Comics Review: The Complete Popeye, Volume IV: "Plunder Island", E. C. Segar

This is a slightly revised version of an essay that was originally published at The Hooded Utilitarian in 2010. It was part of a contributor's roundtable on E. C. Segar's Popeye. For other contributions to the roundtable, click here. Matthias Wivel's piece, which was written partially in response to my essay, is of particular interest. Click here.

No reference is made in my essay, but it was written shortly after two articles by Caroline Small on the state of comics criticism. (To read those pieces, click here and here.) Small's arguments, and the comment discussions they prompted, informed aspects of what I wrote.

Reading through my reviews of E. C. Segar's The Complete Popeye, Volume I (click here), Volume II (click here), and Volume III (click here), one repeated phrase jumps out at me: “largely of historical interest.” The challenge I gave the work was for it to transcend that description. It occasionally did. There were flashes of satirical and absurdist genius every now and then. “The One-Way Bank” storyline from Volume II and the finale of “The Eighth Sea” storyline from Volume III stood out. I was especially taken with Volume II’s “The Nazilia-Tonsylania War.” Its treatment of government and military folly ranks with Dr. Strangelove (almost) and Duck Soup. (No pun was intended with the name “Nazilia,” by the way.) But Segar was generally far more enamored with farce and slapstick for their own sake than he was with satire. That greatly limits the appeal of his work, at least for this reader. Farce and slapstick that don’t connect with anything more profound are best in small doses. They tend to wear out their welcome fairly quickly. Unfortunately, that’s the bulk of what one finds in the first three volumes, and as readers of my original reviews can see, I got myself over my disappointment by convincing myself that the strips in the first three collections were preludes to the more celebrated material (such as “Plunder Island”) that was featured in the fourth and fifth volumes. Segar’s Popeye enjoys canonical status in the world of comics, and I wanted that reputation to be truly warranted. I didn’t want to believe that, despite occasional moments of brilliance, the strip was best considered a noteworthy pop-culture period piece.

“Plunder Island,” the Sunday-strip continuity showcased in Volume IV, is widely considered Segar’s finest work on the strip. On its own terms, it’s an entertaining treasure-island quest story, one that Segar’s talent for farce considerably livens up. The best moments are the most incongruous ones, such as the scenes where the smooth-talking moocher Wimpy saves his own neck by romancing the story’s villains, the Sea Hag and her monstrous henchwoman Alice the Goon. I also got a kick out of the story’s climax, wherein Popeye realizes that he can’t just take the treasure--that would be stealing from the Sea Hag--so he decides to win it away from her by playing craps. The story is a more sophisticated version of many of the animated Popeye cartoons I saw as a kid in the 1970s--the dialogue is certainly a lot denser than what one finds in children’s animation--but I’m afraid that it’s nothing more than a strong exemplar of what it now appears Segar’s Popeye generally was. It’s not the epitome of what the strip could be at its best. Storylines like “The Nazilia-Tonsylania War” were the exceptions, not the rule. On the whole, Segar’s Popeye is a moderately enjoyable slapstick-adventure farce and a likable example of Depression-era popular entertainment. The strip doesn’t offer a lot more than that, and it leaves me, as it somewhat did with Noah Berlatsky (click here, wondering about the basis of its canonical status and the comics canon in general.

My own guess is that when dealing with ostensibly “classic” comics, the basic standard has been that they hold their own with the popular entertainment they appeared alongside of. Comics like Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates, Will Eisner’s The Spirit, and the E. C. comic-book line look positively impoverished when considered against their contemporaries among the avant-garde of writing, art, and filmmaking. But they compare pretty well to the popular movies, radio, and fiction of their day. The same is true of Segar’s Popeye. No reasonable person would consider it on the level of William Faulkner, Vasily Kandinsky, or Jean Renoir’s work, but it looks right at home when viewed alongside the efforts of Mae West or W. C. Fields. I have nothing against the popular-entertainment standard for determining “good” comics, by the way. If a comic entertains people, it’s doing its job. And if it’s entertaining people to the extent that it becomes a pop-culture phenomenon, which Segar’s Popeye certainly did, then it’s doing its job terrifically well.

