Popeye and the Langridge of Heroism, by Michael H. Price
The breakthrough of the season, as far as superhuman heroism goes, might lie beyond such big-screen spectacles as Iron Man and the June 13 opening of The Incredible Hulk. The watershed lies, in part, in a set of Popeye the Sailor cartoons that have gone largely unseen – in authentic form, anyhow – since the late 1930s and the earlier 1940s.
A companionable development is a new series of hardcover books reprinting the original Popeye comic strips of writer-artist E.C. Segar. The current volume is Popeye Vol. 2: “Well, Blow Me Down!” (Fantagraphics Books; $29.95). A third collection is due in the fall. The elaborately packaged Fantagraphics shelf commences at the commencement with Popeye Vol. 1: “I Yam What I Yam.”
The books qualify as near-architectural marvels in their own right – towering, heavy-stock packages with die-cut front-cover windows and an interior design that showcases many days’ worth of the newspaper feature with each spread. A full-color section devotes a page to each of what originally had served as Sunday-supplement episodes, complete to the extent of reproducing Segar’s subordinate feature, Sappo, about a household in perpetual turmoil.
The stories in Vol. 2 include a wild Frontier Gothic pitting Popeye’s entourage against a mob of cattle rustlers; and a scathingly funny commentary upon charity-vs.-greed, in which Popeye attempts a banking career in defiance of all practical sense. There surfaces a gemlike example of Segar’s gift for mangling and/or improving upon the langridge: When Popeye uses the adjective liberous, does he mean “liberal,” or “generous,” huh? Neither – he means liberous, and So There. The book also sports a touching tribute to Segar from Beetle Bailey’s Mort Walker.
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Born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1915, Graham Ingels began work early, joining the work force at 14, shortly after his father died. At 16 he began doing art jobs. He married at 20 and entered the Navy at 27 in 1943. After WWII, Ingels worked for Fiction House, Magazine Enterprises, and several other comic book and pulp magazine publishers.
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