Since it took some time for the Popeye of the daily strips to make it to the Sunday funnies, the first volume only features 48 pages of color comics. As with Dark Horse's reprints of the color "Li'l Abner" strips, there's a certain amount of color fade on these strips (and a few panels where blobs from what must have been the other side of the original Sunday page bleed into the images), but what're ya gonna do?
The color Sundays remain fun. In addition to Ham Gravy's aforementioned departure, we get the start of Popeye's career as a professional boxer, a comical series of strips where both Castor and Olive unsuccessfully attempt to gentrify our seafaring proletarian, plus two strips where the dainty Miz Oyl hauls off on some uppity skirt who also has her eye on Popeye. For a stringy girl, she sure puts up a fight, but, then, we knew that from watching her swing at Bluto in the cartoons.
As a bonus, the Sunday pages also include a secondary strip that Segar drew for the papers - "Sappo." A two-tiered strip, it concerns the adventures of a married man (who kinda looks like Castor with a mustache) and his zaftig wife (who is not averse to using a rolling pin on her hubby when he strays too much from the straight and narrow). Though much more quick-moving than "Theater," the Sappo strips provide an extra sense of what Segar's main feature would've been like had Popeye not wandered onstage. Sappo and his frau even had a western adventure just before Castor & Popeye went off on their Wild West excursion.
The resulting strips are amusing — Segar was too much the natural-born cartoonist for it to be otherwise — but they simply don't have the sheer wonderfulness of Popeye. With the creation of that hard-hewn s.o.b., Segar had moved from gifted funny guy into comic strip greatness.
Book o' the Year, I tells ya!
Article comments
1 - Natalie Bennett
This article has been selected for syndication to Advance.net, which is affiliated with newspapers around the United States. Nice work!
2 - El Bicho
Looks fantastic. I'll have to check it out. I'm just starting to go through the collected Peanuts, and some of the gang are barely recognizable.
3 - Bill Sherman
Those Peanuts volumes are a pretty sweet deal, too. Fantagraphics is ahead of the (very small) pack when it comes to reprinting and packaging classic comic strips: me, I’m eagerly anticipating their promised Pogo set.
4 - GL Hauptfleisch
Congratulations--this article has been selected as an Editors' Pick.