Walt Kelly was the creator of the popular and acclaimed comic strip "Pogo," whose memorable characters and potent political satire set a new standard for topical humor and complexity in the mid-twentieth century. At its peak, the comic strip was carried in more than four hundred newspapers with an estimated readership of over twenty million in the United States and abroad. The work of Kelly has influenced the creators of "Bone," "Calvin and Hobbes," "Liberty Meadows," "Mutts," and hundreds of other comic strips and books.

Walter Crawford Kelly was born on August 25, 1913, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. While he was still a child, Kelly's family moved to Bridgeport, Connecticut. Kelly's father, who worked in a munitions plant but dabbled in painting and drawing, exposed his son to art and art technique. Recalling an early artwork he did when he was a child, Kelly told Steve Thompson in Comics Journal: "I...