June 9, 2012
I love Popeye. Absolute classic character, absolute classic strip. In its EC Segar heyday, it was perhaps the most well-written strip out there. Amazing adventure arcs, humor, and of course that burly armed sailor. We all know the strip: spinach, Olive, Bluto, Swee’ Pea, Alice the Goon, and on and on.
Don’t know Popeye? Before we go on, check out these past posts:
Popeye the Establishment Man
Popeye-Palooza!
The Saturday Comics: The Phantom, Day by Day (Popeye shows up at the end.)
There’s more but those should tell you what Popeye is all about. And a good thing too since the current Popeye strip is so generic as to be unrecognizable.
That’s just sad. Those could be any characters in any strip. In fact it probably was. Where is the characterization? Where are the classic tropes we all know and love? OK, maybe I just found one bad strip.
No, I found two bad strips. And it isn’t two out of six thousand, it is two out of five, which is all King Features puts online anymore. Again, that’s Popeye? It is a generic strip. Replace those characters with any characters you make up yourself and it changes the humor not a single iota. The only sop to the old-time grandeur of the strip is Poopdeck’s cursing, which was a staple of the character way back when. But in this PC era, in this lame strip, it just seems so odd.
What the? Popeye is making a Simpsons joke? And what’s Olive doing with the Sea Hag? She’s Popeye’s sworn enemy? Oh, this hurts, deep, deep hurting.
Mr. Blog's Tepid Ride 
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