Tag Archives: Phooey from Me to You

DWYCK: Critiquing a Lively Art

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For this column, I’d like to return to the subject of comics criticism. A while back, HU hosted a Popeye roundtable, which raised some interesting general questions, but seemed to stop from lack of enthusiasm before it went very far. Not being in a position to contribute at the time, I would like to resurrect it for the purpose of raising a number of issues pertaining to how we talk about comics and art.

Noah in his ambiguous essay on E. C. Segar’s strip expresses frustration at what he perceives to be its shallowness:

Though I enjoyed the energy of the drawing, and the Sea Hag and Goon provided some evocatively creepy moments early on, the limited range of the humor, and its empty-headedness, quickly becomes numbing. Wimpy is lazy, Wimpy eats a lot, Popeye is noble, defends the underdog, and always wins.

Robert, in his piece, which references a series of earlier, excellent reviews on his own site, concludes that the strip is “largely of historical interest”, writing:

The challenge I gave the work was for it to transcend that description. It occasionally did; there were flashes of satirical and absurdist genius every now and then. “The One-Way Bank” storyline from Volume II and the finale of “The Eighth Sea” storyline from Volume III stood out, and I was especially taken with Volume II’s “The Nazilia-Tonsylania War” — its treatment of state and military folly ranks with Dr. Strangelove (almost) and Duck Soup. (No pun was intended with the name “Nazilia,” by the way.) However, Segar was generally far more enamored with farce and slapstick for their own sake than he was with satire. That greatly limits the appeal of his work, at least for this adult reader. Farce and slapstick that don’t connect with anything deeper are best in small doses; they tend to wear out their welcome fairly quickly.

So the strip is less than great because it is simplistically conceived and primarily concerns itself with slapstick and farce, only rarely ‘transcending’ these. For Robert, this happens when it becomes satirical, because that somehow connects ‘deeper’ than mere laffs.

This seems to me a holdover from modernist conceptions of aesthetic value that privilege the framework provided by the ‘high’ arts. Robert even spells out this bias:

No reasonable person would consider it on the level of Faulkner, Kandinsky, or Jean Renoir’s work, but it looks right at home when viewed alongside the efforts of Mae West, W.C. Fields, and the Marx Brothers. I have nothing against the popular-entertainment standard for determining “good” comics, by the way. If a comic entertains people, it’s doing its job. And if it’s entertaining people to the extent that it becomes a pop-culture phenomenon, which Segar’s Popeye certainly did, then it’s doing its job terrifically well.

…But it still isn’t as great as Faulkner, Kandinsky or Renoir. Invoking the consummate elitist Harold Bloom’s definition of the canon as what should be taught in our schools, Robert judges Popeye out. But why? He has himself conceded that it gripped more than one generation of readers and became a pop-culture phenomenon. Isn’t that worth teaching in schools? And what about those great humorists cited? Irrelevant to the understanding of our culture?

My intention here is not to claim that Popeye – or Thimble Theater if we want to be correct – is the equal of the best high art had to offer at its time (conversely I’m not saying that it ain’t either). What I am saying is that it will necessarily look impoverished when judged in the framework of high culture, and that I find such a yardstick unhelpful in assessing its qualities — qualities that clearly resonated widely and persistently. Although we have now for several decades described our times as postmodern, with everything that entails, the elitist legacy of modernity is amazingly hard to shake.

Noah recognizes this, essentially framing his dismissal of the strip as personal preference. He compares with another low-culture medium, which has received even less high-culture acclaim: television, concluding that,

…what is and isn’t considered art is really arbitrary. Comics critics have spent a lot of energy for the past decades trying to get comics accepted as high art. They’ve had definite (if not unqualified) success, and now even frankly pulp, unpretentious works like Popeye can be put up in galleries, given lavish reissues, and hailed as canonical examples of the form.

I would guess that someone like Noah, who spends a fair amount of energy as a critic acclaiming the qualities of some of the most commercial iterations of contemporary pop music, would be unsatisfied with the kind of high-culture point of view brought to bear on comics by some of its more assiduous critics at this current, mercurial juncture in their history.

