Resurrecting Pogo
Doyle, who is 29 and writes, and Sternecky, who is 27 and draws, are not complete unknowns. They will be remembered by anyone who attended the University of Illinois in the early 80s and followed their strip in the Daily Illini, “Escaped From the Zoo,” which, Sternecky describes as about “a fraternity of male animals that blackmail their way into staying in the basement of a sorority house.”
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“Pogo” was before their time. “I never read it when I was growing up in Buffalo Grove,” Doyle says. But then someone at school told him “Escaped From the Zoo” was “Pogoesque.” “Which it wasn’t,” says Doyle, “but it had talking animals in it, so I started reading some of [“Pogo”] and became really hooked. I remember reading 15 years’ worth in the Daily Illini archives.”
Doyle and Sternecky worked up some sample strips and took them to the Kelly family about a year and a half ago. The Kellys liked the strips fine and they liked the attitude of the two kids who created them. “They really wanted to do it, badly,” says Scott Daley today. “They’ve wanted to do it against overwhelming odds.”
“Let’s face it,” says Doyle, “it’ll fall short in some ways. But you can fall short of Walt Kelly and still be far better than almost anything on the comics page. I expect it’ll more or less be criticized for going over people’s heads and it’ll go over people’s heads less than Kelly did, because I’m not as educated as he was.”
Even so, Buchanan, complaining that the press has gone after Quayle like “piranha after a side of beef,” conceded that the question “Why did you join the National Guard just as you were about to be drafted in 1969?” is a fair one, and the “issue of hypocrisy” is legitimate.