The problem arises with the perception that it’s a canonical work. Harold Bloom provided a fairly uncontroversial definition of literature’s canon when he described it as “the choice of books in our teaching institutions.” I think that holds true when talking about any media being studied. The canon is the material used to teach students about the art form. The prospect of Segar’s Popeye being used to teach students about comics just doesn’t sit well with me. The strip’s stature points to the need for a new standard of canonicity for the field. Comics needs a T. S. Eliot, André Bazin, or Clement Greenberg to up-end our understanding of the medium and our judgments of its works. I perceive Segar’s Popeye as a period piece, but I can’t summon a rigorous aesthetic basis for that view. All I can muster is my own idiosyncratic opinion. I also don’t see much of anyone else doing differently. The strip makes me feel more like a pretentious comics fan than a critic when I write about it. The salve to my self-esteem is that I’m not as pretentious as those who put it on its pedestal to begin with.

Comics Review: The Complete Popeye, Volume III: "Let's You and Him Fight", E. C. Segar

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

The Complete Popeye, Volume III collects E. C. Segar's daily Thimble Theater strips from June 9, 1932 through December 9, 1933, the Sundays from October 9, 1932 through November 26, 1933, and a 1933 advertising insert featuring the Thimble Theater characters that promotes the 1934 World's Fair in Chicago. This collection doesn't have anything comparable to the absurdist highs of the Volume II strips. The satirical impulse behind the "One-Way Bank" and Nazilia-Tonsylania War storylines isn't as conspicuous. Segar's focus this time out is all but exclusively on slapstick and character comedy. He does it well, particularly with his handling of the Wimpy character, who dominates the Sunday strips featured here. Overall, though, the book doesn't quite escape the damning-with-faint-praise label "of largely historical interest".

However, it should be said that there is a great deal of historical interest present, particularly in "The Eighth Sea" sequence that covers Chapters I-III. The animators Max and Dave Fleischer licensed the Thimble Theater material for adaptation around the time these strips were originally published. "The Eighth Sea" gave them their recurring antagonist for Popeye: the bearded, musclebound sailor/pirate Bluto. It's not hard to see from these strips why the Fleischers and later animators chose to use Bluto as Popeye's perpetual nemesis. He's completely malevolent, he competes with Popeye for the same goals, and he's the only character who can hold his own with Popeye in a fight. The climactic brawl between the two takes up two full weeks of dailies. What's most surprising is that Segar, at least in this volume, never brings Bluto back. (Segar was certainly happy to include the spinach from this point on. Popeye's love for the vegetable--it gives him "strenk an' vitaliky"--first appears in this sequence as well, and it becomes a recurring element of the strip.) A good hero is almost always defined by a good villain. Bluto, who is so greedy that he steals the gold fillings from his henchmen's teeth, comes closer to being Popeye's antithesis than any other character.

Bluto (and spinach) aside, "The Eighth Sea" sequence is the strongest of the daily continuities in this volume. Segar structures it in distinct sections, all of which have their defining piece of slapstick. The story revolves around Popeye's quest to find Dooma, "a lost city of gold in an unknown sea." His journey is hampered by one complication after another. A "black Chinese parrot" is the only way of finding the island, but Popeye finds it quite uncooperative. It tells him to learn to speak English before trying to talk to it in Chinese. Olive Oyl insists on coming along, but Popeye won't hear of it. As they're not married, he feels she needs a "shappyroon" if she's to accompany him. Anyway, it's bad luck to have a woman along on a treasure hunt. His crew feel the same way, and after Olive forces Popeye to take her along (she parachutes onto his boat once it's at sea), he has to quell a mutiny. The battle royale with Bluto is the sequence's centerpiece scene. A good deal of time is also taken up with Merlock Jones, a stowaway detective who confounds the various characters with his mastery of disguise.