Having long regarded hip hop as one of the most inspiring cultural manifestations of the last 30 years, I sympathize. It has been interesting to watch its fortuna critica in the cultural establishment as it has evolved: regarded initially as a fad, its staying power has come to be recognized and it is now classified as a legitimate musical genre, but it still isn’t considered an art form on the level of, say, rock music. “Gangsta Gangsta” by N.W.A simply doesn’t cut it when measured by the yardstick of “Like a Rolling Stone”, but it is undeniably a hugely resonant piece of work, every bit as influential on the generation from which it sprang.

Similarly, at the time of Thimble Theater, surely ‘no reasonable person’ would consider something like ragtime or jazz on the level of opera. Yet, today, these forms and their progeny are regarded as entirely respectable art forms, capable of greatness akin to that achieved in classical music. Music unites us in ways that other art forms don’t, and we seem to be more receptive to “shallow” qualities there than we do in literature, fine art, or even comics. Perhaps this is not so surprising, since music generally is less cerebral than those forms, making us appreciate — and intellectualize — our emotional and visceral responses to a higher degree.

And actually at least one perfectly reasonable person did consider ragtime and jazz, and with them a whole range of other popular forms such as vaudeville, the movies, and yes, comics, on the level of high culture. A cultural critic and New York correspondent of T. S. Eliot’s Criterion, his name was Gilbert Seldes (1873-1970). In his precocious defense of popular culture, The Seven Lively Arts (1924), he wrote:

If you can bring into focus, simultaneously, a good revue and a production of grand opera at the Metropolitan Opera House, the superiority of the lesser art is striking. Like the revue, grand opera is composed of elements drawn from many sources; like the revue, success depends on the fusion of these elements into a new unit, through the highest skill in production. And this sort of perfection the Metropolitan not only never achieves — it is actually absolved in advance from the necessity of attempting it. I am aware that it has the highest-paid singers, the best orchestra, some of the best conductors, dancers and stage hands, and the worst scenery in the world, in addition to an exceptionally astute impresario; but the production of these elements is so haphazard and clumsy that if any revue-producer hit as low a level in his work, he would be stoned off Broadway. Yet the Metropolitan is considered a great institution and complacently permitted to run at a loss, because its material is ART. (pp. 132-133)

Lest he be dismissed offhand as the kind of contrarian philistine such statements might evoke in us today, I hasten to supply the following; during a visit to Picasso’s studio in Paris, he was shown a fresh canvas by the master, which prompted in him a synthesis:

I shall make no effort to describe that painting. It isn’t even important to know that I am right in my judgement. The significant and overwhelming thing to me was that I held the work a masterpiece and knew it to be contemporary. It is a pleasure to come upon an accredited masterpiece which preserve its authority, to mount the stairs and see the Winged Victory and know that it is good. But to have the same conviction about something finished a month ago, contemporaneous in every aspect, yet associated with the great tradition of painting, with the indescribable thing we think of as the high seriousness of art and with a relevance not only to our life, but to life itself — that is a different thing entirely. For of course the first effect — after one had gone away and begun to be aware of effects — was to make one wonder whether it is worth thinking or writing or feeling about anything else. Whether, since the great arts are so capable of being practised today, it isn’t sheer perversity to be satisfied with less. Whether praise of the minor arts isn’t, at bottom, treachery to the great. I had always believed that there exists no such hostility between the two divisions of the arts which are honest — that the real opposition is between them, allied, and the polished fake. (pp. 345-346)

I think we could do worse than take a cue from Seldes’ notion of the ‘lively arts’ in our current reassessment of comics as cultural phenomena and art. About the comic strip:

Of all the lively arts the Comic Strip is the most despised, and with the exception of the movies it is the most popular. Some twenty million people follow with interest, curiosity, and amusement the daily fortunes of five or ten heroes of the comic strip, and that they do this is considered by all those who have any pretentions to taste and culture as a symptom of crass vulgarity, of dullness, and, for all I know, of defeated and inhibited lives. I need hardly add that those who feel so about the comic strip only infrequently regard the object of their distaste.

