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By Naoko Takeuchi. Released in Japan by Kodansha, serialized in the magazine Run Run. Released in North America by Kodansha Comics.

(This review contains spoilers for this volume, as well as Volume 2 of Sailor Moon.)

It is possible that I implied in the review of the first volume of Sailor V that the second volume would be a lot more serious and dramatic. Which it is… in about the last 30 pages. I was going by hazy memories of reading the series years ago using raws and online text translations. But no, 85% of this manga is just as fast paced, wacky and fluffy as the earlier one, and Minako goes to even more over the top heights.

This is the final volume, and the reissue is almost 300 pages, so there’s a lot to take in. One thing I noticed right away is that Minako’s secret is exposed, something that the Sailor Moon anime experimented with quite a bit, but usually it was villains discovering their identities only to be killed off before they could tell anyone else. Here it’s the Inspector General of the police department, who happens to be a giant Sailor V otaku, and she manages to put two and two together by simply being in the right place – she sees V disappear behind a corner, and Minako reemerge two seconds later. The senshi’s ‘disguise magic’ has never really been gone into in great depth, and this is the closest we’ll get to it. Of course, everything ends up working out for Minako in the end.

There’s also Artemis, who gets a bit more focus here. As most of these chapters were written during or after Sailor Moon proper, there’s a lot more crossover and references to the other series. As a result, we can not only contrast Usagi and Minako, but also their animal guardians. For all that he desperately tries to get Minako to grow up and respect her duties as a senshi, Artemis can be just as impetuous and overreacting as his charge. At one point he feels so unappreciated by Minako (who really is callous in the chapter, the closest she gets to being a jerk in this series) that he runs away – then is stunned Minako never even noticed. More to the point, the chapter where he falls for the ‘puppy’ Luna is entertaining but also enlightening. We see that his memories are NOT as hazy as Minako’s, and that he definitely does remember Luna – and misses her a lot more than he lets on. Again, some nice detail that we can get now that the other series has been planned out.

(Speaking of which, one way you can tell that these chapters are written well after the Moon manga is the shot of the fictional manga artists’ 10 heroines – it’s clearly a silhouette of all 10 senshi, complete with the Outers and Chibi-Usa.)

For those who enjoyed the humor in the first volume, there’s some hysterical stuff here. Minako’s speeches to the enemy alone are worth the price. And fans of the best Minako anime episode (and one of the top 5 episodes of Sailor Moon period) will be delighted to here of the chapter where she gives blood – including using the disguise pen to age herself up and lie about her age! There’s a ton of side comments by the author in the dialogue boxes or in narrative form, which is highly cute but can also be a bit messy – I think this manga shows Takeuchi sort of unfettered, and we see a lot of chatter that the Moon manga didn’t have. (Josei manga Codename Sailor V!)

And of course there’s the finale. Minako has spent two volumes crushing on (and then abandoning or getting rejected by) any number of hot guys, and the start of this volume shows the up and coming young actor and possible ally, Phantom Ace! Of course, readers of Sailor Moon will see the word ‘Phantom’ and raise an eyebrow. Not that it’s meant to be a big secret, but surprise, Ace is actually the villain of the piece. His final battle with V involves more property damage than we’ve ever seen before (and V has had a LOT of property damage!), and it’s in the midst of this that she regains her memories of the Moon Kingdom, and her past life as Venus. It’s a radical shift in tone – Minako’s regaining her memories looks horribly painful, and it’s not clear if it’s due to the sudden inrush or simply having to relive her failure to save Princess Serenity.

The most fascinating part of the manga for me is the final pages after Minako has defeated Phantom Ace (or ‘Danburite’, as he is actually known). He’s occasionally told love fortunes with a pack of playing cards in previous chapters, and now he really hits Minako hard with his final one – she will never find love, and will always choose duty over it. Given Venus is the senshi of love, and Minako’s basic vivaciousness, this is quite a blow… or so one might think. I am recalling that this guy also professed to be madly in love with her in their past life. Minako’s issue throughout the 2 volumes has been focus – Artemis can’t get her to take her V duties seriously because she keeps running off after guys. Now she’s basically told, Venus is what you do as well as who you are. You never have to worry about having to make a difficult choice. It’s sort of heartwarming in its callousness, and will also be touched upon towards the end of the Sailor Moon series, where we see that Minako has come to terms with and accepted that being a Senshi and protecting her princess is her highest priority.

And so we come to the end of Sailor V, as Takeuchi briefly ties in with Minako’s appearance in Sailor Moon by implying she’ll be working with the Inspector General to fight crime for a bit (which the other manga noted she did before joining the others.) You don’t have to read Sailor Moon to understand Sailor V, but there are lots of cute references and in-jokes you’ll appreciate if you do – I liked Ami’s appearance towards the end, as if Takeuchi realized she was the only Inner she hadn’t written in yet. But really, Sailor V is much like its heroine, Minako Aino. A bit hyperactive, dizzy, gets off the point a lot, and talks constantly, but is filled with energy and life. I thank Kodansha Comics for picking it up after so many years. And now we can read Minako’s further adventures in future volumes of Sailor Moon.

(Hey, who was their boss anyway? It can’t have been Luna… Queen Serenity’s sentient recording again?)

By Walt Kelly. Released in North America from 1948 to 1950, first published by the New York Star, then Hall Syndicate. This new edition released by Fantagraphics.

