New Treasures: IDW’s Popeye
Okay. I’m fully aware that Popeye was not what you expected on a Monday morning here at your online radar for all that’s great and new in modern fantasy. But please, indulge me for a moment.
I buy comics on Saturday, on my way home from the post office. Finally finished with a busy Saturday morning packing and mailing back issues, I reward myself by browsing the stacks of new arrivals at Graham Crackers Comics in St. Charles. My point here is that, when I’m purchasing comics, I’m a bit more prone to impulse buys than I am with other forms of entertainment.
It was just such an impulse that caused me to pick up the first two issues of IDW’s new Popeye comic. Certainly it wasn’t any special affection for E.C. Segar’s character — in fact, I can’t really recall the last time I read Popeye, unless it was in the pages of Rick Norwood’s excellent Comics Revue two decades ago. Probably Bruce Ozella’s clean and dynamic art style in the first issue didn’t hurt — flipping through the pages reminded me immediately of Carl Barks and Don Rosa, and that’s a good thing.
The first issue, a 22-page epic featuring a dangerous quest to a lost island, mysterious fog, a Sea Hag, pirates, and witchcraft, reads like a Carl Barks Uncle Scrooge story too. Except here it doesn’t quite work. It’s funny, sorta, and the art is great, but the whole affair doesn’t really come off.
Fortunately, the second issue is a huge improvement. In fact, it’s a mini-masterpiece. This one is split into two tales — the first a complete farce, as Popeye discovers his girlfriend Olive Oyl is being courted by the smooth-talking Willy Wormwood. Popeye’s crazed attempts to one-up Wormwood — for example, uprooting a 100-year-old elm tree to present to Olive when Wormwood offers her flowers — reveal the essential core of his relationship with Olive. Their love and friendship, such as it is, is based almost wholly on mutual misunderstanding.
The second story, “John Sappo and Prof. O.G. Wotasnozzle and Saffer’s Wife Myrtle,” is even better. In fact, it is a small slice of genius. All three title characters live together in a small house, and all three have simple ambitions: Sappo wants to be left alone to read his paper; Myrtle wants to unceasingly nag her husband; and Prof. O.G. Wotasnozzle desires only to quietly work on his inventions and best his hated rival Prof. Finkelsnop. Naturally, only one can be satisfied at any moment. When Sappo asks Wotasnozzle for an invention that will block out his wife’s nagging, and a peeved Myrtle asks for something to nullify Sappo’s new Jar of Solitude, the result is an ever-escalating battle of invention and counter-invention that leads to hilariously catastrophic results. This is a comic that had me laughing on virtually every page.
Popeye is published by IDW, individual issues are priced at $3.99. Issue #1 was written by Roger Langridge and drawn by Bruce Ozella; Issue 2 was written by Langridge and drawn by Ken Wheaton and Tom Neely. Check it out at a comic shop near you.
Journey Into Mystery first appeared in 1952, one of a number of anthology titles from publisher Martin Goodman’s line of comic books. Over the years, the title featured a lot of short horror, fantasy, and science fiction tales, many of them collaborations between editor/scripter Stan Lee and artists like Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby. Until 1962. At that point Goodman’s comics were beginning to change direction, following a revival of interest in the super-hero genre. A team book, The Fantastic Four, had taken off. A solo book had followed, The Incredible Hulk. Heroes would now be his company’s main product, and the line would soon come to be known as Marvel Comics. The horror anthology books would be taken over by recurring super-hero characters, and Journey Into Mystery would be the first of the bunch. So with issue 83, in August 1962, in a story credited to Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby, it introduced its new lead: the mighty Thor, Norse god of thunder.
Early on in Sean Howe’s book-length history Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, the reader’s imagination is spurred by a throwaway anecdote: in 1937, New York magazine publisher Martin Goodman and his wife planned to return from a trip to Europe aboard the Hindenburg — on what would turn out to be the final tragic flight of the German dirigible, which ended with a terrifying aerial explosion and fire that led to the deaths of 36 people. Goodman, as it happened, was too late to get tickets and took a plane instead. You can’t help but wonder, though. What if he’d died then, before he’d expanded his magazine line to include comics? Before he’d hired his nephew Stanley to work in the office and do fill-in bits of writing? What if Marvel Comics, the subject of Howe’s book, had been stillborn? What would have been different in the development of comics, of popular culture, of the North American imagination? Maybe everything. Maybe nothing.