Certainly there is a great deal of monotonous stupidity in the comic strip, a cheap jocosity, a life-of-the-party humour which is extraordinarily dreary. There is also a quantity of bad drawing and the intellectual level, if that matters, is sometimes not high. Yet we are not actually a dull people; we take our fun where we find it, and we have an exceptional capacity for liking the things which show us off in ridiculous postures — a counterpart to our inveterate passion for seeing ourselves in stained-glass attitudes. (p. 213)

Seldes doesn’t mention Thimble Theater, and couldn’t have known Popeye (on account of he hadn’t been born’d yet), but he regarded highly its neighbor in the New York World, Krazy Kat, whose creator George Herriman he considered one of the two genuine artistic geniuses in America at the time (the other was Charles Chaplin). In his famous essay on that strip, he wrote:

With those who hold that a comic strip cannot be a work of art I shall not traffic. The qualities of Krazy Kat are irony and fantasy — exactly the same, it would appear, as distinguish The Revolt of the Angels; it is wholly beside the point to indicate a preference for the work of Anatole France, which is in the great line, in the major arts. It happens that in America iron and fantasy are practised in the major arts by only one or two men, producing high-class trash; and Mr Herriman, working in a despised medium, without an atom of pretentiousness, is day after day producing something essentially fine. (p. 231)

Granted, Krazy Kat has received greater high-culture recognition than any other strip of its day, and seems more effortlessly to accommodate a fine arts perspective, but I don’t see why one couldn’t formulate something along similar lines for Thimble Theater. Noah suggests that one might compare the strip with the cinema of Buster Keaton, which strikes me as particularly instructive:

Keaton’s work rightly occupies an important place in the cinematic canon, despite it being similarly resistant to the kind of interpretative framework that eschews slapstick. As the New Wave filmmakers recognized, however, his auteurial presence is acutely felt throughout his work, and it gives us a highly original, fatalistic and uncannily comic conception of depersonalized action in a world of strange, fickle serendipity.

Now, let’s look at fairly typical, self-contained Sunday page from Thimble Theater (sep. 30th, 1934):

On the surface, it delivers a straightforward gag pitting, as is so often the case, Popeye’s morality against Wimpy’s lack of same. But Segar is anything but a utilitarian gang man; he proceeds like a cartoon behaviorist, generously packing in as much character detail and humorous instance to create a highly seasoned repast, all the while unfolding a strongly intuited moral ethos.

Watch his unaffectedly plump line and vernacular wit unfold across the page: Wimpy insinuating himself into the frame and the duck hunt, bodily/verbally; his mention of his favorite animal, “hamburger on the hoof”; the manner in which he splays his three surplus fingers while pressing his nose to quack (and, inevitably, to hamburger moo); his poker face registering the hit, turning to sniff; the derision on his face against Popeye’s soon-to-vanish irascible scowl; the silent burial bookending Popeye’s contrition, Wimpy empathetically yet efficiently settling the mound; the exchange: “WHAT! NO DUCK?!” — “Yeah, no duck”; the unchanged expression on Wimpy’s face as he kneels caninely to exhume the duck with speed, his coattails waving; it remains unchanged as he sits at the end, counter to the left-right flow, roasting the kill.

Clear in presentation, yet richly studied, this sequence is a perfect summation of the profane reality of Thimble Theater. A true comedic hero, Popeye is pugnaciously selfless in a world governed by selfishness. He always restores order around him (often, disturbingly, by violence), but is simultaneously given enough of a tragic edge — his morality is rarely reciprocated — to keep us involved. As with Keaton, there’s a fatalistic undertone to his and, by its frequent extension to the rest of the cast, the strip’s indomitable catchphrase: “I yam what I yam, an’ that’s all I yam!” It’s trenchantly inspirational and it is great fun, so why can’t it be great art?

Part of the answer, if one compares with cinema, is that it has taken comics much longer to expand its field beyond a fairly restricted set of idioms and genres, all of which are candidly low culture. It hasn’t had its James Agee, though people like Donald Phelps, R. Fiore and Art Spiegelman have done their best in recent decades; they haven’t had their Raymond Rohauer and have only recently begun experiencing comprehensive restoration and republication, and they haven’t had their new wave until now.

