Over the years one of the great sources of solace for me in this vale of tears has been comic strips, good, indifferent, and even very, very not very good ones. So my attention was instantly grabbed when I ran across this 1952 Houston Chronicle article glued (you’d think they would have known better!) into an old library scrapbook:

Well, I think Pogo was a really good comic strip and this was enough to send me to the Thresher for an account of Mr. Kelly’s talk in the Lecture Lounge. His essential message wasn’t much of a surprise–Pogo wasn’t about politics so much as it was about human nature, which is dramatically more interesting than politics.

Two things jumped out at me. First, he’s in the midst of a tour of all 310 newspapers that were running Pogo. That sounds absolutely inhuman. And second, given his comments about Albert the Alligator what are we to make of the picture of him with a cigar stuck in his mouth?

Bonus: I just gave it a a quick eyeball (it was raining), but I think they replaced the one that dropped dead and four others that were still alive but maybe running a pretty high fever.