Comics Formulas that Work 2: The Popeye Formula

With all but the most venerable of heroes, semi-heroes, and superheroes, one risks, when presenting the same to a layman, misidentification of a most annoying kind. It drops grit in the gears of the Informed Consumer of Comics, after all, to hear someone mistake the Spirit for the Green Hornet, and we might do well to leave unexplored the thoughts that advance through the mind when hearing the Flash referred to as "Flash Gordon." Some characters, however, have branded themselves on the cultural canvas of Everyman, although frequently through the vector of television, to a degree that he makes a clear and positive identification without having spent years piled upon years with his nose between the pages of comics material. Popeye, one of the early multimedia phenomena to originate in printed newspaper comics, enjoys a clear status of icon; while he, as a fictional construct, might not belong on American currency, nonetheless we could expect a clearer recognition of his face on the ten dollar bill than that of Alexander Hamilton. To verify this, you need only ask a stranger to tell you something about Hamilton and something about Popeye. You could bet the ten-dollar bill with some security that more accurate descriptions of the cartoon sailor would follow.

In some ways, however, the advance of Popeye from sparkle in the imagination of Elzie Segar to Indelible Culture Hero had a kind of accidental quality to it, since the sailor appeared as one of many characters who might pass through a late-twenties strip called "Thimble Theater." Brought in as a hireling to run a boat by the tight-fisted Castor Oyl during one of many money-making schemes, Popeye initially acted as a foil to Castor's character flaws; before too many months passed, though, Castor and the rest of the Thimble Theater cast would play the role of foils and supporting cast to him - and the strip would, soon enough, bear the banner "Popeye" instead.

Unlovely, inelegant, uneducated, crude, toothless, violent, and generally devoid of skills we describe as "social graces," Popeye seemed to have more in common with the villains of crime strips, whose design often served to inculcate readers with the notion that the dubious association of crime with glamor held little truth in the general case. Popeye certainly did not fit the template of the kind of man one might see wearing tie, tails, and top hat and dancing in an MGM musical, and, in many ways seemed better to fit into an era of comics - generally in the 1910s - when newspaper comics extracted their humor from jabs at certain cultural and ethnic types more prominent in a decade rich in variegated immigrants who had not yet assimilated into American culture. Something about this walking train wreck nonetheless allowed him gradually to take over the strip "Thimble Theater" and ultimately convert it to "Popeye;" something allowed him to extend into other media from the newspaper comics section; and something about him had an enduring quality that makes him a recognizable property some 72 (circa 2001) years after he first appeared in print.

While Popeye clawed his way to the role of icon, nonetheless the feature in its whole form, including some passages and contexts that did not involve the sailor directly, presented an enduring concept of substance. Solid characterization, a keen eye for the ludicrous, a balance of situations versus what the cast had to throw against their luck, and the occasional overblown scrap all came together to create a classic in the canons of comics.

Stripping away Human Pomposity

A well-groomed man in a tasteful and well-maintained suit might, to some, seem the essence of a gentleman, but Popeye - the strip and the character - seldom fell for such superficial analyses of worth. After all, using such measures Popeye himself must invariably fail, with the visual cues mostly implicating him as some kind of vagrant, perhaps predestined to a life of crime and an early end. But Popeye very much represented the contrast between the frequently-unlovely folk of shallow first impressions and the real depth of human virtue we can uncover if we allow ourselves to see past cliched visual interpretations.

Unlovely, usually impecunious, toothless as a babe, balding, poorly dressed, given to atrocities against the English language, uneducated in all kinds of book-learning, untainted by family life, devoid of most of the artificial baggage of manners, anatomically unlikely, typically solitary and untroubled by the machineries of sophistication, Popeye presents, at first glance, a kind of antithesis of what men might aspire to become. We need never expect his kind, after all, to grace the cover of Gentlemen's Quarterly magazine; we should make no bets on locating his wardrobe in fashion magazines; and we can dispense with seeing the flower of his pen grace the pages of the New York Times.

Popeye measures against a different yardstick, one forged by the era of the Depression, when gumption and standing by one's word mattered more than oceans of magnificent profiles, handsome suits, and precise pencil-thin moustaches. Popeye might never attain to a magnificent expensive car, but, seeing as such a car might blithely drive past the widow or orphan in trouble, he would not want one.

The Unemasculated Man

One can see in the dangerous, violence-loving, somewhat sociopathic side of Popeye the converse of the gallant, heroic, self-sacrificing stalwart who (usually) without a thought would throw himself in harm's way to protect the people important to him, to defend the weak, or just to give some ridiculous and boisterous lout the kind of beating that has come due after a lifetime of puffery and mistreatment of others.