Which brings us to the matter at hand: this is a time of redefinition for comics, which is not only manifest in contemporary cartooning, but naturally extends back to encompass its history. Neglected by critics and historians, and forgotten even by most cartoonists, the classics now demand our attention for what they teach us about their time and the evolution of the form, but ultimately also as works of art. Though it is surely healthy to assess comics in the expanded field of cultural production being opened up as distinctions between high and low are collapsing, to not cut them any exceptionalist slack, it would seem ill advised to judge them according to antiquated systems of hierarchical exclusion.

PS — Because Noah mentioned them as part of his high-low concordances, I can’t help bringing in the Coen brothers here. While it is correct that they are becoming canonized as directors, it is remarkable that their best loved, and arguably best though not most critically acclaimed film, The Big Lebowski, is so unabashedly shallow. It totally fails the modernist test as a work of art, and yet there it is, and it’s glorious.

Squint, imagine some more punching, and it might almost play at the Thimble.

Phooey From Me To You: I Yama Lonely Cowboy

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“I bet one legend that keeps recurring throughout history, in every culture, is the story of Popeye.”  —Jack Handey

Popeye was pretty far removed from his Golden Age when I was first introduced to him, probably through some combination of Hanna-Barbera’s The All-New Popeye Hour (1978-81) on Saturday morning television, whichever Famous Studios shorts were packaged for syndication at the time, and the various coloring books and toys that piled up around our house.  This was a Popeye who rarely hit Bluto, was a doting uncle to his nephews Peepeye, Pupeye, Pipeye and Poopeye (Huey, Dewey and Louie got off easy, didn’t they?), and was pretty much a total chump unless he managed to down some spinach, which always happened just about a minute before the cartoon ended.

Despite these shortcomings, I was a dedicated Popeye fan, and could draw a fair likeness of the character before I could write my own name.  I’m not sure when I first heard about the Robin Williams Popeye movie, but I do remember it feeling like years for it to reach our local theater (and it probably did take the better part of a year for it to reach our second-run movie house), and I remember being blown away when I finally saw it, all of five years old at the time.  Great scenery, great actors, great characters, fun songs—and Robin Williams as Popeye and Shelley Duvall as Olive Oyl are still two of the best-cast live actors-as-cartoon characters in movie history.

Jules Feiffer’s goal with his screenplay was to pay tribute to E.C. Segar’s original comic strip, with a back-to-basics approach.  Popeye was an unpredictable tough guy, Bluto was a creep, Wimpy was selfish, and Olive was so fickle that you really had to wonder why people were trying so hard to impress her.  Toss in Poopdeck Pappy, who was an out-and-out bastard, and you had some of the greatest characters in comic strip history.  (Well, not Bluto, who only figured prominently in one Segar Thimble Theater storyline, but I’m sure we’d have seen more of him in the comics eventually.)

So what was the end result of this return to Popeye’s roots?  Underwhelming box office, immediate attempts from Robert Altman and Robin Williams to distance themselves from the picture, and a relaunch of the Saturday morning cartoon which included Olive Oyl and Alice the Goon in a shameless Private Benjamin knockoff.  As if that weren’t enough to kill off these characters, four years after that, Popeye and Olive were married off and settled into suburban life in Popeye and Son, a premise which turned me off so much that I never watched a single episode.

There were signs of life along the way, however.  Fantagraphics’ reprint series The Complete E.C. Segar Popeye ran from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, which roughly matched up with underground cartoonist Bobby London’s tenure on the strip.  While I was sadly oblivious to Popeye’s print adventures, the rise of cable television and the need for cheap programming meant that Ted Turner was filling about six hours every day on each of his networks with old cartoons, and the Fleischer Popeye cartoons featured heavily in the rotation, with nary a Famous Studios or a Gene Deitch Prague-produced Popeye to be seen.

The early Fleischer cartoons were even better than the live-action film, with random acts of violence, oddly synched vocal tracks which didn’t match up with the characters’ on-screen speech, and the broad personalities which made Segar’s characters popular in the first place.  Popeye always tries to do the right thing, whether he’s capable or not; Bluto always tries to stop Popeye, whether he should or not; Olive’s out for attention, whether she deserves it or not; and Wimpy could care less, as long as his stomach’s full.

