RIP, Selby Kelly

Mark Evanier has reported the sad news that Selby Kelly, Walt Kelly’s widow and a talented cartoonist and writer in her own right, has left us.

I never got to meet Walt Kelly–my favorite cartoonist, no question–but I’m pleased to say that for a time in the mid-1970s Mrs. Kelly was a regular at Boston-area comics conventions…and so was I. She showed off Kelly work (like the handmade We Have Met the Enemy cartoon), promoted the Okefenokee Star fanzine, and generally spread the Word of the Possum. (Looking back, it’s startling to realize that Walt Kelly had been gone just a few years.)

I’d say that meeting her was the next best thing to spendng time with Walt, but that would be selling the experience short–it was a pleasure in and of itself. She was a gracious and intelligent lady who took good care of Pogo and friends, then and in the years to come.

In 1977 or so, I asked Selby to autograph my well-loved copy of Pogo Parade #1, whose inside front cover featured a letter from Walt with a (printed) signature. Their names look good together, don’t they?

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1 comment on “RIP, Selby Kelly”

  1. Apart from her status as Kelly’s wife and keeping “Pogo” alive for a year or so after his death, Selby had an interesting career on her own: ink and painting at Disney, re-connecting with Kelly as an animator/assistant at MGM, a full animator on the feature “Shinbone Alley”, and checking for R.O. Blechmans “A Soldier’s Tale.” And she was certainly a much better steward of Kelly’s legacy and strip than, say, Audrey J. Geisel (even “I Go Pogo,” which she was associate producer for, while falling short, wasn’t in the same league of catstrophe as Myers’ “Cat in the Hat,” clearly intended to make money), and she did a decent job, I thought, along with the Kelly kids, of keeping Pogo around through book reprints, the Fantagraphics series, the brief but actually halfway decent comic strip revival, and so on. Compared to the ubiquity of Seuss merchandise, may not be much, but it also helped to maintain the characters’ integrity.

    She weill be missed, and I really wish I’d seen “We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us.”

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