Every time Popeye declares his independence to defend his brawling ways, part of the joke is that we're seeing how he ended up missing an eye, hanging out on the docks and all but alone in the world: "I comes when I likes and I goes when I pleases and I don't take nothin' from nobody, no time. Blow me down!" (That line is doubly funny because Popeye, who's just knocked out some big brute with one punch, is relaxing with his hands on his hips, one ankle crossed over the other. He really, truly doesn't care.) He's cheerful in part because he's not even sure what he's missing. "No woman'll ever make a sap outta me," he declares. "I'm forty years old and they ain't never even tried it."
He's a street fighter at heart, and he's capable of taking incredible amounts of abuse. In a confrontation with the wicked Mr. Snork in late 1930, he's shot 20 times, but what he's most upset about when he goes to the hospital is that the doctors who've operated on him have left in an unlucky 13 of the bullets: "Now listen ya crazy tonsil jerkers ya either got to take another one out or put one back." Then Castor reminds Popeye that he actually has 25 bullets in him, counting a dozen from an earlier fight. "Tha's right! Blow me down I feels good now!"
By the end of the book, the daily strips are growing into the monument that "Thimble Theatre" would become. The Sunday pages, which told a separate story and are set at the back of the book, aren't showing quite as much progress. Popeye didn't show up on Sundays until more than a year after he'd debuted in the daily strip; the 1930 strips included here are crammed with plot (Segar drew as many as 22 panels in a single strip), but don't have quite as much verve. Most of them have to do with Popeye's temporary career as a boxer, derailed by his habit of punching the bejesus out of anybody who bugs him. (It's funny once -- maybe twice.) The Sunday incarnation of "Thimble Theatre" incarnation was originally accompanied, as it is in this book, by a smaller, unrelated, not especially well-remembered Segar strip called "Sappo." The one noteworthy "Sappo" sequence here takes a few potshots at modern art -- when John Sappo shows a surrealist painting to an art dealer, the dealer declares, "It's all wrong. Ask any modern artist -- the head should be at the bottom." So Sappo turns the painting upside down and sells it to the dealer for a wad of cash.
Segar didn't care about that highbrow stuff -- he was an entertainer first and an artist a distant second, at least at this stage of his career. The four-color dots on the cover of this volume, an extreme close-up of a Sunday panel's image of a boxing-glove-wearing Popeye punching out himself and his opponent simultaneously, make it look a bit like a Roy Lichtenstein painting -- pop recontextualized as fine art -- and as welcome as the book's deluxe production is, the Segar of 1930 might have found it a little odd. By the time he died of leukemia in 1938, he'd started to care much more about his art, and he'd become a better entertainer because of it. By then, of course, Popeye was a huge franchise of cartoons and merchandise, and "Thimble Theatre" finally became "Popeye" proper sometime in the '70s. Part of what's great about these early strips, though, is that they're not just about the malaprop sailor -- they're about the thimble-size world he wandered into, a world he took over by force of will and a powerful right hook. In his words, "I socks 'em permanent."
About the writer
Douglas Wolk writes a monthly column on comics and graphic novels for Salon. His book "Reading Comics" will be published by Da Capo next year.
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