Watching the earliest Popeye cartoons again in preparation for my contribution to the roundtable, I was struck by just how much care and effort the Fleischer studios put into them.  Popeye was incredibly popular with American audiences when the first animated cartoons were released, and the Fleischers probably would have cleaned up with an average or even subpar product.  But they put their best crew on the job, wrote some great songs, cast some brilliant voice actors and created some classics that are still fun to watch more than 70 years later.

But better still, better than Robin Williams on the big screen, better than Jack Mercer and Mae Questel voicing the Fleischer cartoons, better than all of that were Segar’s original strips.  One of the great pleasures in being a comics fan is discovering something new and unusual, unlike anything you’ve ever seen before.  And even better, in my book, is finding out that the original incarnation of a favorite cartoon or comic was significantly better than the stuff that you thought you’d been enjoying.  I experienced that by going from Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends in the early 1980s to Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s Amazing Spider-Man reprints in the late 1990s.  I’m pretty sure that Chris Claremont’s late 1990s version of the Fantastic Four was hitting the stands around the time that Marvel decided to issue the Essential Fantastic Four collections, reprinting the original series by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.  And my main exposure to Plastic Man before reading Art Spiegelman’s New Yorker article on Jack Cole was the Ruby-Spears animated series of the early 1980s, Hula-Hula and all.

And I had the same reaction to Segar’s strips that I had to the aforementioned examples:  “Where has this been all my life?”

Since I can’t (as yet) go back in time to drag my younger self away from The All-New Popeye Hour, Pac-Man and The Snorks and beg myself to read Segar’s Thimble Theater instead, there’s still time to save some of the unitiated out there.  If you’ve only seen the Popeye animated cartoons, and God help you if you actually watched Popeye and Son, pick up one of the Segar reprints as soon as humanly possible.  Start in the mid-1930s, when Popeye finds his long-lost father (and finds out that he should probably stay long-lost).  Or when Popeye takes over a local newspaper, and decides to spice up the headlines by beating up townsfolk and blowing his entire payroll on staff cartoonists.  Or the time Popeye becomes “dictipator” of a small island nation.  Or the fact that Popeye’s first plan of attack in any complicated situation almost always involves him dressing in unconvincing drag, which is guaranteed to fool his intended target.

Or better yet, dive right in at the beginning.  “’Ja think I’m a cowboy?” is still one of the all-time great first lines of any cartoon character ever, and it still holds up 80 years later.  Segar grows as a storyteller by leaps and bounds throughout the 1930s, and it’s easy to see why just about every cartoonist who grew up in that decade worshipped him.  Thimble Theater is one of those rare strips from the early 20th century that I don’t need to qualify with “it’s pretty entertaining for its time,” or “you have to remember that humor was different then.”  Popeye’s mangling of the English language (and his mangling of people) is as entertaining now as it was during the Hoover administration, and that’s why his legend endures.  It’s a real testament to Segar’s original work that no amount of terrible animation, kid sidekicks and general neglect can keep a good sailor down.

Phooey From Me to You: Huh

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Back in the day, I used to watch Popeye cartoons.  I liked them OK, although I enjoyed Scoobie Doo more.  Olive Oyl was feisty, and she didn’t wait around to be rescued.  She was a force to be reckoned with.  I never really liked Popeye himself, since he was kind of dumb and kind of violent.

I never got a chance to read Popeye in comics form as a kid, and that’s kind of a shame, I think.  As a youngun I would have really enjoyed the strange story lines and the occasional random slapstick.  The art’s pretty good and the ink is interesting.

As an adult though…  I’m going to admit upfront that I just don’t enjoy slapstick humor.  I like when bad guys get smashed because they’re bad, but I don’t find it funny.  I can’t watch reality TV because it makes me intensely uncomfortable and embarrassed for the people on the show.  I always hated the Three Stooges.  For me, Popeye was an uncomfortable read.  I just didn’t enjoy it much.  I could see why people loved it, because as I said, the stories do go interesting places and the art is pretty good, but I spent so much time cringing because Popeye beat up a cow or a random person.  It’s just…not for me.  I ended up thinking I’m such a girl, but that’s not really it.  It’s not about being a girl and not enjoying this comic.  It’s just not my kind of art.

