Popeye Volume Two: Well Blow Me Down! (Fantagraphics, 168 pages, $29.95) has the dimensions of a coffee-table tome, but it was born to be paired with rotgut whiskey, ideally upon a block of wood hammered into shape by one’s forehead. The book design is an announcement on its own, all blaring dot colours and die-cut title, as if our hero had put his fist through the cover itself. And opening it doesn’t disappoint: the very first page features Popeye punching a horse in the face.
Spectacular violence is not the only appeal here, however. This is the second in a series of six volumes collecting E.C. Segar’s classic comic strip Thimble Theatre, and the adventures therein are taken from its prime, which basically means they’re some of the greatest comics ever drawn. That’s not due to the dust-ups alone, hilarious as Popeye’s scraps with generals, gorillas and a boxing robot are. In his introductory essay, critic Donald Phelps notes that Thimble Theatre was always, well, theatrical: Segar was fond of campy playbills “announcing” each new storyline, and his instinct for the perfect line, as well as his senses of place and staging, were all masterful.
Stories like “A One-Way Bank” (as Phelps puts it, “Segar’s principal concern with money is to devise various ways for Popeye to dish it out”) and “The Great Rough-House War” (in which the old seadog is recruited for a conflict between Nazilia and Tonsylvania, then gets into fisticuffs with his own side) reflect the Depression-era headlines printed alongside them, but Segar always values farce over ham-fisted allegory. In the former storyline, Popeye drains all the money from his ad hoc charity when flapper babes start showing up alongside the hobos and penniless crones — there’s a wonderful panel where he hurriedly gets rid of his “PLEASE OMIT KISSES” sign.
Like any anarchic type, Segar frequently subverts the same melodramatic adventure genre he inhabits; there’s one incredibly funny sequence where a kidnapped Olive Oyl spends an entire strip screaming for help even as she beats the shit out of her captor. Segar’s cartooning is rudimentary, as broad and ribald as his satire, but both have real heft — there’s a burlesque kind of physicality to these characters, from Popeye’s ham-hock arms to King Blozo’s hunched shoulders, his hands clasped in nervous worry. And the artist had a vaudeville showman’s gift for improvisation: his sailor man was originally just a throwaway character. The gentleman grifter J. Wellington Wimpy (“I would gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger to-day,”) debuts in this volume as an odd fight referee, before attaining that combination of total indolence and inventive wheedling the world knows and loves.
Not even Wimpy and his burgers make as inspiring a couple as Popeye and Olive Oyl, though. That relationship between the pipe-chewing, one-eyed sailor and his stringy, knock-kneed paramour is one for the ages; it became a saviour-damsel thing in the Fleischer cartoons, but in these strips Popeye spends about as much time looking to trade up or run away from his swee’pea as he does rescuing her. At one point Olive starts dancing in a saloon and ditches him, leaving the old man to play she-loves-me-not with a cactus. Still, despite driving each other insane — or to blows — they always end up together in the end. Love has seldom been portrayed so perfectly. In nailing that and so many other absurdities of human nature, Segar definitely ate his spinach.