The brilliant Walt Kelly, one time Disney artist and creator, artist and writer of Pogo, one of the greatest comic strips aver produced, at one point turned his hand to an interpretation (it you want to call it that) of Clement Moore’s familiar Christmas poem, A Visit From St. Nicholas, which many small children know by its first line, ”Twas the night before Christmas”.
In Kelly’s delightfully loopy version, infused with a bit of political satire for its time, the poem starts:
‘Twas the night before Xmas,
When all through the moon
Not a creature was stirring
Not even a spoon;
and goes on from there to get silly.
Roger Ebert, the jolly old soul, has gifted us with a reprinting of Kelly’s comic strip with Pogo and Albert dashing through their version of the story, and has included high-resolution images (click on the ones in the column) with which we can find extra holiday cheer in Kelly’s beautiful pen and ink lines.
[Via Escape into Life]