Like Noah, I would read a bit and realize that what I really needed to do was scrub the bathroom.  Or do laundry.  Or weed the garden.  Get the oil changed in the car.  And once you’re starting to look forward to battling the garden slugs, it’s probably time to set down the comic, no matter how beautifully presented in the Fantagraphics book.

I wish I had something weighty to add, but I don’t.  I can see the appeal, and I didn’t hate it.  I just didn’t connect with it.

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Update by Noah: The whole Popeye roundtable is here.

Phooey from me to you: Who cares about Sappo?

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For me, E.C. Segar’s Popeye remains, no matter what Noah says, not only one of the great comics of the 20th century but a great piece of Americana as well. It manages to combine hilarious slapstick, daffy absurdity, high adventure, sentimental melodrama and still create genuine emotion and care for the cast’s well-being. It deserves every ounce of acclaim and high regard it’s earned over the years.

But I’m not going to be talking about any of that today. Instead I’m going to be talking about Popeye’s less benighted comic strip brother, Sappo.

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Phooey From Me To You: Masters of American Television

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I organized this roundtable as an excuse to look at some of the E.C. Segar Popeye strips. I’d never read them, and many people love them, obviously, so I figured this was a good chance to catch up. After reading a couple of reviews, I tried the Plunder Island volume, often mentioned as the highpoint of the series.

And after reading through the Plunder Island strips, I can say with some assurance that, man, this is not for me. Though I enjoyed the energy of the drawing, and the Sea Hag and Goon provided some evocatively creepy moments early on, the limited range of the humor, and its empty-headedness, quickly becomes numbing. Wimpy is lazy, Wimpy eats a lot, Popeye is noble, defends the underdog, and always wins. It’s like Garfield meets Superman. And, you know, I don’t hate Garfield or Superman…but I’ve read enough of both to last me the rest of my life. Honestly, I couldn’t even finish the book. I got distracted by Kierkegaard, and then by Derrida — and when you’re procrastinating by reading Derrida, you know you really, really don’t want to be reading what you’re supposed to.

If I had read the whole book, I’d probably be really thoroughly irritated and be spitting piss and vinegar (that metaphor isn’t exactly right…but onward.) As it is, though, I don’t have much resentment built up. Popeye isn’t at all pretentious — punch, eat, mangled English, laff. I don’t find it that funny, but I can’t get mad at it either. As I said, I even appreciate the art in a generalized way (cute cows!) If people like this, I’ve got no beef (as it were.)

While I’m not that interested in the content of Popeye, the strip does raise some interesting issues. Specifically — well, as I said, this is a very unpretentious strip, which relies almost entirely on the most basic kind of repetitive gastronomic and pugnacious humor. Whatever the drawing’s charm, there’s none of the sweeping formal adventurousness of Little Nemo here. I guess you could compare it to Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplain…but it seems to have at least as much in common with sitcoms; the same zany characters performing the same zany routines week after week in a timeless round of entertaining tedium.

Comics is often compared to film and literature and visual art, but it’s much less frequently linked to television. There are certainly many parallels between TV and comicdom, whether in method of delivery (they’re both among the few contemporary art forms that are serialized as a matter of course), or in material for adaptation (Buffy in one direction, Smallville in the other), or in creator overlap (Brian K. Vaughn, Joss Whedon, Dave Johnson.) But nobody wants to make a big deal out of it since nobody but nobody wants to be linked to television, a medium which has gone more than half a century without ever attaining even a morsel of aesthetic credibility.

People do wax enthusiastic about individual shows, of course, whether it be the Wire or Mad Men or Battlestar Galactica. But that enthusiasm is perpetrated with an amazing lack of ambition or anxiety. When people say that Lost is awesome, they rarely do so by saying “Lost is awesome — and worthy to be compared to the achievement of the Coen Brothers!” People love Joss Whedon, but nobody says he’s Quentin Tarantino, much less Orson Welles. Similarly, there’s virtually no effort that I’ve ever seen to solidify television’s bona-fides through canon formation. I’m sure someone has made a list of the best 100 television shows (here’s one, for example) but such lists don’t get tons of press and tend to be presented as much as personal preference as “this is what all educated people must be familiar with.”