The satirical tack that distingushed the dailies in Volume II isn't entirely absent. Popeye returns to Nazilia at the end of "The Eighth Sea" adventure, and King Blozo is now flush with gold for the nation's treasury. Popeye tells him he should share it with the nation's citizens, a course of action that Blozo, despite his initial objections, eventually goes along with. But when every citizen receives the gold, they all choose to retire and live a life of luxury. The country of course grinds to a complete halt, with the citizenry complaining, "How can we spend the gold you gave us? All the stores and shops are closed. There ain't no place open." The Nazilia sequence also features some sharp absurdist bits, such as the time Blozo decides to give a condemned prisoner clemency. The callousness on display is hilarious:

KING BLOZO: Well, if you haven't already cut off his head, why, don't cut it off--I've changed my mind.
EXECUTIONER: I think you're just trying to save my sixty-cent fee--you know my business has been bad--please let me execute him.
KING BLOZO: You say you need that fee to buy shoes for your kid?
EXECUTIONER: Yeah.
KING BLOZO: Oh, all right--go ahead.

It just isn't right to pay people unless they earn their keep.

The continuity that follows the initial sequence on Nazilia is disappointing. Popeye convinces King Blozo to let him have a neighboring island on which he can found his own country of Popilania. The text panel that introduces the story raises hopes that the story will reach the satirical heights of the Nazilia-Tonsylania War storyline. It describes Popilania as a utopia where "trouble will be unknown" and "spinach will be the national crop," but it gets bogged down with Popeye's dealings with a prelapsarian native population. A war with the nation of Cuspidor seems to mine the same vein of humor as the Nazilia-Tonsylania conflict, and the competition between Popeye and King Blozo for Nazilia's citizenry just seems frivolous, if not outright juvenile. Some humor hasn't worn well over the decades. Jokes about attracting single young men with comely brides who don't speak a word of their language now seem fairly gross.

The bright spot of the Popilania sequence is the addition of Wimpy to the daily strip's cast. The storyline highlights what an articulate and well-mannered coward he is. He's refreshingly straightforward in his insights, such as when he describes a diplomat as "a person who gives the worst sort of deal in a nice way." He's also quite honest about himself. Popeye berates him for abandoning Olive Oyl to the natives, and when Wimpy is asked why he replies, quite simply, "Self-preservation." Wimpy's insistence on good manners leads to some delightful moments as well. Popeye brutally insults a soldier in the Popilanian army, and Wimpy will have none of it:

WIMPY: You mustn't talk like that--do you want to hurt our army's feelings? Shame upon you!
POPEYE: Aw, pipe down!
WIMPY: There... there now, Mr. Shultz... don't you cry. Everything will be all right.

There's never any excuse for poor manners.

Wimpy really comes into his own in this volume's Sunday strips. Segar's treatment of him in the volume's dailies highlight other aspects of the character. But considered against the Sundays, they're just the icing on the cake. The Sundays feature him in all his mooching glory. Wimpy is always trying to cadge food out of the proprietor of the local diner. He constantly makes his classic promise, "I would gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger to-day." This is often accompanied by the less well-known "I want you to come to my house sometime for a duck dinner--you bring the ducks." His battery of tricks for getting food knows no shame. He steals fish from the city aquarium, and when he takes a job as a waiter, he can't resist temptation long enough to serve the customers' orders. He can't even follow through on a small act of charity. He buys a homeless man a hamburger and then eats the sandwich off the poor fellow's plate. Wimpy is sloth and selfishness incarnate, but the comic force of the character comes from his complete obliviousness to how self-centered he is. There's nothing the least bit self-conscious about him, and his shamelessness makes him oddly endearing.

