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Wayback Weekend Anniversaries – Endings: Pogo, Scopes, Bodé

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D. D. Degg Updated: July 21, 2025 at 11:59 am EDT 1 minute 2 comments

Pogo, Scopes, Bodé

We’ll Not Meet His Like Again

Fifty years ago, on July 20, 1975, 21 months after Walt Kelly died, Pogo ended.

That same day Bill Vaughan, a contributor to the comic strip in its last couple of years, said goodbye:

Religion v. Science

One hundred years ago tomorrow The Scopes Monkey Trial was decided.

The story thus far: Tennessee State Representative John W. Butler, head of the World Christian Fundamentals Association, pushed eponymous legislation through to Governor Austin Peay signing it into law, banning the teaching of evolutionary science in Tennessee public schools. A Dayton coal and iron company executive, George Rappleyea, thought it would be good publicity for his town to challenge the Butler Act in court.

Paul Berge brings us the action by way of editorial cartoons in two parts: The Trial Starts and The Verdict.

Going Underground

It was sometime in 1974, and I was extremely nervous because I’d just affixed my signature to a mail-order form confirming — despite the fact that I had four more revolutions around the sun to go — that I was at least 18 years of age. I was already down the road to becoming a serious history and politics buff, partly due to reading about the mid-1950s U.S. Senate hearings that largely attributed postwar spates of juvenile delinquency to the deleterious effects of horror and true-crime comic books on impressionable young minds. That bureaucratized moral panic decimated the industry for over a decade, giving me a naif’s understanding of the machinations of government censorship — at least when it came to four-color blood and gore — and I worried that mailing in 50¢ for Junkwaffel #1 (1971, The Print Mint) would bring jack-booted postal inspectors kicking down my door to arrest me for lying on the form. 

Fifty years ago, on July 18, 1975, cartoonist Vaughn Bodé, creator of the Cheech Wizard and much more, died. R. C. Baker for The Village Voice remembers and profiles Vaughn Bodé.