The Sunday Funnies - Popeye 1989-1992!

 Bobby London's tenure on the venerable Thimble Theatre Presents Popeye comic strip was brief but potent. He took a comic strip which had become mostly a moribund vehicle designed mostly to keep out front a popular icon who could move product in other media and elsewhere. He turned it into a savage satire which not only bit the hand that fed it, but snapped said hand off at the wrist. It's no wonder the powers-that-be didn't put up with him for long. It's sadly the evidence of the success of satire that its targets fire back and sometimes with deadly aim. 

As this second volume of strips from 1989 to 1992 kicks off we will be treated to some of London's most ferocious commentaries on the world, so brutal in fact that not all of the strips contained in this collection actually saw the light of day, but were suppressed when London was removed from his Popeye duties. Finally the full glory of Bobby London's Popeye can be known. 

The fiery tome begins with A wild fracas that begins with Toar, the immortal caveman getting fascinated with modern pop culture and ultimately both he and Popeye fall in with a motorcycle gang and head down to South America were they seek the waters that grant immortality. Along for the ride is the alluring Sutra Oyl who cause Popeye more than a panic when she uses her considerable charms to woo him. Also we see what happens when a fountain of youth is marketed to the modern world and how that becomes a particular attractant for the mopes in Hollywood and such. 

Then Popeye, Wimpy, and Castor get swept up in the rabid doing of Madison Avenue (or simply "Mad Avenue" as London dubs it). Popeye becomes a marketing spokesman for oat bran and as a consequence loses control of his image and even his ability to control his own body. His ups and downs as the tries to make sense and then free himself of the mind-numbing and dehumanizing aspects of modern advertising culture are truly hilarious. And yet another Oyl shows up, the magnate "Standard Oyl" who turns his fortune and his company over to Popeye and wait until you see where that leads. 

When Popeye is confronted by the end of the world as he knew it, a stunning series of cartoons is generated by London which takes the Thimble Theater gang into the Fourth Dimension and beyond. With Eugene the Jeep on the mend they used another method to enter this weird new world, a little craft Popeye dubs the "Yeller Submarine". Yep, the old vehicle which took the Beatles over the edge is on hand in recognizable shape to take Popeye and his allies on an epic journey too. After they return they find the world is threatened by "Sadarn Sashame" a brutal dictator from "Bananastan". In one of the best satirical roastings of the Bush administration's Gulf War, Popeye fights the mope with funny effect. 

And then Bluto returns from the misty past. He's pretty upset at all the posers who have been appearing over the decades under the rotten name of "Brutus" and once he seizes control of Sweethaven makes hit illegal to even say that name. We get a look at a lot of different men named "Brutus" from different eras and regions that Popeye has been popular. But once Bluto has been dealt with Popeye is forced by the powers that run licensing to wear the stupid little hat he once had as an enlisted sailor. It makes him appear less than smart according to his neighbors and London is able to have a great deal of fun with the effects of appearance on the inner self. 

Sadly it's nearly the end of  London's wonderful run on the series. His desire for sharp satire has made the owners of Popeye nervous and they prefer a lighter gag-of-the-day approach to blunt criticism. London sails off into the distance with a final storyline which focuses on Oliver Oyl and her addiction to TV shopping shows and when she ends up a with a robot baby she wants to get rid of the church is concerned for her very soul. This last blast at the subject of abortion never saw the newsstands as these strips were recalled and never sent by the syndicate. Now at long last they are available for the reader and they are great indeed. 

The failure of Bobby London's Popeye to be free to do what comics often do best, hold a sharp distorted lens to reality, is a tragedy in many ways. At at time when the United States and the larger world needed to reflect and make hard choices about its very nature and its direction in the world it chose to kick away its critics and insteand bumble down a path which led ultimately to the attacks of on 9-11 and to the disastrous wars in the Middle East. There's no way that Bobby London was going to stop our culture from descending into the mess it has become, but he might at the very least have shown us a mirror so that we might see ourselves more clearly. 

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The Sunday Funnies - Popeye 1986-1989!

It seems that in 1986, in the full bloom of the second Reagan administration, King Features Syndicate was faced with dilemma. Who was going to draw the long-running and highly successful Thimble Theater Starring Popeye the Sailor Man comic strip. 

Of course Popeye had been introduced into the Thimble Theater ensemble in the early 1930's when FDR was attempting to stem the dread effects of a worldwide depression on a nation which was staggering after a decade or more of wine and song. In that environment a tough frisky and salty sailor who threw punches first and took names later if at all was a nice release from tense times. Popeye proved invulnerable both literally in the strip and outside where in the era that produced Mickey Mouse he was the most popular cartoon character in the world as well as a dominant figure in the funny pages. But at the height of the strip's success its creator E.C. Segar died. 

The strip soldiered on with Dick Winner and other assistants holding the fort. Bud Sagendorf was one assistant who helped expand the Popeye empire by making a successful foray into comic books with new stories for an up and coming medium. Eventually in 1959 Sagendorf took control of the comic strip as well and remained at the helm until age brought him to seek partial retirement in 1986. He'd keep doing the Sunday page, but the daily needed a new talent to take the helm. The choice was a sage one, but not an obvious one. 