It's hard to tell from this volume if there's a tension on Segar's part about which approach to stories he feels most comfortable with. Farce and slapstick are the strip's foundation, but he seems to be pulling back from the sharp satirical approach that's distinguished the best of his work so far. It's possible, though, that the volume reflects something a dry run. The final two daily continuities, which feature Popeye's adventures as a reporter and then as an amnesiac trying to take care of the baby Swee'Pea, are rather dull reads. Segar's reputation as a cartoonist is most based on the work in the years that followed this material--strips from 1936 through 1938 in particular seem the basis of his stature--and the work in this volume, though uneven, certainly doesn't dissuade one's anticipation of it.

Comics Review: The Complete Popeye, Volume I: "I Yam What I Yam," E. C. Segar

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

Popeye is an icon of American popular culture, but my memories of him all date back to the 1970s, and they're sketchy at best. I really only remember him from animated cartoons that aired on TV in syndication, which always seemed to revolve around him saving his girlfriend Olive Oyl from the clutches of the fat, bearded bad guy Brutus. (Bluto is the traditional name of this character, but he was always called Brutus in the shorts that I saw.) Popeye would always save the day with the help of eating spinach, which gave him invulnerability and super-strength. He was a grotesque, humorous version of the costumed superheroes I obsessed over as a kid, but instead of saving the world, or just his hometown, he only sought to protect the people close to him, whether it was Olive, the baby Swee'Pea, or his mooching hamburger-loving friend Wimpy.

As I grew older, I became increasingly aware that there was more to this character than the animation indicated. The original comic-strip Popeye was created in 1929 by cartoonist E. C. Segar. He was a supporting character in Segar's Thimble Theatre newspaper daily. Popeye was a crude, ignorant deckhand who loved to gamble his money away playing craps, and he was always spoiling for a fight. Segar (pronounced "SEE-gahr") had been producing the strip for about a decade when he introduced his good-hearted, malapropism-prone sailor, and nothing he had done up to that point ever generated the response that Popeye did. The character quickly took over the strip, and Segar came into his own as a cartoonist. The Thimble Theatre strips he produced between 1929 and his death in 1938 are considered perhaps the most sophisticated adventure material produced in the medium, and they are among the greatest newspaper comics ever published. When The Comics Journal listed their choices for the hundred greatest English-language comics of the twentieth century, Segar's Thimble Theatre Popeye strips ranked sixth among newspaper features, and eleventh overall. They enjoy the reputation of a comics masterpiece.

In 2006, Fantagraphics Books began publishing a projected six-volume reprinting of Segar's Popeye material. The books are scheduled to be released at the rate of one a year, and the third is due out any day now. The individual volumes are handsomely produced in a hardcover, oversized format. A week of the dailies are printed on each page, and a special color section is devoted to the Sunday strips. (The Sundays had a different story continuity than the dailies, so being printed in a separate section is appropriate.) The first volume includes the dailies published between September 10, 1928 and December 20, 1930, and the Sundays between March 2, 1930 and February 22, 1931. I read it filled with eager anticipation.

And it's not bad. I gather Segar was not yet at the height of his powers in these early strips. The world depicted in this volume is not the one the feature is famous for, and one senses its full realization is years away. Popeye, once he becomes a permanent member of the cast, shares center stage with the Castor Oyl character, who was the strip's initial star. Olive Oyl is barely present in this volume, and the strips devoted to her relationship with Popeye are relegated to the Sundays. There is no Swee'Pea and no Wimpy. (There is no spinach or Bluto/Brutus either, but Jules Feiffer makes clear in his introduction that those are fixtures of the animation, not Segar's original material.) The strip is a humorous adventure picaresque with occasionally fantastic elements, and the first volume reads pleasantly enough, but it's primarily of historical interest.

