E. C. Segar, Popeye, Vol. 1: “I Yam What I Yam” (Fantagraphics, 2006). $29.95; hardcover.

by Jared Gardner

This is undoubtedly a golden age for Platinum Age comics. Beginning with the remarkable series of reprints of Sunday Krazy Kat comics launched by Fantagraphics and Bill Blackbeard a few years ago up through the monumental reprint of McCay’s Nemo in Slumberland published last year, early 20th-century comic strips are emerging from rarified archives and into the hands of a new generation of readers. Much of the credit for this resurgence of interest in early comic strips is due to the influence of a generation of contemporary comics creators—Ware, Seth, Brunetti, et al—who trace their primary influences less to superheroes than to the comic strips of the Sunday supplements. In coming issues we will be reviewing some of the remarkable projects that have emerged from this recovery of some of the pioneers of graphic storytelling, including King’s Gasoline Alley (co-edited by Chris Ware) and Gould’s Dick Tracy (co-edited by Max Allan Collins). But E. C. Segar’s Popeye, so very different from his animated descendant with whom modern readers are most familiar, might not be as immediately attractive to audiences as some of these other projects. And that would be a very great loss indeed.
For those who know Popeye best from his animated manifestations (or, God help us, from the Robert Altman movie), Segar’s original protagonist might well be something of a surprise. Here is no spinach, no Bluto, no hamburgers on the lay-away plan. Instead, Popeye walks into the already-well-established ensemble cast of Segar’s Thimble Theater as yet another minor character: a roughneck, one-eyed sailor who enjoys a good fight but will settle, if need be, for a bad one. Segar’s Thimble Theater had been running for ten years before Popeye walked on, and there was little reason to believe that he would be any different than any of dozens of other minor characters who had shared in the misadventures of the Oyle family over the years. Thimble Theatre was an ensemble piece explicitly modeled on Ed Wheelan’s Midget Movies (which Wheelan renamed Minute Movies after he took the strip from Heart’s syndicate). Midget Movies began as a parody of the conventions of Hollywood, which by then had become established sufficiently to merit parody. Wheelan set up a “studio”—complete with directors, stars, and producers—with which to run through the various film genres then in vogue. Segar’s Thimble Theater adapted the ensemble and the generic play from Whelan’s work, but Segar created a delightful and unique mash-up of vaudeville routines, serial cliffhangers, romantic comedy, domestic melodrama, and swashbuckling adventure—all at once.
Popeye showed up halfway through the run, and his earliest appearances are captured in this first volume from Fantagraphics. For the next ten years, until Segar’s early death in 1938, Popeye became an irrepressible force in the strip. Upon reading this volume, it is easy to see why. Unlike the other colorful characters who pass through the Oyles’ adventures, Popeye, even in these early strips, brings an unpredictable energy—a perfect combination of irrational violence and romantic chivalry—that somehow summons both the noblest and most grotesque features in his companions. And Popeye has the courage and energy to take Castor Oyle and company into situations they never would have gone before. Once Popeye arrived, there was no leaving him behind.
Perhaps the biggest surprise in reading through these strips from 1928-30 is how simultaneously funny and exciting they are. In our own day we are rediscovering the pleasures of seriality, so it is a special treat to relearn the art from one of its great early masters. The volume is nicely broken down into “chapters,” very much as Segar originally conceived them. Castor’s misadventures with the Wiffle Hen, played for slapstick physical comedy, quickly gives way to a darker mystery as a series of villains conspires to capture the rare bird at any costs. Adventures with mysterious pirate ships, haunted houses, death rays, and strange islands with stranger inhabitants soon follow. Somehow Segar maintains the breakneck pace of the stories, leaving the reader hanging on many a cliff, while all the time reminding us that this is theater after all. In the history of early film, vaudeville and Hollywood were often set up as adversaries in a struggle for audience (a struggle that Hollywood would of course win). But in the magic space of Segar’s Thimble Theater in the late 1920s, Hollywood serials and vaudeville routines look like they belong together the whole time. Of course, it was a marriage that could only work in comics.
Popeye is being reprinted in oversized hardcover editions with a full week of strips per page. The effect is very different from reading Drawn & Quarterly’s editions of Gasoline Alley, in which each day’s strip has a page to itself. But the volume does capture the feel and size of the daily papers in which the strips were originally read, and somehow the crowded page feels appropriate for the cacophonous adventures we are reading.
History tells us that these moments in publishing history are few and far between. A series of very exciting reprints of early comics were published in the 1970s but soon went out of print and disappeared forever. The moral of the lesson is clear: grab all you can and save them for the rainy day when the earliest serial comics are once again impossible to find and when we have once again forgotten from whence this glorious art first came. With luck, we will never again come to such a pass. But if we do, I will always have my Krazy Kat, my Gasoline Alley, and (now) my Popeye to remind me just how much we still have to learn from the first masters of the comic arts.