I was out Christmas shopping and saw a recently-published album of Popeye, collecting thimble theatre strips from the early 1930s. It's a beautiful book: oversize format with colour sections from the weekend and black and white strips. The only fly in the ointment is a pseudo intellectual introductory essay by some fraud called Donald Phelps. I was hoping for some background to the Thimble Theatre strips, perhaps some discussion of EC Segar's technique and narrative development, or maybe an analysis of Popeye's appeal in depression-era America. Instead, Phelps takes the coward's way out with, well, for example:
"Segar was affected, not with parody, but with camp as a viable comic tone. Involved in this feeing was his awareness of farce and melodrama, not as "effects" to be siphoned as lubricants into the hiccoughing mechanism of some formula, but as vigorous imaginative currents, as the natural prerogatives and powers of the comic-strip medium, which meant its terrain, to be expanded, exploited, and gloried in; and, also the comic strip's point of contact with the actual world; even as belived some of the most redoubtable of the silent-film makers: D W Griffith, Abel Gance, Erich von Stroheim, Thomas Ince."
You can stare at that sentence as long as you like, and no meaning will peep out. I didn't choose to reproduce this sentence because it is the most pretentious, or the most meaningless, in the essay. It was picked at random. The whole seven-page essay (in an oversize book) is like this. All of the author's limited repertoire is on display here, though: note the overlong sentence, separated by semicolons, giving the illusion of a well-structured thought to an incoherent ramble; note the name dropping to show off the author's erudition (the author frequently does this, even though there is no reason why anyone should have heard of half the people he cites); note the tortured metaphors and the quite meaningless assertions ("farce and melodrama... as the natural prerogatives and powers of the comic-strip medium") made in a matter-of-fact tone.
Having studied English Lit, I'm quite used to meeting these sort of craven attempts at criticism in the field of cultural studies. They are there to fool the intellectually insecure, who think that big words, long sentences and esoteric references are the same thing as being clever. They aren't. Or as Phelps puts it:
"Imagination was, in his altogether just and surpassingly creative view, the perennial tenant of actuality, even in its crudest, least negotiable aspects"
Quite. What saddens me, is to see rubbish like this in the introduction to a Popeye book. I kind of thought that comics were a folk medium that was secure in its world and didn't need pseudo-criticism to justify its existence. Popeye is good because it is good, or "I yam what I yam", as he would put it. It seems I was wrong. Depressingly, we are promised the next installment of Phelps' essay in the next Popeye volume. That's something to look forward to.
But how good is Popeye? Incredible. In my opinion, it stands up better than Krazy Kat strips from the same era. Segar has the same scratchy, doodle style, and the same - let's face it - artistic limitations, coupled with a stylistic facility, honed over pages and pages of strips which makes even the poorest draftsmanship easy on the eye. One of the joys of the volume is watching Popeye's face take shape, over weeks and months, as Segar refines his style, until it finally resembles the iconic face we recognise from the animated cartoons. I love the scratchy pen lines for shadows or night skies. The way hands look like bunches of bananas. The way a crowd watching a fight all look like bald, identical homunculi. The best thing about Popeye, however is the story. Segar is a master of suspense, keeping the reader engaged whilst we wait for Popeye's next big fight, or showdown, or another crazy plan comes to its disastrous fruition. As the climax approaches, Segar lines up the next plot, so that the climax effortlessly segues into another story. He's like a master plate-spinner. Most of the gags are still funny too. Some elements of the strip have dated: particularly Popeye's tendency to thrash Olive every now and again. Actually, when was that ever respectable? Overall, I would say that Segar's achievement was to create a believable world in which anything, even the supernatural, can happen, and yet keep the world operating within some sort of physical laws which are difficult to define. I'm still enjoying reading and learning from it.
