[Earth Day has been around for more than 50 years, but it’s more important than ever here in 2026. So for this year’s commemorations I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of the folks who helped create & popularize the holiday, leading up to a special weekend tribute to the work of two of our most impressive young environmental activists!]
On why the iconic cartoonist’s Earth Day special wasn’t surprising, and why it’s so important nonetheless.
By the time of its famous 1970 Earth Day comic, Walt Kelly’s groundbreaking and influential daily comic strip Pogo had been in existence and syndicated for more than 20 years. Even more relevantly, Pogo had been explicitly taking on current and political events since at least 1953-54, when Kelly introduced the character Simple J. Malarkey, a villainous wildcat who is clearly satirizing Senator Joseph McCarthy (in a moment when he was still a powerful figure and a dangerous one to cross). Across the many strips that featured his villainy Malarkey was assisted first by Mole MacCarony, a satire of the right-wing and xenophobic Nevada Senator Patric McCarran; and later by a badger named Charlie, a satire of McCarthy’s supposed mentor “Indian Charlie” (seriously, you have to read about that potentially imaginary and definitely racist figure from McCarthy’s past for yourself, by searching that hyperlinked web text for that fraught phrase and seeing what you find; you won’t be sorry, or maybe you will be but I am too and we’re in this together).
Got a bit far afield in that parenthesis (for a good reason, as you know if you learned for yourself about “Indian Charlie”), but you get the idea: Pogo had a longstanding commitment to engaging with political and social issues; and so both Kelly’s overall participation in the original Earth Day celebrations and his specific choice to do so through a pretty striking poster—featuring Pogo himself confronting litter and other man-made environmental degradations and destructions, with the accompanying caption “WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY AND HE IS US” (a humorous but also deeply powerful misquoting of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry’s War of 1812 line “We have met the enemy and they are ours”)—were certainly in keeping with the tenor and tone of his comic strip and artistic and professional career. If this was the last nationally prominent Pogo moment during its more than 25-year syndicated run—and since Kelly passed away in 1973 and the strip went out of syndication in 1975 it seems quite possible that that was the case—then it was a very appropriate one indeed.
Something doesn’t have to be surprising or unexpected for it to be important, of course, and I would argue that Kelly’s Earth Day comic/poster was a very important part of the 1970 events. Part of that is due precisely to how longstanding and well-established the comic strip was by that moment, both overall and in terms of its specific tone and topics; for an event and holiday trying to just get off the ground, being associated with such an iconic comic and influential cultural presence offered an unquestionable and potent leg up. But Kelly’s participation also helps drive home a complicated and key goal of the Earth Day founders and their allies—to take the event’s and movement’s conversations beyond the activist and academic communities from which they had originated, to connect them to broader audiences including (indeed, especially) younger Americans, such as those in the classrooms with which the event partnered. Like most of the best daily comic strips, Pogo was aimed at adult audiences at least as much as at kids—but the title character is still an adorable opossum, and I have no doubt that connecting him to Earth Day helped bring that occasion to youthful as well as simply broader public audiences in significant and successful ways.
Last Earth Day figure tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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