"I Yam What I Yam!"

Dec. 9, 2006 | It's a very good time for aficionados of classic newspaper comics -- the great strips that have spent decades out of print, or have never been collected in the first place, are finally being reprinted in nicely designed editions. Fantagraphics' exquisite chronological volumes of Charles Schulz's "Peanuts" and George Herriman's "Krazy Kat" led the pack, but the last couple of years have also seen sharp hardcover reprints of the early years of Winsor McCay's "Little Nemo in Slumberland," Frank King's "Gasoline Alley," Hank Ketcham's "Dennis the Menace," Tove Jansson's "Moomin" and Chester Gould's "Dick Tracy." (Somebody still needs to publish definitive editions of Milton Caniff's "Terry and the Pirates" and Walt Kelly's "Pogo," though.) Now, another top-tier strip is getting the top-tier treatment, with E.C. Segar's "Popeye, Volume 1: 'I Yam What I Yam!'"

The strip it reprints wasn't called "Popeye" -- at least not until decades after this material appeared. It was called "Thimble Theatre," and Elzie Crisler Segar started drawing it in late 1919, almost nine years before Popeye himself showed up. It wasn't about Popeye at first, either -- it was about the Oyl family (including Olive Oyl, of course, but also her relatives Castor Oyl, Nana Oyl, Cole Oyl and Cylinda Oyl), and Olive's hapless boyfriend, Ham Gravy. And even when the sailor man made the scene, he wasn't quite the benevolent, spinach-gobbling romantic that the later animated cartoons made him out to be: He was an independent-minded brawler whose good humor masked the effects of a life as rough as anyone on the funny pages has ever endured.

The first volume of "Popeye" (there will be six in all), which takes us up to around the end of 1930, conveniently omits most of the first decade of "Thimble Theatre." You won't miss it -- the first few pages, beginning with the daily strips from September 1928, are slightly stale slapstick, a mildly amusing bit of business involving a "Whiffle Hen" named Bernice who can't be killed no matter how hard anyone tries, and whose head can be rubbed for good luck. ("Well I'll be popeyed!" declares Castor with surprise on the story's first page.)

Then, four months later, Castor and Ham need to charter a boat and hire somebody trustworthy to sail it for them. "Hey there! Are you a sailor?" Castor asks the first person he sees. "'Ja think I'm a cowboy?" snaps a battered-looking man in sailor whites with one eye, a corncob pipe and matching anchor tattoos on his bulging forearms. "O.K. you're hired," Castor replies. Two days later the sailor has a name: Popeye. And all of a sudden "Thimble Theatre" gets much funnier.

For one thing, every time Popeye opens his mouth, he says something nutty. His dialogue is one long string of malapropisms, mangled pronunciations and wildly colorful lowlife slang, punctuated with "Blow me down!" for emphasis every chance he gets. "I'm goner lay ya among the swee'peas," he keeps telling his sparring partners. (Hence his adopted son Swee'Pea's name, which sounds a little bit less tender when you think of it that way.)

But there's also a touch of sadness and even cruelty to Segar's jokes. View the early "Popeye" strips from a distance, and you notice that they're almost all about class stratification: the WASP-y, middle-class turned nouveau-riche Oyl family exploiting the determinedly lower-class Popeye, with his immigrant's tortured English and willingness to undergo incredible suffering in the hopes of catching a break. Which he never will: Bought off with a million dollars at the end of his first adventure, he wanders out of the story for a month or so (by the end of which it appears to have been made clear to Segar that he'd better get the star back onstage pronto), then turns up penniless, explaining that he was talked out of his fortune by "a dame." For which you can read that he's been playing craps down at the docks again. He's deathly afraid of "evil spiriks," and chalks up anything he doesn't understand to them. Even the familiar catchphrase that provides this volume's subtitle is a declaration of pride in ignorance. It's his response, more than once, to a string of insults: "No matter what ya calls me -- I am what I am an' tha's ALL I yam!"

There's no spinach anywhere in this first volume, and very few of the familiar "Thimble Theatre" supporting characters: no Swee'Pea, no Alice the Goon, no Jeep, barely any of the Sea Hag and, most regrettably, no J. Wellington Wimpy. And there's another curious surprise: It's nowhere near as good as Segar's later work. The strips that appear in the touring "Masters of American Comics" exhibit and "The Smithsonian Book of Newspaper Comics" are all from later in the run, when Segar developed a surer line, more uninhibited layouts, a much more keenly honed sense of both comedy and suspense. Here, though, even after a decade of "Thimble Theatre," he was still flailing a little with his stories' pacing -- a mystery involving a man who has sat motionless for 20 years gets resolved via pseudoscience explained at exhausting length -- and drawing his characters from a static middle-distance perspective, as if the strip really were a theater.

Segar also had a habit of belaboring his jokes: Popeye and Castor are suckered into investing in a "brass mine" at one point, and go around for what seems like ages getting into fights with anyone who snickers at the name. What he was already terrific at, though, was sneaking fear and poignancy into a strip that pretty much had to deliver a chuckle a day. He spends weeks building up to the first appearance of the Sea Hag, a supernatural being who sails a ship called the Black Barnacle -- Popeye is terrified of both of them, in a blindly superstitious way. And when she actually shows up, she's a silhouetted tangle of hair against a nearly black scribble of night sky, one of the scariest images that's ever shown up in a newspaper comic strip.

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