Even the criteria for creating such a canon seems almost completely untheorized. What are the aesthetics of great television? What would a great television show look like? What issues would it address? How would a canonical television show distinguish itself from film, or from video art? Could great television be video art? Could there be a gallery show of television video art, the way there are gallery shows of comic art? What would that be like? What would be chosen?

Of course, some people will probably argue that there couldn’t be such an exhibit because television is a wasteland and the whole medium should be dropped in a well or eaten by bears. (Domingos, I’m looking at you.) But…I don’t know. I look at Popeye, which has good visual aesthetics and competent jokes and has been firmly placed in the comics canon, and I think — television could do that.

The classic Sesame Street animations are brilliant and weird; I don’t see how they’re aesthetically any less accomplished than E. C. Segar’s drawings, and they’re certainly more conceptually adventurous. The Batman TV series is visually bizarre; those giant freeze cones, the slanted villain hideout with the girl in the cage in the background — it seems infinitely more inventive than many of the comic book sources, and the dialogue and plotting is so arch it’s a wonder everyone’s eyebrows don’t just fall off. The Abbott and Costello routine does nothing in particular with visuals, but the escalating insanity of the dialogue seems, at least to me, much more manic and witty than the Popeye strips.

My point here isn’t that these are all superior to Popeye and therefore deserve to be treated as canonical culture. Nor is it that television in general should be seen as a (potentially) serious art form. Rather, I’m just saying that what is and isn’t considered art is really arbitrary. Comics critics have spent a lot of energy for the past decades trying to get comics accepted as high art. They’ve had definite (if not unqualified) success, and now even frankly pulp, unpretentious works like Popeye can be put up in galleries, given lavish reissues, and hailed as canonical examples of the form. And, of course, the critical zeitgeist has created room for more explicitly highbrow work by everyone from Chris Ware to Lilli Carre.

At some point, you do wonder, though…what if comics had taken television’s route? No anxiety, no ambition, no real critical battles over whether it could be high art or whether that would be a good idea. Would that have been categorically worse? The anxiety is certainly a spur…but it can be a cage as well. In any case, I don’t think I do comics in general any harm by saying, you know, it doesn’t really matter that much whether Popeye is or is not great art.

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For a more enthusiastic take on (among other things) Popeye’s relation to artsy-fartsy comics, read Shaenon Garrity’s appreciation.

This is part of a roundtable on Popeye. All posts in the series can be read here.

Phooey From Me to You: Six or Seven Things I Know about Popeye

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1. Popeye is old. I don’t mean the strip is old.  Everybody knows the strip is old.  I mean Popeye himself is supposed to be a senior citizen.  He’s a grizzled old sailor, with emphasis on the old, with extra old added on.  Although his official bio now describes him as 34, according to the Segar-era strips he’s in his sixties, and his father (more on him later) is pushing 100.  That’s why Popeye is bald and missing an eye.  Because of the oldness.

2. Popeye’s mythic origin is fundamentally flawed. In his youth, Fionn mac Cumhaill, the trickster hero of Irish folklore, gained his powers by tasting the flesh of the bradan feasa, the salmon of knowledge, which contained all the knowledge in the world.  When Fionn mac Cumhaill burned his thumb cooking the salmon and automatically stuck the burned thumb in his mouth, the knowledge flowed from the salmon into Fionn.  After that, Fionn mac Cumhaill knew everything and could access any information he needed by sucking on his thumb.

Popeye, in his old age, got his incredible toughness by staying up all night below decks rubbing the head of Bernice the Wiffle Hen, a bird with the power to bestow supernatural good luck on those who touched her.  All the luck flowed out of the hen and into Popeye, rendering the hen useless to would-be gambling kings Castor Oyl and Ham Gravy and transforming Popeye into an unstoppable demigod.