The initial storyline featured doesn't include Popeye at all. It begins with Castor Oyl, Olive's short, bald brother, receiving an African "whiffle hen" as a gift from his uncle. The bird is domesticated and friendly, but it moves super-fast, and Castor's uncle offers Castor a thousand dollars if he manages to do the impossible and kill it. Most of the episode deals Castor's repeated failure to win the money by killing the bird, and it plays like an early comic-strip version of the Road Runner/Wile E. Coyote animated shorts. It's one slapstick gag after another, and things get more outlandish as they continue. The storyline ends on a sweetly ironic note: the bird, named Bernice, interprets Castor's efforts to kill it as affectionate attention, and becomes devoted to him.

Popeye comes on the scene after Castor discovers that rubbing the bird's head is a guarantee of good luck. Castor buys a schooner to travel to an island gambling resort, and he hires Popeye to be his crew. Castor is a compulsive, impatient, and occasionally bullying fellow, and the dynamic between him and the hard-headed Popeye is frequently hilarious. The two are always arguing, whether it's about one using the "whiffle hen" to cheat the other at craps, or Castor's highhandedness and Popeye's insubordination, or the arguments between the two about Popeye's pay. Castor insists he's giving Popeye the "privilege" of being one man who does the work of twelve while being paid one man's wages, and Popeye sensibly argues that if he's going to be doing the work of twelve men, he should get twelve men's pay.

Money makes the world go 'round in Thimble Theatre, and many of the stories revolve around scrounging, get-rich-quick plots, and confidence schemes. Castor uses the "whiffle hen" to break the bank at a posh gambling resort. He gets swindled out of his millions in a land-speculation deal. He and Popeye try to turn a quick buck by entering Popeye as a ringer in boxing matches. In the first volume's final two daily continuities, Castor and Popeye's reputation as adventurers leads to them being offered large commissions to solve mysteries, and they open a detective agency. The strip revolves around the folly of greed, but it's not the wealthy man's greed of rapaciousness. It's working-class greed borne of desperation. These strips were created during the Great Depression, and they're heavily reflective of the period zeitgeist: the buck-chasing on display is motivated by the need to survive.

And Popeye is in many ways a working-class man's idealized view of himself. He may be poor, but he retains his dignity, and his fists-first approach cuts through all the baloney. He has a sixth sense when it comes to spotting slicksters and other scoundrels, and he's indomitable in his dealings with them--which drives them right up the wall. The single funniest moment in the first volume occurs when the recurring villain Mr. Snork, a suit-wearing thief and con man, exclaims of Popeye:

What a nerve!--swims out to my ship--takes my guns away from me, beats me up--forces me to tell him all I know about the mystery, and then makes me set him ashore in my best life boat [sic]. Bah!! And I thought I was a hard man!

Popeye's propensity for using his fists whenever he gets a bad vibe can occasionally land him in trouble, but he lets it roll off his back. As he says, "I socks 'em where I sees 'em an' I leaves 'em where I socks 'em--an' tha's that!" And he's inevitably vindicated by the end of the story. Popeye may not have money, but no one ever gets the better of him. (Unless, of course, a craps game is involved.)

Thimble Theatre is an unusual reading experience for contemporary audiences, and one may find its most striking aspect is the structure and pacing. Most humor strips today feature interchangeable gags with no continuity, and they have an extremely abrupt structure: set-up, punchline, and a post-punchline follow-up. Segar's material has a continuity--the daily storylines tend to cover about sixty strips each--and the punchlines of the individual strips have a more prolonged development with little or no aftermath. The individual Sunday strips are far denser than one sees today. They show Segar was a first-rate gag man. He often came up with a recurring piece of slapstick for each storyline, and he would then play variations on it while incrementally advancing the plot. I gather this was not an unusual approach in the older humor strips, but it's unheard of among today's features. It gives this decades-old material a freshness one doesn't expect. In other words, everything old is new again.

And that's what ultimately gives this first volume its appeal. Subsequent editions may reveal the richness that gives Thimble Theatre its enormous reputation, but one is at last given an extended glimpse into the roots of a great pop-culture phenomenon. It stands enough on its own to make it an enjoyable ride.