Pokey The Penguin - Content and Style

Content and Style

Pokey lives in the Arctic, unlike most penguins, which live in the Southern Hemisphere. He is accompanied by several recurring characters, of which the "Little Girl" is the most commonly seen. His main antagonists are the Italians, whom Pokey suspects of intending to steal his Arctic Circle-Candy (which grows in the Arctic). The Italians are usually represented by a ship on the horizon flying the Italian flag; an actual Italian was seen for the first time in a comic posted in late February 2008. In the first strip, Pokey is described as an "educational children's cartoon".

Pokey's artistic style is deliberately crude, even childish. The artwork has rough pixelated edges, jagged lines, and few colors (the hallmarks of Microsoft Paint drawings), and characters are almost always copied and pasted after their first appearance. The comic has been described as resembling "the ramblings of a deranged child". Most minor characters are exact copies of Pokey—the various "Chicken" characters are not chickens, but ordinary penguins, and the "Bear" is merely a brown penguin; the "Dinosaur" a green penguin. The comic strips are filled with visible corrections: some words are crossed out, while images are occasionally scribbled over. Some words are left misspelled, such as "haggas".

Pokey the Penguin's lettering consists entirely of italicized capitals. The typeface is exclusively Courier, is italicized by shifting pixels of each successive horizontal row further to the left, and is never anti-aliased. Sentences often end without punctuation, or end with multiple exclamation marks or question marks, usually separated by spaces.

The strip's dialogue is surreal and often peppered with obscure allusions; illustrative quotes include "HERE ON RUM ISLAND WE DO NOT BELIEVE IN RUM!" and "IN MEAT-SPACE, MR. NUTTY, EVERYONE IS YOUR FRIEND! ! !" Most strips lack clear punch lines. The comic introduced the expression "Chicago-style", meaning to do something without pants.

Two animated Pokey adventures (which originally appeared in 2002) have been released into the "Hall of Whimsy", which also suggests forthcoming availability of Pokey shirts and a book.