Popeye, once the feature moved beyond the early explorations of flaws in his character - including lying, superstition, fraud, and pecadillos like cheating at craps - had, among other remarkable abilities, some kind of insight into the human soul which allowed him correctly to measure a man up by a first impression. Hence his tendency to lay one fireplug fist on the sinister Snork's jaw every time he saw him, and hence the tendency to introduce himself to some of the more questionable supporting members of the villainous cast by the kind of assault civilized folks might expect to land him in, and keep him in, jail.

The Myriad Permutations of Humanity

Many of Segar's better creations enjoyed certain physical traits that we might, if uncharitably inclined, view as deformities. However, while Popeye's sage creator did see extremes of the human type - absurd permutations of proportion - as a method for invoking the fantastical and surreal in Man, he also seems to have appreciated that much of the appeal of people lies in the manner in which they diverge from what appears on the bell curve. Nor can we conclude that the bulbous arms, melon-shaped bodies, toothpick frames, enormous jaws, and the other anatomical baggage that appeared from "Thimble Theater" onward into its incarnation as "Popeye" represent an elitist's eye towards a mankind that simply fails to measure up to his standards of beauty; in general, the overly handsome or beautiful suffer from the same kind of pomposity Popeye routinely deflates in the strong, the powerful, and the wealthy.

To Segar, our flaws made us beautiful. J. Wellington Wimpy's inclination to mooch and distaste for personal risk-taking serve as inspiration to a kind of deathly-polite yet unenlightened pursuit of self-interest; King Blozo's fearfulness made him an object not of contempt but of sympathy; the brutish Toar's doglike loyalty turned his simplicity - or ignorance - into virtues; and Popeye's own taste for polemic-through-fisticuffs transformed blunt brutality into heroism.

If, in concepts like Batman or Dick Tracy, distinctness translated into a disturbance of the human type from a common center it must seek - meaning sometimes madness and evil - in Popeye's world it provided a main source of color on the black-and-white page. Consider, after all, that Popeye's supporting cast - at least the early players - had driven the strip which became "Popeye" as "Thimble Theater" for some time before the sailor managed to take it over. Indeed, he grew from the role of a foil showing the foibles of Castor Oyl and his money-making schemes to overshadow the original cast, but Segar could have made the likes of J. Wellington Wimpy, Olive Oyl, et al, drive the concept in his absence. And, unlike the aforementioned examples of the Dick Tracy strip and Batman books, the distinctness of the cast served to celebrate the diversity of the human personality rather than luridly to stare at its dark underside.

Improbable Feats and Unlikely Challenges

Some observers, looking at the variety of impossible deeds that became routine work for Popeye - absorbing hails of bullets, knocking out armies of goons and hauling them away as a single bundle, and the like - prefer to classify him as the "first superhero." If we ignore the other conventions of that genre, including bizarre clothing, unlikely names, double identities, and miscellaneous other gimmickry and baggage that help define the superheroic form, we could push the data to return this result. This becomes problematic, however, in that overblown deeds in the absence of the conventions of superhero comics predate not only the printed drawing but the printed word and very likely the written one as well. Nonetheless, the invincible flailing fist, the jaw that could absorb just about any blow, and the unyielding will that defined Popeye doubtless did contribute or help set the standard for the superheroes that would follow perhaps ten years later, and this claim of unoriginality of abilities in some superheroes in the aftermath of Popeye's appearance would feature in the arguments Fawcett Comics made in their unsuccessful attempt to prevent DC Comics from suing them out of existence (and, thereby, effectively monopolizing the superhero market for some time).

To invest a character with some improbable degree of personal power invites a kind of storytelling abuse that perpetually rigs the odds by confronting the hero with false challenges. For example, positing a character like Superman - one generally established as having only such limitations as writers find, for the moment, convenient - in situations where he must contend with opponents through the use of those abilities for which he has no peer creates no challenge at all. In Popeye's case, however, Segar did not resort to turning the strip into an endless series of brawls in which his ham-armed stalwart could never fail; the challenges Popeye faced sometimes, but by no means all the time, allowed him some use of these talents, but more frequently forced him to resort to his wits, and, in the absence of a surplus of the same, the wits of his fellows. After all, what good can a knockout punch do a man on an island that rapidly sinks into the ocean? For that matter, what kind of punch will do any good when ghosts - inherently untouchable - seem behind the strange activity in an abandoned manor? And, though a thick skin definitely belongs in assets rather than liabilities for a politician, a near-invulneribility to violence doesn't seem the central virtue one requires for running for office of king in the environs of Nazilia.

