The characters of Pogo the possum and Albert the alligator were created by Kelly in 1941, for issue #1 of Animal Comics, in a story titled «Albert Takes The Cake.» Both were created as comic foils for a young black boy named Bumbazine, who also lived in the Swamp. Kelly found it hard to write for the human boy, preferring to use the animals to their full comic potential, and eventually phased Bumbazine out. Pogo quickly took center stage, assuming the straight man role that Bumbazine had occupied.

In 1948, Kelly was hired to draw political cartoons for the short-lived New York Star newspaper, and decided to do a daily comic strip featuring the characters he had created for Animal Comics. Pogo debuted on October 4 of that year and ran continuously until the paper folded on January 28, 1949. On May 16 of the same year, the strip was picked up for national distribution by Post-Hall Syndicate, and ran continuously until (and past) Kelly’s death from diabetes in 1973. It was then continued for a few years by Kelly’s wife, Selby, and son Stephen before ceasing publication in 1975. Selby said in a 1982 interview that she decided to discontinue the strip because newspapers had shrunk the size of strips to the point where people couldn’t easily read it.

In 1989, the Los Angeles Times revived the strip under the title Walt Kelly’s Pogo, written at first by Larry Doyle and Neal Sternecky, then by Sternecky alone. After Sternecky quit in March 1992, Kelly’s son Peter and daughter Carolyn continued to produce the strip, but interest waned and the revived strip was dropped from syndication after only a few years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogo_Possum

For roughly seven years from 1942 to 1949, between leaving the employ of Walt Disney and the start of his work at the New York Star newspaper, Walt Kelly turned out over 2500 pages of comic book art for Western Printing and Lithographing Company and published by Dell Comics. Appearing in over a dozen titles with material ranging from high adventure to whimsical fantasy to slapstick farce, Kelly proved to be as versatile as anyone who has ever worked in comics.

By the time Pogo the Possum #1 hit the stands (the definitive article was dropped after the first issue), the cartoon marsupial had already been appearing in national newspaper syndication for nearly six months. Even though Kelly’s work stopped appearing in all other Dell Comics, during the four year run of Pogo Possum he was also doing illustrations for books such as The Glob, cartoons for magazines such as Life, and personal appearances to promote the strip. There was also friction developing between Kelly and Western over the book publishing rights to the strip. Consequently, the amount of time Kelly spent on each issue seemed to dwindle as the life of the book wore on.

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