As long-time readers of my old WEBLAHG know, I am MomGoth. Born that way. Well, not the Mom part, obviously. Anyway, one of my favorite comic strips as I grew up was Pogo. At the time, I cherished the quirky characters, the individualistic dialog (with tone of voice indicated by fonts), and the total absence of people. I also enjoyed the world views of the characters, no two exactly alike, and often resonating with my own skews.

I didn’t like it whenever Kelly introduced politics, with animals obviously meant to represent people in the news. I didn’t want outsiders and their craziness to intrude on the fantastic reality of Pogo’s swamp, where everybody knew each other’s peculiarities and took them into account, the way the people I knew did.

Now, I enjoy dipping into the many Pogo collections I have, but my favorite bit–and now we come to the point of the title of this post–is a panel I have on a t-shirt and used to have posted on my wall (as an adult–my mother would have thought it very odd, if I’d said I wanted it as a child) is a typically Goth Pogoism. It accepts things as they are and sees the bright side of it. This is very Goth, if what you’re looking at is the difficulty of life and the certainty of death. It’s one of the most encouraging and comforting panels in all comicdom, and people just laugh and laugh at how funny you are when you display it. If you laugh, too, you don’t have to deal with their being scared by what comforts you.

Anyway, I encourage you to visit the Oh-fishul Pogo Website and enjoy the escape or the mirror to reality, as you please. Pogo has it all.

WRITING PROMPT: Look at the above picture of the animals in the band. Are any two of them on the same page? Can you see how each of them is in the middle of a story with him or herself as the main character? Go thou, and do likewise.

MA