The conventions of superhero comics essentially force the role of crimefighter on the protagonists that appear in that medium, leaving the writers fewer mechanisms to confront heroes with challenges that can test their abilities. Mainly beefing up the villains themselves provides the challenge. However, Popeye, fortunately standing outside this form, could thrust himself into pursuits such as publishing a newspaper, breaking the bank at a casino by rigging the odds with Castor Oyl's African Escape Hen, or tracking down the deposed King Blozo who had failed as a shoe-shine king and had moved down the career ladder to the role of beachcomber.

Gumption and firepower frequently saved the day in Popeye stories, but they did not, fortunately, absolve Popeye or his peers from the challenges they had to face to get in the position where his fists could do any good. Segar, after all, saw too many ways to play on the characters' weaknesses to drive plot threads, and, rather than lining up straw men for his hero to manhandle, instead conceived methods to cut him down to size, even when it involved placing Popeye in women's underwear and forcing him to work his way out of the situation.

The Forging of an Icon

Newspapers exposed Popeye to the public initially, but his leap to celluloid caused his penetration of the culture to deepen, since - particularly in the post-television era - some considerable percentage of human beings became impermeable to developments in print (because they do not read, or only do so when they have to) and do not discover things until they come to film. Indeed, we still think of an idea as having truly made it into the greater culture when it hits a television or movie screen. Cartoons, therefore, provided Popeye his formal entry to late-twentieth-century culture in the same way that comic strips had originally introduced him to an earlier generation.

While cartoons never did justice to Popeye, presenting a much tamer, more civil, and altogether bowdlerized version of a much more complex character with a seeming love of violence, they nonetheless presented a simplified version which did get across several defining traits even as this interpretation omitted others. In this form, we see the indestructible little sailor who could defeat any enemy, including the English language, but we miss angles that gave the notion depth, such as the tendency to unprovoked violence (the 'real' Popeye would lay a man on the grass with a hamlike fist to the jaw just for not liking his looks, thought the story would invariably justify his judgment); the occasional inclination to scams (such as the rigged gambling with the African Escape Hen); the romantic squabbling with Olive Oyl (toned down so that you would not see Popeye finally get fed up and slap Olive right in the chops); or any of the darker angles that completed his personality on paper.

Perhaps the character flaws that make the character solid and enduring also presented challenges to broadening his audience; perhaps making the denominator more common had to involve lowering it to reach audiences not ready for featured events like Olive Oyl shooting a baker's dozen of cowboys and stuffing the casualties down in the basement while she waited for help to arrive. Regardless, a version of Popeye made it to the movie screen via early cartoons, followed by another series in the mid-to-late-1940s, and ultimately some (generally dreadful) made-for-television cartoons at the dawn of the 1960s.

From a theme in some Popeye strips, the cartoons added a new angle of schtick in the gimmick of Popeye acquiring his amazing abilities from canned spinach, roughly an equivalent to Billy Batson saying "Shazam!" before clobbering his enemies or to Rex Tyler taking a Miraclo pill before clobbering his. This came from the comic-strip Popeye's occasional lectures on nutrition in which he shilled for the benefits of buttermilk and of spinach in the diet (indeed, one suspects that if he had run an orphanage he would produce a sour-faced crop of children grumbling about their terms in an institution where the overseer - our subject, Popeye - fed them nothing but spinach and buttermilk). This represented a creative liberty with the source material, but did not truly undermine it; in the terms of cartoons, in fact, it added the additional challenge of getting to the spinach and then beating the snot out of Bluto (or, in one set, the loathsome Brutus).

These cartoons gave an imperfect summary version of our hero, showing the sailor who generally avoided ill will to other men except where jealousy gatecrashed into the proceedings or until exceptional provocation forced him, like an isolationist America responding to the attack on Pearl Harbor, to emerge with spinach-fueled fists flying and lay his enemies out on the sward. Even this Popeye retains many of his better features, including his hostility to style and postures of sophistication, and, of course, his ability to mix it up with the biggest and most beastly.

And, several generations since the varied appearances of Popeye in the various media he has managed to infest over the decades, we have a figure familiar from newspaper comics, occasional comic books, cartoons, movies, tie-in merchandising, toys, and, in general, whatever direction we might choose to look in. In the short term, this speaks the language of the fad or the money-driven media blitz; seventy years and more since the initial creation of a character in an ephemeral medium like newspapers attests to the character pugnaciously gripping the public imagination.

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Column 290. Completed 09-DEC-2001.