The Comicon Advent Calendar Day 24: A ‘Twas The Night Before Christmas’ Double Feature

Yes, it’s the night before Christmas, and it’s welcome, one and all, to the final day of festive fun with our Comicon Advent Calendar… open up another pack of mince pies, pour yourself your favourite Christmas tipple, and enjoy two very different takes on a Christmas classic…

For the final entry, we’re going for a double The Night Before Christmas/Twas It Was The Night Before Christmas, two classics taking the words of Clement Moore and putting them to two very different uses.

We have the masterful whimsy and ridiculousness of Walt Kelly and Pogo and the anarchic chaos of the EC Comics competitor to Mad, as Bill Elder does a very different reading of the poem.

Let’s start off with Walt Kelly and Pogo…

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A Visit From St. Nicholas (To The Moon) is an absolutely gorgeous thing, originally from the Pogo Book, Gone Pogo printed in b&w in 1961 but then reprinted and coloured by Joe Orlando and Angelina Genduso, for the December 20, 1987 Daily News Magazine, looking like this…

Kelly’s Pogo was, seriously, one of the finest and most beloved comics of all time, up there with Peanuts in so many ways.

Beginning as a Disney animator – where he worked on Pinocchio, Fantasia, The Reluctant Dragon, and Dumbo – Kelly moved to Dell Comics in 1941, aged just 28, all because of an animators strike. With Funny Animal comics all the rage at the time, Kelly hopped on that particular trend with Pogo Possum in 1943’s Animal Stories, eventually pitching the characters of the Okefenokee Swamp to the New York Star, where he’d been working as a political cartoonist.

The rest, as they say, is history, with Pogo beginning in 1949 and running all the way through to his death in 1973, with his widow and assistants continuing the strip until 1975. It was 26 years of incredible, warm-hearted comedy that was never afraid to move into political and environmental commentary, following the delightful characters of Pogo the possum, Albert the Alligator, and all the rest, with Kelly’s playfulness and incredibly clever manipulation of language elevating this into one of the greatest comic strips of all time.

Everything you need to know about Pogo you can get in the magnificent absurdity of this Christmas feast, all of the ‘swamp speak’ and the malapropisms, all that lush and beautifully simple artwork, just amazing to see…

.Now, at the other end of the Twas The Night Before Christmas spectrum, we have something very different from Will Elder in the debut issue of Panic from 1954… the strip that got the magazine banned in Massachusetts…

Panic was, depending on which side of things you were on, a magnificent addition to the funny mags or a complete rip-off of Mad Magazine. It came out of Bill Gaines‘ EC Comics line from 1953-1956, with this first issue cover-dated Feb/Mar 1954.

Al Feldstein edited it through that short 12-issue run, bringing in plenty of Mad artists to do some brilliant work, much to the displeasure of Mad‘s founding editor Harvey Kurtzman.

Controversy came straight away, with this very story, as Gaines recounts… ‘The trouble we had on the Santa Claus story was Bill Elder. He had put a sign on the sleigh of Santa Claus, ‘Just Divorced’. Now how do a bunch of iconoclastic, atheist bastards like us know that Santa Claus is a saint and that he can’t be divorced and that this is going to offend Boston?’

Hmmm… oh I think Gaines and Elder knew exactly what that would do. Anyway, it was this strip that got Panic banned from sale in Massachusetts.

As you’d expect, it’s quite brilliant, loaded with visual gags, absurdities, and plenty of glorious stuff just designed to offend…