Later, as everyone knows, the story was changed so that Popeye gained his strength from eating spinach.  This introduced the crucial element of consumption that gives the core myth its memetic power, but in the process the totemic animal was lost.  It’s a shame we can’t have both, the animal and the vegetable, but everyone forgets about the hen.

3. Popeye is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans. E.C. Segar drew Thimble Theatre for ten years before introducing Popeye.  It took him the length of the entire run of Calvin & Hobbes just to find his main character.  Popeye sidled in through the seedy back docks.  He was not the kind of hero you could plan for.  Who could have predicted that a cranky old sailor who looks like he smells funny—everyone in Thimble Theatre looks like he or she smells funny—would become the idol of millions, making Mickey Mouse shake in his polished red shoes and enduring for generations beyond?

If you are a writer, if you are an artist, you have to learn to open yourself to Popeye, to be ready if Popeye should happen.  But at the same time you have to know that Popeye will probably never happen.  Maybe there’s a hen you can rub.

4. Popeye is a dick. He’s a lot more heroic in the cartoons.  In the Segar strips, aside from sporadic and whimsical urges to aid the downtrodden, a.k.a. widders and orfinks what ain’t got none, Popeye devotes himself largely to being an insufferable cuss.  This is, after all, the guy who not only kicked poor Castor Oyl out of his own comic strip, but banged Castor’s sister just to show he meant business.

He’s consistently awful to Olive, of course.

Back in the day, Segar got complaints that Popeye was a bad role model for children.  He solved this problem as every similarly beset writer should: by creating a nearly identical but even more meretricious character to make Popeye look good by comparison.  Thus the strip gained Popeye’s father, Pappy, who looks exactly like Popeye with stubble.  Apparently aware that he lives in a crudely-drawn strip, Pappy sometimes disguises himself as his son by shaving so he can make time with Olive.

5. Bobby London got Popeye. None of the other legacy cartoonists really have.  They love Popeye, I’m sure.  They want to do right by Popeye, to pay just tribute to Segar’s creation, to be responsible bearers of the standard.  London, by contrast, used his run on the Popeye strip to see exactly how much he could get away with before an outraged syndicate, newspaper market, readership, and world kicked him out for the sake of common decency.  He probably made some people cry.  And that’s what Popeye is all about, Charlie Brown.

6. You can go to Sweethaven. The village built for the 1980 movie still stands.  Looks cleaner now, actually, judging from the photos.  It’s in Malta and is open to the public as a tourist attraction, complete with movie props, stage shows, and a movie theater showing clips from the film.

I like the movie.  It’s messy and mumbly and wanders all over the place, which suggests that the filmmakers got Popeye too.  The strange grimness of the musical numbers always makes me smile.  As far as superhero movies go, it’s higher on my list than Iron Man.

7. Popeye Ruined My Life. I found Thimble Theatre in the old Smithsonian Book of Newspaper Comics in my high-school library.  It was something I hadn’t seen before: a funny adventure strip, a gag strip with a story.  It had long stories, stretching for months or years, with pirates and gamblers and thieves.  I wanted to do that, and I did, and now I’ve been doing it for ten years.  Without Popeye.  All you can do is be ready.

Comic strips, unlike comic books, boast a genteel legacy.  The elegant stagework of Little Nemo, the bohemian poetry of Krazy Kat, the quiet philosophy of Peanuts, the Disneyfied poly-sci of Pogo…it’s all so very convincingly Art.  Even the rugged adventure strips are rugged in a pleasant, Brylcreemed, magazine-illustration way.  And then there’s Popeye, who cusses and fights and brags about cussing and fighting, who comes staggering up drunk from the lower decks inhabited by all those weird old Jazz Age strips with the blotchy art and spindly lettering and betting tips and Yiddish and plop takes and Nov Shmoz Ka Pop? I don’t know what kind of theater Thimble Theatre is, but Winsor McCay probably wouldn’t want to do his quick-draw act there.  Popeye hangs on, indestructible (because of the hen), the last of a tougher, smellier, funnier breed.

He also has a damn catchy theme song.

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Update by Noah: This is the first in roundtable on Popeye. You can read the whole roundtable here.