“Is it Talk Like a Pirate Day?” I asked.
“Naw, Ah gots ya thar—it’s Talk Like Popeye Day. Arf! Arf!” With a flourish he pulled a huge volume from the bag and displayed it to me.
“Great! Volume Three. Have you read it yet?”
Fantagraphics Books has been issuing the complete Popeye comic strip as drawn by Popeye’s creator, E.C. Segar. The books, six volumes in all when complete, are oversized, about 150 pages each, and contain a complete reprinting of both the black-and-white daily strips and the color Sundays. Van had loaned me the first two volumes, and I’d been looking forward to the third for a year or more.“Ah yam done, and it’s yers to enjoys.”
“How is it?”
“Just like the first two—wonderful.” He dropped the painful dialect, or whatever it is that Popeye speaks. “Except for the pretentious introduction, which I skipped.”
“Anything noteworthy?”
“Well, probably the most memorable thing is Olive Oyl doing a fan dance at the World’s Fair. Bluto shows up for the first and only time in the Segar strip, Swee’pea is introduced, and Popeye gets his own country, Popilania. Not a bad cargo for one volume.”
Red Meg was watching us with unconcealed amazement and perhaps a bit of slightly concealed scorn. Finally she said, “And here I thought you were both grown ups, even Van. Why on earth would you care about an extended commercial for spinach?”
Van and I exchanged glances, then grins, and finally turned simultaneously to stare her down.
“Meg,” Van proclaimed gravely, “you are talking about one of the great literary characters of the 20th Century. Don’t confuse the real Popeye with the cartoons you may have seen on television. Segar’s Popeye inspired those cartoons, but it’s a completely different ‘aminal.’ You have to read a fair amount of it to really appreciate it, but it’s a dark, gritty, Depression-era comic masterpiece.”
Meg looked at me. “Do you agree with that appraisal?” she asked. “Are you crazy too?”
“Pretty much.”
I passed the book to her and she started flipping through the pages.
“To understand the appeal of Popeye,” Van said “and why the character is still universally recognizable eighty years later, you have to read the original comic strip. As cartoonists go, Segar wasn’t much of an artist, but the raw quality of his drawings actually adds to the appeal in a strange sort of way. As a storyteller and humorist, though, he was inspired. Imagine the great new popular hero who took the early 1930s by storm—a crude, rowdy, virtually illiterate, physically deformed, one-eyed ne’er-do-well who cusses up a storm and gets in fights at the drop of a hat, but has a heart of gold and a curious philosophical streak. Combine this character with long, complicated, imaginative adventure stories that take Popeye and his friends on trips around the world, add a sprinkling of fantasy like the Sea Hag or the Whiffle Hen, a pinch of political or social satire, and a large serving of hilarious characterizations like J. Wellington Wimpy and Olive, and you start to have some idea of the power of the original Popeye.”
“It’s historically important, too,” I said. “As far as I know, Popeye was the first widely successful humorous adventure strip. That would make it the forerunner of Floyd Gottfredson’s Mickey Mouse strip, and through Gottfredson of Carl Bark’s Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge comic books.”
Meg was rolling her eyes in earnest now. “Donald Duck! Uncle Scrooge! I suppose you’re going to tell me those are great literature too.”
“I haven’t read much of Gottredson’s work,” I said, “though the little I have read makes me want to read more. But Carl Barks’ work is brilliant, both as art and as storytelling. Wonderfully clever, with great insight into human nature. But above all else, his stories are great fun.”
Meg let out a sigh of exasperation. “Next you’ll be telling me that the Three Stooges should have won Pulitzers. On second thought, maybe they should have—for their deep insight into the male psyche!”
Van and I looked dubiously at each other, tilted our heads as if considering that possibility, then shook our heads simultaneously, dismissing the idea.
“Meg,” Van said, reaching out and patting her hand. “You have to toss off your literary snobbery. There are brilliant works of commercial art and literature waiting to be discovered. I know that funny talking animals seem innately childish, but don’t be fooled by that. Truly great art can be created for both children and adults. In the case of Segar and Barks, it was. There are things in both that will escape most children and some adults.”
