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Mm-hmm,  Toonerville is a town I founded and built.  I know that sounds strange, but I can explain.  It used to be my HO model train layout.  It used to be, when I owned a house in Cotulla, Texas, I had room for a four by twelve sheet of plywood on which to lay track, wire it up, build scenery, and run my model trains (and two different versions of the Toonerville Trolley).

Toonerville is named after Fontaine Fox’s Toonerville Folks comic strip that appeared in newspapers from 1915 until the 1950’s.  A book of Fox’s collected Toonerville cartoons became my most prized possession during my college days, the second half of the 1970’s.  More than just a favorite book, it became my religion, my Bible, influencing not only my art style and my cartoon stories, but my very perception of small town life, the only life I knew from…

I was once an avid reader of the Sunday Funnies.  I loved the madcap world of Dogpatch, Lil’ Abner, Mammy Yokum, and all.  I also loved Pogo and his creator, Walt Kelly, but I’m sure you probably realized that already.  I believe I basically grew up in Dogpatch.  Rowan, Iowa is a small rural farm town.  Romance is basically a matter of running away from the girls and eventually tiring out enough to get caught and married.  I was a good athlete as a kid, probably why I didn’t get married until I was thirty-eight.  More than one of the old church ladies was a Mammy Yokum.  They fought the good fight for what is right by using a fast fist, a good dose of tonic, and an imperious, “I have spoken!”  I married a woman like that.  I had a Great Grandma that even looked like Mammy Yokum.  There…

Recently, in a Dallas area restaurant which will remain nameless in this post because Bugsy Bugswatter doesn’t deserve free advertising for his dead cockroach parfaits after the recent food poisoning of several teachers who couldn’t afford to go to McDonald’s instead on Texas’ overly-generous teachers’ salaries, Betty Boop and Popeye the Sailor met for coffee and a chance to reminisce about the good old days at Fleischer Studios in the 1930’s.  I happened to overhear their conversation because I was in the next booth trying to choke down a semi-nutritious garden-weed salad with dung-beetle protein wafers.

 Betty; “Oh, Popeye, it is so nice to see you again.  You look so Boop-boop-i-doop after all these years.”

Popeye; “Aw, yer jest sayin’ that cuz it’s true.  ‘Course we is cartoon carickachurs, and being in movie cartoons makes ya immortalized sorta.”

Betty; “That’s true. I still have my girlish figure even though…

I gave you fair warning.  Pogo has been coming to Mickey’s Catch a Falling Star Blog for a while now.  So, if you intended to avoid it, TOO BAD!  You are here now in Okefenokee Swamp with Pogo and the gang, and subject to Mickey’s blog post about Walt Kelly and his creations.

Walt Kelly began his cartoon hall-of-fame career in 1936 at Walt Disney Studios.  If you watch the credits in Pinocchio, Fantasia, and Dumbo, you will see Walt listed as an animator and Disney artist.  In fact, he had almost as much influence on the Disney graphic style as Disney had on him.  He resigned in 1941 to work at Dell Comics where he did projects like the Our Gang comics that you see Mickey smirking at here, the Uncle Wiggly comics, Raggedy Ann and Andy comics, and his very own creations like Pogo, which would go on…