dell's Four Color Comics: Christmas with Mother Goose #201 (1948) is Chip-Chop's only appearance anywhere!

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Monday, November 14, 2022

Monday Madness CHRISTMAS WITH MOTHER GOOSE "Miss Cross Patch on Christmas Eve"

Unlike this Goldilocks story, which adapted an existing fairy tale into an Easter setting...
...this is a classic nursery rhyme, greatly expanded and enhanced by Walt (Pogo) Kelly for Christmastime!
From Dell's Four Color Comics #253 aka Christmas with Mother Goose (1949), written and illustrated by Walt (Pogo) Kelly.
For the remainder of the holiday season, we'll present stories (many never-reprinted) from this oversized holiday annual which ran from 1945 through 1949 every Monday!
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Friday, December 3, 2021

Friday Holiday Fun CHRISTMAS WITH MOTHER GOOSE "Christmas Alphabet"

Nobody did Christmas-themed comics better than the legendary Walt (Pogo) Kelly...
...as this never-reprinted piece from Dell's Four Color Comics #201 (1948), one of the annual Christmas with Mother Goose anthologies, proves!
Yeah, it is difficult to find something Yuletide-related that begins with "Z"...any suggestions?
Christmas with Mother Goose was an ongoing annual from 1945 through 49.
It apparently ended when Walt Kelly left Dell to work full-time on his new Pogo newspaper strip.
But Dell continued to do Yuletide annuals with a Frosty the Snowman series from 1951 to 1961 as well as continuing an already-ongoing line of Kris Kringle-themed Santa Claus Funnies running from 1944 through 1961!
(In early 1962 Dell Comics broke up into two companies, the already-established Dell, which had really just handled distribution, and Gold Key Comics, which had handled the editorial and art production chores, but not newsstand distribution.
This left Dell, which had to build a comics editorial division from scratch, without the resources to continue the Christmas-themed annuals.)

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Thursday, December 17, 2020

Holiday Reading Room SANTA CLAUS FUNNIES "Ticky Tack the Littlest Reindeer"

You know all about Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer...
...but I'd bet you've never even heard rumors about this guy!
This story from Dell's Four Color #205 (1948) aka Santa Claus Funnies, is an original tale by writer/artist Walt (Pogo) Kelly, who mostly did adaptations of fairy tales modified to fit the Christmas season or straight-out re-tellings like "Night Before Christmas".
There have been other "Littlest Reindeer" tales, but none with this particular plot or characters (besides Santa and the rest of the classic reindeer, of course!)!
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