Setting
Pogo is set in the Georgia section of the Okefenokee Swamp; Fort Mudge and Waycross are occasionally mentioned.
The characters live, for the most part, in hollow trees amidst lushly-rendered backdrops of North American wetlands, bayous, lagoons and backwoods. Fictitious local landmarks—such as "Miggle’s General Store and Emporium" (aka "Miggle's Miracle Mart") and the "Fort Mudge Memorial Dump," etc.—are occasionally featured. The landscape is fluid and vividly detailed, with a dense variety of (often caricatured) flora and fauna. The richly-textured trees and marshlands frequently change from panel to panel within the same strip. Like the Coconino County depicted in Krazy Kat and the Dogpatch of Li’l Abner, the distinctive cartoon landscape of Kelly’s Okefenokee Swamp became as strongly identified with the strip as any of its characters.
There are occasional forays into exotic locations as well, including at least two visits to Australia (during the Melbourne Olympics in 1956, and again in 1961). The Aussie natives include a bandicoot, a lady wallaby, and a mustachioed, aviator kangaroo named "Basher"). In 1967, Pogo, Albert and Churchy visit primeval "Pandemonia"—a vivid, "prehysterical" place of Kelly’s imagination, complete with mythical beasts (including dragons and a zebra-striped unicorn), primitive humans, arks, volcanoes, sabre-tooth tigers, pterodactyls and dinosaurs.
Kelly also frequently parodied Mother Goose stories featuring the characters in period costume: “Cinderola," "Goldie Lox and the Fore-bears,” “Handle and Gristle,” etc. These offbeat sequences, usually presented as a staged play or a story-within-a-story related by one of the characters, seem to take place in the fairy tale dreamscapes of children’s literature, with European storybook-style cottages and forests, etc.—rather than in the swamp, per se.
Read more about this topic: Miz Mam'selle Hepzibah
Famous quotes containing the word setting:
“A happy marriage perhaps represents the ideal of human relationship—a setting in which each partner, while acknowledging the need of the other, feels free to be what he or she by nature is: a relationship in which instinct as well as intellect can find expression; in which giving and taking are equal; in which each accepts the other, and I confronts Thou.”
—Anthony Storr (b. 1920)
“We don’t arrive at it by standing on one leg or on the first day of our setting out—but though we may jostle one another on the way that is no reason why we should strike or trample—elbowing’s enough.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“Linnæus, setting out for Lapland, surveys his “comb” and “spare shirt,” “leathern breeches” and “gauze cap to keep off gnats,” with as much complacency as Bonaparte a park of artillery for the Russian campaign. The quiet bravery of the man is admirable.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)