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Rating:  -
E. C. Segar was a comic genius, but just how great a genius becomes clear as you read his Popeye stories in this beautifully reproduced new series from Fantagraphics. Popeye himself is one of the most fascinating and complex characters in American fiction, a tender-hearted ruffian who clobbers not just big thugs but also puny bystanders, and yet somehow never seems the least bit like a bully. Popeye was still taking shape in Popeye Vol. 1: "I Yam What I Yam" (Popeye), but he's completely present in the new book, and now it's the turn of supporting characters like Roughhouse and Wimpy--Segar's second-greatest comic creation--to emerge before our eyes. I hope these wonderful books are getting the support they deserve. Their only drawback is that it's a year between volumes.
Rating: -
Popeye the Sailor, a mainstay of modern popular mythology, blasticates his way through another delectable volume. Morality doesn't know what hit it. The one-eyed squawking proto-Superman plot device who appeared in 1929 continues to bully his way to justice with dirigible forearms and pile driver fists. So much so that, sometime in 1931 the previous alpha male, Castor Oyl, unceremoniously vanishes. Sadly, many may not notice his absence. By the Skullyville adventure, about 70 pages in, Popeye has fully usurped the strip. Duo becomes solo. Olive Oyl, Castor's sister, fills the void and brings the strip to fruition. Her battles with Popeye's personality and Popeye's battles with himself give the strip a sniper focus and a razor edge. Popeye emerges as one of the most complicated characters to ever darken newsprint. He has a heart of gold. Most of the time. The rest of the time his convoluted ideas of justice result in much pummeling of innocents. On the first page, in a very un-PC strip, he wallops an Indian because "I read all about you swabs in story books and ya ain't goner scalop me - savvy?" Later, when he whacks another one Olive reprimands him. His only excuse: "I yam what I yam." He hits cows, again to Olive's chagrin. He accidentally mauls a stranger, apologizing afterwards that "I thought ya was somebody else." He promises repeatedly to Olive he'll give up fighting, only to use the situation to his advantage. Olive proudly kisses him, not seeing the well hidden and thoroughly trodden victims. He also spurns Olive's cooking to her abysmal heartbreak. To complicate things, Popeye gives $500,000 to a random poor child, rescues an orphan from abusive and refuses reward money, and befriends all the neighborhood children. A heartwarming contrast to the pulverizing vigilante. But the hardest, most unforgivable, strip to stomach occurs on April 14, 1932. Here he actually smacks Olive across the face.She later proves her fortitude by saving him from vultures. She only plays the helpless woman. She's anything but (as the 13 outlaws she shoots in the shoulder and throws in the cellar can attest to). This strip has depth.
And other surprises await: this volume finally eradicates the total vacuous absence of spinach from Volume One. Though Popeye already possesses Herculaen strength, spinach enables him to take on twenty men, which happens in the July 3rd, 1932 Sunday panel. Here spinach culminates as a Vitamin A coup d'état. The twenty fall like toothpicks in a typhoon of fists. Earlier that year, a heaping pile of spinach gives Popeye the boost he needs to flatten an unflattenable roughneck. After he plummets, people rush to Roughhouse's counter demanding a helping. In the final panel, Popeye tells mothers to "tell yer youngstirs I said they should eat spinach and vegetables on account of I wants 'em to be strong an' helthy - I will be a persnal fren of all chil'ren who eats what their maw says to eat." Popeye's sensitive side once again percolates. And, best of all, Mr. Wimpy appears in full splendor as the embodiment of pathetic manipulation and gluttony. Though the depression and hunger earn him some sympathy. It works on Popeye... sometimes. Wimpy also referees all Popeye's fights (which begs the question as to why he's so poor, but there you have it). His mantra "I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today!" resonates through the Sunday strips (he doesn't appear in this volume's dailies). The appearances of spinach and Wimpy makes this an unforgettable read. Try not to keep turning the beach blanket sized pages.
Fans of volume one will find much to succor in this volume. E.C. Segar's brilliant amalgam of adventure, comedy, bizarre romance, melodrama, violence, and head scratching morality inexorably carries on. The tension rises, the strip focuses, and the sailor reigns undeterred (even against gorillas and robots). To claim this strip inspires philosophical reflection is no exagerration. It's no wonder Castor Oyl quietly stepped aside and let the steamroller sailor take the wheel. Not that he could have stopped him if he tried. Like unflinching Sisyphus, nothing stops Popeye. But Bluto will appear in volume three... I guess we'll see.
Rating: -
Do yourself a big favor right off the bat: skip Donald Phelps' jargon-choked, muddy mess of a preamble and dive right into the strips themselves. If you read Volume 1, you pretty much know the drill anyway. In these daily and Sunday strips from 1931-32, Segar is still burnishing the character of Popeye while slowly starting to develop the sailor man's stable of supporting players. Wimpy makes his first appearance as a referee in a Sunday sequence featuring "sprize fighter" Popeye's bout with the man-mountain Tinearo, then gradually infiltrates the ranks of regular patrons at Rough House's Café (which also debuts here, along with its hirsute, gruff, opinionated manager) and wastes little time in firmly establishing his murmuring, hamburger-mooching persona. There are big doings "below the fold" as well, in the supplementary Sunday strip "Sappo"; after a long spell as a backyard inventor, John Sappo welcomes Prof. O.G. Wottasnozzle into his home, and wild flights of fancy are not long in arriving. (Reflecting Segar's love of outdoor sports, a number of these early gadgets and gizmos relate to making hunting and fishing easier... which, of course, they don't.) The highlight of the daily "Thimble Theatre" strip during this period is "The Great Rough-House War" (no, it has nothing to do with bad food) between worrywart King Blozo's Nazilia and "cowardly" Tonsylvania. This may be regarded as a sort of warm-up act for Segar's most ambitious and fondly remembered political parody, the "Dictator of Spinachovia" story of the mid-30s, but it holds up very well on its own. The silly struggle packages a strong pacifist message, no surprise given the tenor of the times. Before the war story, Popeye (with a surprisingly large amount of help from a pistol-packin' Olive Oyl) polishes off Western outlaw Glint Gore and his gang, then uses the reward money to open a "one-way bank" that offers free funds to the disbelieving, Depression-straitened citizenry. The latter story stings a little bit too much to be a real laugh-riot today, but those who contend that Popeye's world is completely oblivious of our own will have to contend with a strong counter-argument here. After boosting Blozo, Popeye then saves Olive from Bluto... sorry, force of habit... from the fate of a worked-to-death barroom dancer in "Skullyville, the Toughest Town in the World," another Western setting. Was Segar working out a personal fetish for sagebrush opi in doing the Skullyville story so soon after the Glint Gore epic?
With the debuts of Swee'Pea and (fatefully) Bluto to come in Volume 3, the spinach-powered momentum of Segar's wonderful strip is just beginning to kick in. Too bad that we'll have to wait a full year to enjoy the next batch.
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