It is impossible to overstate the influence of Elzie Crisler Segar (1894 – 1938) on the cartoonists who followed him. Take the underground comic book creators from the 1960’s for example, like r. crumb and Bill Griffith: their rounded, gravity-aware, cross-hatched, rubber-limbed figures, their wobbly lines that don’t always connect quite exactly where you’d expect them to, their off-balance character blocking and camera placement, etc., are all signs of Segar’s influence. But then, Thimble Theater (also known as “that comic strip with Popeye in it”) was probably still running, in some form, in the funny pages of their childhoods. So that explains that. Even today, though, when other cartoonists of Segar’s era have long been forgotten (quick — who drew Toonerville Folks?), young, up-and-coming figures ranging from Kevin Huizenga to Manu Larcenet have obviously studied, and internalized, his style. For the most part, the strips collected in Popeye Vol. 1: “I Yam What I Yam,”, originally published at the tail-end of the “flapper era,” appear as fresh and vital as if they had been drawn yesterday, by the hottest of the cool alternacomickers.

Which is not to say that a taste for Segar comics is a rarefied one. Quite the opposite. From his first appearance in Thimble Theater, about ten years into the strip’s lifetime, Popeye was, and has remained, a mass market phenomenon, popular with children and adults alike, almost as famous as his contemporary Mickey Mouse (who is, in turn, more popular than Jesus). His star has faded a bit since my own childhood in the late sixties and early seventies, due to changing cultural priorities and the emergence of more guilt-ridden (and therefore more intrusively concerned) parental units. Popeye, after all, smokes. He smokes a pipe. According to one panel collected here, he actually smokes his pipe while chewing tobacco. He beats people up. What’s worse: he beats people up in order to impress a woman and win her favors. And so on. Even so, except for the pipe smoking, the humorously violent understanding of courtship and love, and a small number of very unfortunate panels showing dehumanized monkeyfied African tribesmen hunting human prey in the bush, there is very little in these pages that will strike the modern reader as completely alien; there’s much less of that kind of stuff than you would find in just about any other specimin of popular entertainment from the era. These strips actually seem more contemporary than the much more famous and widely-distributed animated cartoons featuring Popeye, for example. For one thing, Popeye’s relationship with Olive Oyl, and his rivalry with her other suitors, is not at the center of the story (this may change in future volumes, I don’t know). There’s no spinach. There’s no Bluto. Or Brutus. Or whatever his name was supposed to be. There’s more than one, you know, plot. Characters have interesting motivations and relationships. And so on. The stories collected here are generally more complex, less predictable, and, well, just a whole lot better, than the animated cartoons — more like Seinfeld with a crusty, seafaring, middle-aged, super-powered protagonist, and without the urban focus and the laugh-track, than like anything else. Um. Yeah. I think that made sense. Anway, before Popeye came on board, Thimble Theater was apparently a kind of hybrid between an adventure strip, a family situation comedy (featuring the Oyls — Castor and his sister Olive, their parents and hangers-on), and a romance/dating gag strip — and at least through the duration of this volume, it remained so. That’s a good thing. If you like comics at all, of any kind, you’ll like these comics. They’re a lot of fun to read.

That said, I can’t recommend Popeye Volume 1 to the casual reader. The presentation and format are just entirely too damned deluxe. It’s a big, big book. You can’t take it to the coffee shop, or read it on the bus. It fits no bookbag. You can’t even easily carry it under your arm. If you sit it down on a table or a desk to read it, you have to kind of stand up and hover over the pages, leaning on your hands, craning your head left and right, like a navigator on a wooden frigate, contemplating a map of the stars (which, okay, I guess may be kind of appropriate). Leaning back in your Laz-E-Boy and propping it up on your lap is the only relatively comfortable way to read this monster, and even then you’ll find that it cuts off the circulation below your knees after a couple of hours. I’m totally serious. Or maybe I’m just getting old. I don’t know. Whatever. Given the historical value of the material, and its difficult-to-find status over the past several decades, I understand and appreciate the need to make Segar’s work available in a high-quality, archival, durable edition. Collectors, aficionados of the cartooning form, serious-minded cartoonists, historians, and, especially, libraries should not hesitate to purchase this edition. It is clearly intended for them, and serves their needs well. The oversize format is probably the only one that could have done justice to the Sunday strips printed in the back, for example, allowing them to be seen at their huge original size, along with the extra matter (a secondary strip of Segar’s) that originally accompanied them in the papers. I understand this. I know. Segar’s work must be made available to future generations in as faithful a manner as possible. But, yeah, the interests of the average reader would best be served by something smaller, more convenient, and maybe a lot less expensive. Popeye belongs to the people. The people demand their Popeye! Let’s hope that, in addition to continuing this fine, archival project, Fantagraphics, or someone else, is able in the near future to put out some reasonably-sized paperbacks collecting the same material. Yes, I know they did so in the nineties. Maybe they can release those again? Pretty please.

The image in this post, a detail from Popeye Volume 1 by E. C. Segar, is copyright (c) 2007 King Features Syndicate.

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