Tag Archives: Brutus

This Is Popeye? I Beg To Differ

4 Apr

April 4, 2013

Yesterday we saw Popeye: take no prisoners, ask no questions, mumble for your life sailor and all-around tough guy with the physique of someone exposed to too much radiation. But today, tomorrow, and Saturday we’ll see some things that claim to be Popeye but are not. And don’t forget, Friday and Saturday’s posts are all-new this week!

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.

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Et Tu, Brutus?

12 Mar

March 12, 2011

You guys know that I love all things Popeye. For example, I wrote about the big Popeye celebration held every year in Chester, Illinois. It features Popeye-related fun. such as hayrides and horseshoe games. What makes them Popeye-related? I don’t know. But Chester Illinois celebration is the one time each year that any extremely flat-chested and plain looking girls are guaranteed the spotlight if they wear ugly red dresses that come down to their ankles. Guys with Olive Oyl fetishes flock there from all over the country to emulate their cartoon heroes and compete to see who sexually assaults Olive first. Isn’t that what every Popeye cartoon comes down to? Popeye and Brutus compete to see who can force Olive Oyl into the sack. It is like an episode of Law and Order: SVU waiting to happen.

I also recently posted a great internet find. In this old comic strip Popeye, in true establishment fashion, beat up a hippie. Does it get more American than that?

Today I feature an installment of another great, but not nearly so old comic strip, Mother Goose and Grimm. Look closely and you may see a familiar face making a cameo appearance.

For other comic strip fun, check out this Rex Morgan strip where the good doctor checks a man’s prostate and this Blondie strip where some questionable language is used.

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