Perpetuating Pogo
But overall, it wasn’t fine. From the beginning Sternecky was more comfortable drawing the strip than Doyle was writing it. “We brought our own ideas of what we thought Pogo was to it,” Sternecky remembers. “We focused on different sides of the strip. What I felt was not as strong in Larry’s writing as it should be was a sense of camaraderie among the characters. It wasn’t quite loose enough for my tastes.” Sternecky thought Doyle’s text “worked well on a political level but maybe not as well on the humorous level the strip is supposed to work on. I felt it had to be funny first and pointed second. My guess is his criteria would be flipped.”
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Or what your partner wanted it to do? we asked him.
Or maybe you do. Sternecky, at any rate, has not lived happily ever after. In fact, something he didn’t tell us in January was that last November he’d given the Kellys four months’ notice. He was exhausting himself as a slave to another man’s creation.
Doyle and Sternecky don’t often speak anymore. Doyle knew for sure that his old partner had left Pogo when he picked up a Newsday in late March and saw a new signature on the strip, “P & C Kelly.” To keep Pogo going, Pete and Carolyn Kelly, Walt Kelly’s children by the first of his three wives, have stepped in to write and draw it. When Kelly died, his widow Selby, son Stephen, and stepson Scott Daley carried on the strip for several months; Pete and Carolyn thus become the fourth and fifth members of the family and the third team to try to perpetuate an inimitable classic of popular art.
To keep the competition fresh and exciting, we’ve undertaken a general housecleaning. The BAT, over the years an acronym for Baseball Aptitude Test, Baseball Accountability Test, and Baseball Accuracy Test, now stands for Baseball Acumen Test. The dreaded Lead BAT, aka Cracked BAT, becomes for the foreseeable future the Whiffle BAT.