Yes, it’s no longer a myth, the book we have been waiting for for four and a half years is finally here. A huge, collected hardcover of the Pogo comic strip, covering its first year and a half of syndication, as well as the early New York Star strips. And even if you have a bunch of old Simon & Schuster Pogo books from the 1950s such as The Pogo Papers, or the 1980s reprints such as The Best of Pogo, this is still a worthy purchase. The strip looks great, the Sundays are in color, and the whole thing reads like the labor of love it is.

As I said before when recommending the purchase of the book, Pogo was one of the first things I ever read. Yes, I suppose there was Dr. Seuss and Richard Scarry in there as well, but I also had copies of We Have Met The Enemy And He Is Us and Bats and the Belles Free that I had found in a used bookstore, and read them until they fell apart. Because Kelly has created a world rather than a comic strip, and one does not so much read it as bathe in it. It took me several days to read this volume, because I wanted to read everything slowly. The dialogue, the pacing, the situations… even when everyone’s running around and crazy events are going on, it’s still not what I would call hectic. This is good old fashioned Southern Okefenokee adventure, written by a man who grew up in my own home state of Connecticut.

For those who are unfamiliar with the strip, it could be described as a talking animals strip if you want to get that simple. Pogo is a possum who lives in the middle of the swamp, and he is also the straight man around whose life his crazier and funnier friends revolve. There’s the impulsive Albert Alligator, the pseudo-intellectual Howland Owl, grumpy yet lovable Porkypine, and the ditzy yet likeable turtle Churchy LaFemme. (Can men be ditzy? Or male turtles?) There’s also a whole pile of ancillary characters, many of whom debut here – Kelly would bring them in and out of the strip as he pleased, but those are the ones I’d consider the core cast.

For the most part, the strip varies between one-shot gag type strips (Kelly loved wordplay, and the book is filled with bad puns, as if Churchy LaFemme’s name alone didn’t warn you) and longer more intricate adventure strips, many of which seem to involve everyone thinking Albert has accidentally eaten someone else (sometimes he has – the beauty of comic strips is that creatures can survive quite a long time after being eaten by an alligator – they can even play cards!). Strangely, Albert is no less sympathetic for this, as he never does this out of malice or hunger, just carelessness. Indeed, one of the earliest satirical strips involves some of the villains setting up a sham trial to prove Albert guilty of eating the cute little Pup Dog, and Albert is clearly meant to get the reader’s sympathy.

For those more familiar with the strip, there is some satirical content here (mostly the arc I just mentioned), but we have not gotten too political just yet. In later volumes Pogo will delve further into the realm of political and social criticism, and indeed by the 1960s you may see why more folks compare it to Doonesbury than, say, Shoe, but here Kelly is taking it easy and building up his strip’s popularity. The villains tend to be as broad as the heroes, with Seminole Sam briefly taking a turn as a carnivore (along with the far more malevolent and nasty Wiley Catt) before Kelly realized that he actually made a far more effective villain as a shyster and small-time crook. What’s more, most of the situations Pogo and company find themselves in are made by the heroes themselves – Albert, Owl and Churchy are all easily led, and can change their minds whenever they please. Sometimes Pogo just finds himself going along with the craziness, trying vainly to put in a good word for sense. And by ‘sometimes’ I mean ‘for the next twenty-four years’.

I’d mentioned Kelly grew up in Connecticut, and indeed the dialect used in the strip is not genuinely Southern so much as ‘Southern once or twice removed, then exaggerated for comic effect’. But it’s amazing to read, and works very well when read aloud (another reason I took so long to read the book). Many critics have taken the time to examine Kelly’s written dialect, and it easily fulfills one of my own pet bugaboos about written speech: it has to sound like someone would actually say it. This is harder for many writers than you might think, but there’s no question that the swamp denizens are engaging in dialogues that are not only funny and engaging but sound real – even if they don’t necessarily sound Southern.

Kelly started to do Sunday color strips a few months after the syndicated debut, and they’ve been collected before, but usually in black and white. These are in color for I believe the first time since they appeared in newspapers. The introduction notes this was the main reason why the book kept getting delayed – cleaning the Sunday strips, and finding ones that could be published, was a major chore. They look fine here, about as good as I think you’re going to get when dealing with 60-year-old comics where the original art is long since lost. While the strips could occasionally be in continuity with the dailies, more often than not the Sunday Pogos had their own continuity from week to week. I was particularly fond of the Fountain of Youth story, which features much of what Pogo does best – immediate misconceptions and overreactions.

Fantagraphics has a nice introduction giving a brief biography of Kelly, and describing many of the struggles he had with Pogo and syndication. There is also a fantastic notes section at the end, which points out historical trivia as well as giving the context for some of the strips. Two of the main villains of the story where Albert is falsely accused are based on newspaper publishers William Randolph Hearst and Robert McCormick, something I would have been totally ignorant of as a child. As the strip got more satirical, we’d see more swamp animals based on real life figures, usually political. We’ll have to wait for Volume 3 for the most famous one, however.

It’s possible that the appeal of Pogo may be lost on folks who are so used to everything that it influenced, be it talking animal comedies or political satires. Doesn’t matter to me, though. This strip is funny, well-drawn, and features a huge mass of likeable characters doing entertaining things. Put it together with Fantagraphics’ excellent presentation, and you have a definite must-buy. I will assume that Volume 2 will be out this fall, and that the wait for future volumes will not be as long as the wait for this one, even if it was totally worth it.