It begins with the aforementioned Mickey Mouse, a household name and powerhouse icon of the Walt Disney empire. Such potent symbols are ripe for satire but when cartoonist Bobby London took aim at the Mouse in the pages of Air Pirates Funnies it proved disastrous not only to London himself but to the very notion of satire and free speech. According to the courts the voice of freedom to mock was secondary to the power of the marketplace and a judgment was made against London which hobbled him for years. 

He kept cartooning of course. And it was one of his other creations named Dirty Duck that first introduced me to the talented and potent artist. I found dirty duck in the pages of National Lampoon in that magazine's comics section and for me reading London's Dirty Duck in Nat Lamp was like reading Don Martin in MAD, the first order of business whenever a new issue fell into my mitts. 

King Features turned over Thimble Theater to Bobby London who ironically had found some success working for the "House of Mouse" in the intervening years. As one might've expected of the artist who had done Dirty Duck, the denizens of Sweethaven were in for some ruckus. Comic strips had changed since Segar's day as had the newspapers that transported them. Other mediums like television had diminished the newspaper's hold on the public mind and consequently the comic strip's hold on the public imagination. And economics had made comic strips get smaller and smaller as the need for brevity became necessary. The luxurious artwork of bygone eras was disappeared and the original creators were long gone. In their place were gag-a-day cartoons by the likes of Mort Walker and Bobby Hart, punchy jokes that hit and then evaporated. Continuities were gone save for a few adventure strips like The Phantom and Prince Valiant and soaps like Mary Worth. But London was about to change that. 

After a year or so, some of it anonymous, London slowly make the strip more strident and pointed taking on not general notions of human nature, but news of the day. The aforementioned Reagan administration came in for some comments here and there as well as the all-consuming consumer culture which seemed to define the era. Later still London returned continuing storylines to Thimble Theater as Segar had always done in the dailies and we saw the Sea Hag become not a vile sorceress but something more heinous, a soulless property speculator who was intent on turning Sweethaven into an enormous shopping mall and only Popeye stood up to her. Later Popeye gets ensnarled in a wrestling match with invading Martians and Wimpy imagines what life would be like married to Olive Oyl. In these early years it was Olive Oyl who really stands out as she tries to stand on her own two feet out of her parents's home and apart from Popeye. She ends up accidently creating a deadly coffee which the military want to use in South America and which later still as "Agent Olive" comes back to mutate all manner of things in Sweethaven itself. 

It's a raucous ride with London's take on the denizens of Thimble Theater and that's what E.C. Segar would've love I suspect. More next time as London's tenure comes crashing down. 

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London Calling!

IDW Publishing is really tempting me with some tasty Bobby London collections in recent times. The most recent is an upcoming collection of Dirty Duck strips from sundry Underground comix, National Lampoon (where I first encountered the character), and Playboy.

Bobby London first and foremost has a appealing cartooning style which evokes a classic approach inspired by George Herriman and Elzie Segar bonded with a modern and raunchy sensibility.

 Dirty Duck along with his companion in corruption Weevil are two of the more lurid and compelling characters of the 70's, totally identifiable and just plain depraved in so many ways.

The mirror they hold up to our secret selves is withering.

London traded the notoriety he obtained on strips like Dirty Duck into the utterly supreme mainstream gig of drawing Popeye which he did for several years. Those strips have been collected in two volumes from IDW and I totally want them.

The only glimpse of this work I've seen is in the little trade package above titled Mondo Popeye and as that cover shows, London tried to inject a modern vibe into the strip. I'm not crazy about all of the things he did, but I admire that he tried to do them. London lost the Popeye job when an abortion gag when sour and reaction came on too strong among other things. He goes into it here. It's a shame since Popeye went into reruns and has never come back.

These Bobby London collections though do indeed call my name. How about you?

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Mondo Popeye!

For a relatively short time in the late 80's Bobby London, former Air Pirate and creator of Dirty Duck (the best comic strip in National Lampoon) was the artist on Elzie Segar's venerable Popeye comic strip, taking over from Bud Sagendorf. London's artwork was ideal for the comic, his style a nice updated turn on Segar's classic look. So I was delighted when I stumbled across the collection above by London featuring his work on the strip. It's a bit warped from water exposure, so I got it for small money, and that's fine by me because the strips are all there in their black and white glory.

But alas the staid folks who controlled the license of Popeye were not amused by London's social commentary most notoriously evident in a strip which spoofs the then popular Miami Vice, but also puts out front and center the mysterious nature of Popeye's go-to leaf Spinach.

The artist was fired off the series when some later, unpublished-to-this-day strips making reference to abortion were deemed too much. The powers-that-be then confirmed they feared the present day when they replaced London's new material with reprints which continue right to the present day. It's a shame, since the acerbic Popeye and his gaggle of  characters might well have something interesting to say about the world we live in.

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