Here’s the book to read over the long bleak winter ahead. Perfect for this Neo-Depression we’re in, E.C. Segar’s Popeye Volume Three: "Let's You and Him Fight!" from Fantagraphics collects the daily and Sunday comic strips from the some of the darkest days of that first Depression, 1932-1934. What did Popeye do when the sky fell in 75 years ago? He set sail for exotic lands and kicked ass!
Popeye: one of the most beloved cartoon personalities of the 20th century, was created by E.C. Segar (a former movie house projectionist who loved his Chaplin) some ten years after he became a cartoonist in pre-Capone Chicago. At the time, Popeye was a world-wide sensation. The daily adventures of this very American character literally changed the face of comic strips and heavily influenced that other burgeoning art form, animation.
Segar’s serial inventiveness is captured in another handsome tome designed by Fantagraphics’ wizard in residence Jacob Covey. The best part about this nutty, oversized billiard table of a book is the simple but effective format: one week’s worth of comic strip continuity gets one page. The color Sunday strips are in the back (they aren't part of the continuity) and so one can read the epic adventure of the daily strips uninterrupted.
What's great reading the serials collected like this is seeing how the fixed “time signature” of the dailies allows the story to unfold. There are, generally, six panels to each daily strip. This “beat” is echoed in the rhythm of the page design for the entire week—six days, six strips—and the natural break, or breath, is simply the end of the week itself. The way narrative builds, day to day, week to week, is built into the architecture of the strip itself, and thankfully into the design of the book.
The epic tale that ran from the summer of 1932 to the end of 1933 uses this invisible architecture to spring Popeye from his cramped panels and propel him across the globe. During one sequencewhen Popeye squares off against his arch-foe Bluto—on the deck of a sailing ship, no less—Segar’s line gets really loose and he manages to compose a veritable symphony of draftsmanship. What an action scene!
The story, and the inevitable offshoots of the serial, is about Popeye trying to figure out who he really is. He’s immediately off searching for buried treasure; Olive Oyl somehow manages to go along with him; he battles Bluto; he becomes king of a small island somewhere; he becomes a “mudder” to little Swee’Pea. Olive even brandishes a pistol towards the love of her life and declares: “I’ll make you want me and then I’ll say—Pooey!” It’s just one thing after another, without let-up—Segar was truly hitting his stride as a storyteller here.
And that’s just the black and white dailies. The color Sunday strips in the back are the real treasure. Each page has a Popeye and a Sappo strip. The Popeye's mostly star the hamburger-loving Wimpy, who is absent from the daily continuity. So, they really are “breaths” and Segar takes full advantage of the opportunity to go for the laughs at blistering speed.
Popeye may not have been a “cinematic” adventure comic strip like Roy Crane's Captain Easy or Milton Caniff's Terry and the Pirates, insomuch that the “camera” doesn’t do much else besides follow Popeye around at the same focal length panel after panel. Yet what follows is a remarkable parade of images squarely nailed into place. Though his drawing style features exaggerated cartoons, Segar’s characters are quite “real.”
It’s easy to talk about Segar’s influence: on movies, on early animation, on American slang, on future cartoonists like Crumb, or future “artistes” like Guston. But that doesn’t really help us understand Segar any better.
So let’s go to the videotape. Let’s look at Segar for Segar. As entertainer, as populist orator (through Popeye), as a reflection of the individual scrappy voice of the early American popular arts, as a cartoonist. It’s the alchemy of Segar’s dialogue—how the “exposition” does all the tedious work for him, how it sets the scene with very believable, individual voices—and the solid characterization defined by his lines that is so breathtaking. (“Breathtakingly definitive” as cartoonist Mark Newgarden told me while viewing Segar’s originals in person)
Segar’s craft effortlessly seduces the reader and allows one to submerge into this very real, very familiar world. Like the cast of some ramshackle vaudeville show on the side of the old state highway, Segar’s characters are representatives of a different America. This America was a frontier land of lower class values that Segar tapped into brilliantly, and in many ways something he helped define for many, every day in the newspaper.
“Nothin’ kin kill me... I yam immoral”
“You mean immortal”
“I means what I means — tha’s what I means”
Also, one of the best things about this particular volume, is the inclusion of never before reprinted daily half page cartoons about Popeye visiting the World’s Fair. Here, Segar unleashes his real design skill and makes each days cartoon a visual feast for the eyes. They use huge, odd-shaped panels, not just grids—bigger than even the Sunday strips, unbelievable visual gags that echo what many “real people” must have been experiencing at such a historic event. It’s just funny stuff. All in all, further proof of Segar’s singular vision and his ability to speak to and through The People.
Frank Santoro was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pa. Moved to San Francisco on an art school scholarship. Quit to create and self-publish SIRK zines & comics—some in conjunction with Katie Glicksberg—culminating in publication of Storeyville. Moved to New York City, returned to painting, worked five years as Francesco Clemente’s assistant. Met Dan Nadel and began project to integrate painterly and poetic values into comics, starting with Chimera and Incanto and currently in collaboration with Ben Jones on Cold Heat. Cofounded the Comics Comics blog with Dan Nadel and Tim Hodler and writes there about comics ephemera. The opinions expressed here are not necessarily those of Publishers Weekly.
