Pogo 9/15/52

I am, as I have previously stated, a big fan of Fantagraphics' republishing of Walt Kelly's Pogo comic strip. In the second volume, I was interested to see the last panel of the strip for September 15, 1952. One corner of the panel has clearly been redrawn and relettered, and rather crudely and inaccurately. A quick search on newspapers.com shows that Fantagraphics used the Spokane Chronicle as their source for this strip. The Chronicle scan on newspapers.com was made with the top right corner of the page folded back, obscuring that corner of the panel. In every other newspaper on that date, the strip appears intact.

The same panel also appears, perfectly intact as Kelly wrote and drew it, in the book The Pogo Papers. For the sake of anyone who might have noticed this in the Fantagraphics book, below are both versions. (You'll see that in the Pogo Papers version, there's a great deal more detail in the line work as well.)