“Okay, I’ll accept that in principle,” she said, tossing her head so that her blonde hair swirled around her head enticingly. The girl flirts without trying. “I’ll even take your word that Popeye is more than the silly cartoons. But Donald Duck?”
“Yes, Donald Duck. And Uncle Scrooge,” Van insisted. “Segar’s Popeye and Barks’ Donald Duck comics are examples of the best in popular culture. Both bear sure marks of genius. Carl Barks basically created all the comic book versions of the Disney duck characters, and they’re very different from the animated versions. The animated Donald is very one dimensional—irascible with a speech impediment. Barks’ character is much more complex, with a full range of emotions. Barks didn’t scrimp on or dumb down his work for children, either. He was wonderfully inventive and clever. You can’t be a fully cultured person if you don’t know how Uncle Scrooge and Flintheart Glomgold settled their bet on who was the richest duck in the world.”
She stared at him through disbelieving eyes.
“String. It all came down to who had the largest ball of string.”
Slowly her disbelief faded to amazement as a big smile spread across her face. “I remember that story! A friend made me read it when I was a little girl!”
“No one ever forgets it. Barks was a highly talented artist and a great writer of comic book stories. He was capable of being very subtle, too. There’s one Donald Duck story—I don’t remember the title” (it was “Luck of the North”) “where Donald gets so fed up with Gladstone Gander, his insufferably lucky cousin, that he tricks him into going on a wild goose chase to the Arctic. Then Barks devotes two or three pages to the gradual evolution of Donald’s thoughts and emotions, from riotous delight to pleased self-satisfaction, to the realization of the deadly predicament he’s put Gladstone in, to concern, to guilt. Just brilliant, and this in a ‘children’s comic book.’ You really have to read this stuff. If you like, I’ll loan some to you. I have a couple of thick collections that would make a good place to start.”
“There’s something else that the Barks comics offer that I’ve found in very few traditional works of literature, if any,” I said. “It’s hard to exactly explain, but what comes closest is a sense of—delight. I find that I take delight in Popeye and Carl Barks. They somehow allow me to recapture the untroubled joy of childhood for a little while, without insulting my adult mind.”
That brought the conversation to a temporary halt. Finally I said, “You might as well tell her about Barks’ successor.”“Barks was so good that he has inspired generations of fans who collect his stories and argue over details in them. Don Rosa is Barks’ great disciple, a sort of nerdy fan turned commercial Disney artist. He knows the Barks Duck Universe inside out and has been writing new stories that knit together different aspects of it. He did a sort of biography of Scrooge McDuck as separate stories set in different crucial periods of Scrooge’s life. He’s an excellent artist and good writer, though perhaps a little too detail obsessed. Worth reading, but only after reading Barks.”
Van moved his arm in such a way that it nudged the bag he had put on a corner of the table near him. It reminded him of something.
“And I just got this,” he said, reaching into the bag and removing a book from it, which he displayed with a flourish. “Volume One of the complete Prince Valiant.”
He passed it to me. Another oversized volume from Fantagraphics, with sumptuous color, it contains the first two years of Hal Foster’s adventure masterpiece and is the first volume of a planned series reprinting the complete Foster run.
“Foster was the greatest artist ever to grace the newspaper comics,” Van said, “and possibly the greatest storyteller, too.” He took the volume from me, turned it toward Meg, and flipped slowly through the pages so that she could view the gorgeous artwork and breathtaking layouts. “Now what do you say to that?” he demanded.
I could see by her expression that she was impressed. She pursed her lips, exhaled audibly, then grinned and said, “Well blow me down! Toot—toot!”
__________________
Links of possible interest:
Talk Like a Pirate Day (September 19):
http://www.talklikeapirate.com/piratehome.html
Wikipedia entries for—
E.C. Segar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.C._Segar
Carl Barks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Barks
Don Rosa: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Rosa
Harold Foster: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Foster
Prince Valiant — An American Epic: “The biggest, most beautiful, most expensive comic book of all time.” For serious collectors, full color, full newspaper page size reproductions of the first three years: http://www.io.com/~norwoodr/order.html.
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